Category Archives: Business

Guest Post by Megan Grey

With Halloween only a few days away, this is perfect time of year to explore the fears we writers often face. And if my own experience is any indication, we writers have lots of things that can strike terror into our neurotic little hearts: Rejections. Pitch sessions. Criticism. Rewrites. More rewrites. Our laptops deciding to drunk-query our dream agents.

Maybe I should explain that last one.

With my first novel (at least, my first submission-worthy novel) written and rewritten and rewritten again, I faced the much-dreaded next step. It was time to query agents. I spent weeks crafting the perfect query, and researching which agents would (in my estimation) be the best fit. Then I spent a few extra weeks procrastinating sending it, for a host of what seemed like perfectly reasonable excuses at the time, but really boiled down to one: fear.

Late one night, after bolstering my courage with approximately 8.3 pounds of dark chocolate M&Ms (as a Mormon, I don’t drink alcohol or smoke, so I heavily abuse chocolate instead), I readied this perfect query email to one of my top agents, took a deep breath, and hit send.

I was pleased with myself for conquering my fear, and yet something—writers intuition? An extra power of foresight granted me by obscene over-consumption of chocolate?—made me check my sent folder to make sure the email went through.

A quick scan revealed it had indeed sent, and seemed to be formatted fine. I was just about to close it and ease my paranoia with a few extra M&Ms when something horrible caught my eye. At the end of my query, where I could have sworn I had written “Thank you so much for your time“, this email read “Thank yo.”

Thank YO?!? After about a millisecond of debating whether I had the street cred to pull that sort of nonchalance off (I don’t), I quickly decided to send another one. Surely if agents see two of the same queries in their inbox, they’d only read the most recent, right?This seemed my only option. I re-pasted my query into another email, read it through about a dozen times to verify that each and every word was in place, and sent it again.

This time, when I checked the sent folder, my horror doubled. Not only did this one also end with “Thank yo“, but my computer had somehow deleted the latter half of several of my sentences. So now I had two queries to one of the top agents in publishing, both of which made me appear that I was querying while intoxicated. Or a complete idiot. Or, most likely, both.

Full-on panic set in. In between planning the destruction of my laptop, which I was convinced was turning all Skynet for the sole purpose of ruining my writing career, Ienvisioned being blacklisted by every agent and editor in the business. Being unable to show my face at any writing conference, ever. Having to enter the witness protection program just to lead a normal life again.

After a fit of weeping and swearing off both computers and M&Ms forever (obviously not in a sane frame of mind), I crawled into bed next to my peacefully sleeping husband,who was frustratingly unaware that every hope and dream I’d had of a writing career was shattered. As I lay there in bed, it occurred to me to try one last desperate ploy to salvage things. I would send my query again, rewritten from scratch (no copying and pasting) on our desktop computer, one that I could only hope didn’t have some vendetta against me.

So I did. In the subject line of this email, I wrote “Query (please disregard my previous emails, my computer was having issues)”. I sent it. And, lo and behold, after checking thesent folder, this email appeared to have sent exactly as I wrote it. No sentences that mysteriously lead to nowhere. No awkward and ungrammatical uses of slang. Now I could only hope. (And totally run my laptop over with my car in the morning. That was still happening, regardless of the outcome.)

The most I felt I could hope for from this was that the agent would have enough pity forme to not put me on some industry watch list. So I was completely shocked when, only a couple days later, I actually got a partial request from this agent. And though I was eventually rejected, it was a very nice rejection, and didn’t include any kind of restraining order. Since then, my query (my actual query, not the one my laptop decided to send on my behalf) has gotten me several partial and full requests, so I think it’s safe to assume I’m not on an agent blacklist somewhere.

The moral of this cautionary tale (besides never trusting computers) is this: my career didn’t end because of a computer mistake. It didn’t end on my first rejection, or my twentieth. It won’t end if I flub a pitch session, or if some reviewer hates my work. My career will only end if I give in to my dozens of fears about writing. It will only end if I give up.

And the same goes for you.

Guest Writer Bio:

Megan Grey’s fiction has appeared in Fireside, Sybil’s Scriptorium, and One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple UnicornAnthology. You can find out more about Megan by visiting her website at www.megangrey.com.

I Am Not An Introvert…People Just Terrify Me

October 24, 2014

Leigh Galbreath

Conventions Leigh Galbreath Networking Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life No Comments

I am afraid of people.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit broad. How about, I’m afraid of talking to people I don’t know but want to make a good impression on? Like seriously terrified. My brain shuts down, and I lose the ability to think coherently. All I can do is smile and babble, which strangely makes for a good job interview, but not much else.

For instance, I once was sitting in an airport after a writing convention and happened to find myself next to an editor who struck up a conversation with me and seemed genuinely interested in hearing about what I was writing. I proceeded to blather on about how I had been writing for years but most of what I had written to date was terrible. The editor looked absolutely crestfallen, like I’d kicked her puppy. I backtracked in a lame attempt to fix the situation. It wasn’t pretty.

I have been known to bring a conversation to a screeching halt in ten seconds flat like a sad little nerd trying to add something to the cool kids’ conversation by interjecting an anecdote that only marginally has to do with what they’re talking about. You know that kid. The one everyone stops to stare at only to then continue on with the conversation as if nothing had happened?

Yeah, that’s me. I think I might have been in my room reading the Exorcist when they covered those social skills when I was a child. I think this has made me a bit creepy on occasion as a result.

This has, as you might imagine, had a detrimental effect on my networking skills. I have in the past spent entire conventions and conferences without speaking to another human being besides the hotel staff. Not the most effective way of spending time and money or get ahead in a writing career.

Yet, I kept going to events that caught my fancy, trying to figure out how to get out of my own way. My better experiences usually came when I attended writer’s retreats, which forced me to talk to people. I’ve been told I just need to practice, only it’s hard to practice anything when your brain’s shorting out and everyone’s watching you like they want some warning before you pull out the tinfoil hat and break into a dance number.

My single biggest success was when I decided to attend the first Superstars Writing Seminar. Being the first seminar, I had no idea what to expect, and honestly, I went because of the presenters rather than the unique content being provided. I met some of my favorite people there, all with a common purpose and at the same level career-wise regardless of our writing talent. From that one decision to keep attending conferences despite my personal deficiencies, I found comrades in arms that I have come to think of as friends and I’m now sitting here writing a post that others will read. Good things happened.

I’m not over my social anxiety, of course. I still have problems dealing with strangers, but I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is how to manage my issues. If I can find people I know at an event, that helps. If not, I continue to go to workshops and retreats, in person if possible, to force myself to speak to people.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I may ever get over it completely. I don’t have a happy ending about how I’m all better now, unfortunately. But I think the point is to keep trying, to be happy when good things happen, and not to get down on myself when they don’t. I think that last is the hardest part. I do what I can, and in the meantime keep writing and hope that my work might possibly do my best talking for me–even if personally I am always a bit lacking.

When to Walk

October 23, 2014

fictorians

Editing First Drafts Guest Posts Interacting With Fans Reflection Reviews Rewriting Self-Awareness Submissions The Writing Life 1 Comment

Guest Post by Josh Morrey.

I’ve been writing for almost ten years now. And I mean actively pursuing the coveted title of “published author”. Early on I was bitten by the Writers of the Future bug—my first submission earned an Honorable Mention—and I’ve submitted more than two dozen stories to the contest over the years. I am pleased to report that my efforts have garnered three Honorable Mentions and a Semi-Finalist, so it hasn’t been entirely in vain; but I have yet to actually win.

Granted, for the first several years I didn’t seek feedback on my work before submission, or even write a second draft. I would crank out a story each quarter, read through the draft once making grammar and structural corrections, and then ship it out to the contest. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started actually making an effort to learn about the craft of writing fiction. I began attending cons, joined a writing group, became active on some online writing forums, and *gasp* even submitted stories to places other than Writers of the Future. And it’s been great. I’ve learned so much since I really got involved in the writing community.

One aspect of my new involvement that I really enjoyed for a long time was being active on the online forum for a short fiction podcast. On these forums, we would discuss the stories published each week on the podcast as well as writing in general. At one point, someone suggested creating a private writing forum where we could share our work with each other and receive feedback. This was a great opportunity for me, because several members of this forum were either professional editors or multi-published short story authors. It was a great way for me to learn from those more experienced in the professional field.

Over the next year or so, I submitted several stories to this group for critique, as well as critiquing many stories submitted by others. After a while I started to notice a pattern. To begin with, I found I didn’t connect with many of the stories I reviewed. Most of them were stuffed with metaphor and alternate meanings that I failed to pick up on. At the same time, not one of the stories I submitted was ever met with even a hint of approval. That’s not to say the critiques were harsh, most of the people on those forums I still consider friends. Nevertheless, my stories were never good enough.

Now, I’m the first to admit I’m still learning my craft. I’m still essentially unpublished. (I have one short story published in an online journal that has already gone out of production.) But, after more than a year of never pleasing any of these readers—even though my regular writing group really enjoyed many of them—I became very driven, almost obsessed, to write a story that would please the members of this forum.

Finally, I wrote the story that I wanted. The one I knew would wow them. It had depth; it had emotion. Members of my regular writing group hailed it as the best story I’d written yet. So, eager to finally get a thumbs up, I posted it in the forum.

Once again, it was met with apathy and criticism.

It crushed me. I mean it really took the wind out of my sails. I had worked so hard on this story, and had such high hopes for its reception, that another harsh criticism was more than I could take. I crashed hard. I spent the next several days in a depression, wracking my brain for how to finally please the members of this forum. Then I finally came to a realization. Though I very much enjoyed my time on these forums, and made many friends…these people were not my target audience.

I feel almost pretentious saying that, as if I’m crying, “You people just don’t understand what I’m trying to do here!” But the fact is, the members of this forum are much more literary in their writing than I am. And that’s ok. Some people enjoy literary writing. Me, I enjoy a good story told in a fun way. I’m not looking for deeper meaning, I’m looking for entertainment. And there are a lot of people out there looking for the same thing. Just look at Larry Corriea. Do you think he worries about allegory or literary depth? No, his biggest concern is how many monsters will die with the blimp explodes. And he sells a LOT of books. Some people just like that.

So, with this realization in mind, I made a very hard decision and I left the forum. I still keep in touch with a few of my closer friends from there, but for the most part I’ve moved on. See, my time there had shifted from productive to destructive. I wasn’t learning to improve my craft anymore; I was simply trying to please a very specific audience. And once you start writing for others, and not yourself, you’ve defeated the purpose. At least, I defeated my purpose; which is to write stories that I find fun and fascinating. Not to preach some deeper message or wrap my tale in metaphor and allegory.

Maybe I’ll never get published. Maybe my writing will always be too shallow and straightforward. Maybe no one will love my words outside of a few members of a small local writing group.

But as long as I have fun writing it, I don’t care.

Writer, artist, gamer, husband, and father, Josh has been writing fiction for nearly ten years. He is a member of the Word Vomit Writers Group, which group blogs at The Writer’s Ramble. Josh has one story published in Issue 2 of Promptly and has earned three Honorable Mentions and a Semi-Finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest. He is currently developing a space opera webcomic based on a short story he wrote for NaNoWriMo 2012. It will eventually be seen at www.lostintransitcomic.com. Josh lives in Utah with his amazing wife, two beautiful kids, and two tiny dogs.

One Horn To Rule Them All: A Single Spark

October 22, 2014

mary

Mary Pletsch Rewriting Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life No Comments

(Image of “Azazel” by Stephanie Bajema.)

I remember sitting in the 2010 edition of Superstars Writing Seminars when Kevin J. Anderson gave his now-infamous professionalism example: “If you agree to write for a purple unicorn anthology, be a professional and write the best damn purple unicorn story you can, no matter how dumb you think the concept is.”

Surveys agree: most people think purple unicorns are pretty ridiculous.

But I’m a Firebringer Trilogy fan (as I wrote about back in May) and a My Little Pony fan since 1983. Purple unicorns are serious business to me. I knew I could write a purple unicorn story straight-up: no irony, no metaphor, no punchline. The challenge, to me, would be to show a reader what purple unicorns look like through my eyes.

And when the Purple Unicorn Anthology , One Horn To Rule Them All, became a reality, I had my chance. This would be a collection of short stories, the sales of which would fund scholarships for deserving future Superstars, showcasing our storytelling talents.

I played a game during my preteen and early teen years, when I went down to my grandparents’ basement with Fashion Star Fillies and Barbies. The toys were avatars – symbols of a sort – for a fantasy epic I conjured in my mind. I imagined the colourful talking unicorns from the Firebringer Trilogy, the exotic desert setting from The Black Stallion Returns, the warrior women from The Secret of the Unicorn Queen and spun these concepts into a universe all my own, a game I called simply Unicorn Warriors.

If I could write what Unicorn Warriors looked like to a fourteen year old girl, I knew I’d have my purple unicorn story.

On the other hand, I had to fit those teenage emotions and concepts through the experience I’d accumulated since. One thing that experience told me was that “writing an adventure” the way I sat down to a game of Unicorn Warriors wasn’t going to be enough. I had to show a character growing and changing, not just dash off the short story equivalent of a half hour cartoon, and though I knew the world of the Unicorn Warriors inside out, a new reader would be coming to it without any background knowledge. I was going to have to be explicit about the setting and the themes; I was going to have to craft a definitive beginning and ending; I was going to have to make my characters feel like real people.

I don’t have any memory of creating origin stories for any of the Unicorn Warriors. I think a lot of my original character concepts were partly borrowed wholesale from popular fiction (a little bit of She-Ra, a little bit of Xena) and partly thinly veiled versions of myself and my friends. I didn’t need to introduce these characters because I already “knew who they were,” so most of their time was spent seeking out treasures, fighting monsters and outwitting evil kings. By writing my Purple Unicorn story as an origin for one of the Unicorn Warriors, I could introduce readers to the world through the character’s eyes. I could also show the character’s growth as she makes the decision to join the Warriors. And I made the character the same age I was when I started to play this game.

I also had to decide what aspects of my original game to leave in and what to cut out. In an early draft of A Single Spark, there’s a teryx–a fabulous bird–circling overhead, watching the main character struggle. The teryx is a friend and ally of the Unicorn Warriors’ leader, and in my games, the teryx allowed the Warriors to learn about things that happened when they weren’t present, as long as the bird was watching. When I started writing, of course I wrote in the teryx. But on my third version of the draft, I realized that the teryx didn’t serve any function in the current story. It was just there because it had always been there in the games. And I was writing long. The teryx was cut. Maturity and experience taught me that “because it’s awesome!” isn’t, in itself, enough to keep something unnecessary in a story.

Another benefit of the decades between the Purple Unicorn anthology and the original Unicorn Warriors was an understanding of research. I did some actual research on Persian culture and the desert environment instead of relying on stereotypes and other works of fiction. I gave my Warriors and their unicorns new names, with considered meaning behind them, including that of my protagonist, Sharareh, whose name means A Single Spark, which is also the title and major theme of my story. And instead of using generic unicorns, I found real-world unicorn mythology that would make my unicorns as culturally distinct as their riders.

Because if you dismiss a karkadann as ridiculous fluff, you do so at your own peril.

To support Superstars Writing Seminars scholarships, meet the Unicorn Warriors, and enjoy a great anthology of speculative fiction, you can get your own copy of One Horn To Rule Them All in print and e-book formats right here: