How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

I recently read this post Over at Mysterious Matters , a blog about publishing mystery novels. (Disclaimer: I don't have any inclination toward publishing mystery novels. I barely read mystery novels, unless you count Agatha Christie and my new-found love of Tana French. I just like reading blogs. In other words, I have no expertise or qualifications to discuss what I am about to say, but I figure why should this topic be any different from anything else I talk about here? ) The post describes the publishers' reaction to a recent submission that they liked, but had some issues with, one of them being that the villain was a Muslim with ties to terrorism. It then goes on to suggest that asking a writer to change the ethnicity of a villain is "respectful of our readers' expectations" in part because "Genre mystery fiction isn't reality, and it's not supposed to reflect reality. Rather, it's supposed to offer an alternative universe that's r...

A couple weeks ago, I got my first revision letter from Agent Ted. Some background on me--I am not afraid of revision. As a fast writer, I revise all the damn time. Plus, I've been writing long enough as a serious hobby, and as an English major, and as a lawyer, that hearing comments and suggestions from other people about my writing rarely bothers me. Sometimes, I even enjoy it. I'm sick that way. And before I signed with Agent Ted, he made it clear to me that he would be asking for some changes, and talked a little bit about what those were, because he didn't want me to be surprised. I appreciated his honesty, and, frankly, his suggestions were pretty good, even in the abridged pre-client version, so I wasn't too scared of getting the revision letter. But you never know, right? After all, Agent Ted is a Real Agent. He's sold Real Books. To Real Publishers. But when I actually got the revision letter, I was downright happy. Agent Ted didn't want to ...

A lot of authors and agents and editors nowadays have an online presence. (See, e.g., the whole list of links to my right. And that's only scratching the surface.) And it's pretty much conventional wisdom now that, once you sell a book, you should set up a website, and update it regularly, and perhaps even get a blog. But Patrice Michelle over at Fangs, Fur, and Fey has a good question : as an author, how online should you be? Theoretically, at least, every minute I spend updating this blog, or my facebook page, or my myspace page, or twittering is a minute I'm not spending working one my current magnum opus (of course, if you look at my last entry, there's a whole lot of minutes I'm spending not doing that already). And JA Konrath says that, for him, it's important to be where the people are . And if you look at the list of links in that post, I think you'll agree that there aren't many places he isn't. But I disagree with him, and here's w...

On Friday, I turned in my revised manuscript to Agent Ted for his perusal and now I'm at loose ends. I have the writing bug, because of the amount of time I was spending on The Book up until Friday, but none of my current projects seem right. * I can't go back to The Book until Agent Ted looks at it. I mean, I could fiddle around with it some more, but why? There's no point. Until Agent Ted has his say, it would be like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic....except that my book is not going to sink on its maiden voyage, so rearranging chairs on the Olympic? The Britannic? It would be a pointless exercise is what I'm trying to say. * TNP (the Totally New Project) doesn't have any supernatural elements, unlike the Book, so it seems a little...mundane to work on right now. I don't mean it's boring or plain, but it's all so...real. I'm not really feeling it at the moment. * I don't want to get moving on Electric Boogaloo (the sequel to...

You may recall this post , where I talked about how artists got mad when political campaigns used their songs and wondered why the campaigns didn't get permission. Well, there's a new news article about just that here . Note a couple of things: 1. Once again, it's the McCain campaign ticking people off. This time, it's Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters (and formerly Nirvana), who objects to the McCain campaign's use of their song "My Hero." I went to see the Foo Fighters a couple of months ago and I will tell you, I have never seen a guy who's more of a rock star than Dave Grohl. I don't mean that in a "he's a jerk" way, but in a "he walked out on stage and the crowd went crazy for fifteen minutes before he even played a note" way. It was insane . You do not want to piss off Dave Grohl, man. His adoring fans will kill you. 2. Apparently, the Obama campaign has been asked to stop using a song! Sam Moore objected to th...

Over on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (which if you read romances you should totally be reading--heck, I don't even read romances, and I still love it), they had a post this week about fan fiction, which mentions Annie Proulx's objections to people foisting their Brokeback Mountain fan fiction on her. (The Wall Street Journal article is here .) As a fan fiction author and, potentially, a "real" author, I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. What if I get published and then people start writing fan fiction about my book? What will I do? How will I feel? How will I react? What I won't do is give an interview where I talk about how offended I am about the fan fiction. That would be a wee bit hypocritical of me, I think. But, on the other hand, I have huge sympathy for Ms. Proulx who, after all, probably didn't have a huge fan fiction exposure before the movie version of Brokeback Mountain. I mean, were there people out there doing fanfic ...

I couldn't blog about this until I got the all clear from my AGENT, but on Friday I accepted an offer of representation from Ted Malawer, of Firebrand Literary. The website is being revamped right now, but this is my AGENCY. Let the squeeing begin! Okay, let the squeeing stop now--there's only so much of that I can listen to. For any of you six readers who aren't already represented by an agent, and who want to be, this is how it happened: 1. I wrote a book. 2. I rewrote the book seven squillion times. 3. I wrote a query letter. 4. I rewrote the query letter EIGHT squillion times. 5. I looked at about a billion blogs and websites and books trying to decide which agents to send my query letter to. 6. I bought #9 and #10 envelopes... 7. ...and then ended up doing most of my querying online. 8. After submitting to agents, I waited and tried not to check my email every 10 minutes... 9. ...and failed. 10. I sent out partials, and fulls, and more queries, until fina...