Do your homework, but not too much

Doing all your research before querying is essential… or is it?

Your writer wannabe has been at it once again.  A couple of weeks ago, my query for a nonfiction article made its rounds and the rejections are now trickling in.  You know what that means — time for you to learn from my mistakes.

Thank you for your query. Unfortunately, the subject does not meet our current editorial needs. We appreciate your interest in Sierra.

— Jake Abrahamson
Editorial Assistant, Sierra Magazine

Thanks for your query. Unfortunately, we don’t have any available slots in any issues of the magazine this year in which to schedule your proposed piece, and so we can’t make the assignment. With only six issues a year, our space fills up quickly.

— Mark Wexler
Editorial Director, National Wildlife Magazine

Thanks for reaching out to us. We actually covered many of these issues in a few articles over the last couple years, so we don’t have any plans to write more pieces any time soon. Good luck placing your work elsewhere…

— Scott Kirkwood
Editor, National Parks Magazine

Well, such is life.  The best thing to learn from this is that nonfiction articles, although apparently more marketable than fiction, nevertheless carry certain risks.  I made the mistake of writing a full 3,800 words on a subject before querying.

There are several reasons why a market doesn’t exist.  Editors don’t like to buy stories that are too similar to something they or another magazine has printed in the past year.  Also, as Mark Wexler mentioned, the magazine may have already sold all its article spaces for the next year or more.  Or maybe the editors just think that whatever you’re pitching simply isn’t interesting enough.  Thus, the answer is to query before spending a lot of time researching and writing a project.

But, what if you query your brash ideas and someone bites?  You suddenly have a deadline to work against.  If you were querying without having done any research, the story idea may not amount to a full article.  Imagine if you sold an editor on the story being a feature-length article and it’s merely a page or less?  It may be fit for a different department or even a different magazine.  Or the ultimate nightmare, the story that you sold turns out to not really exist.  This indicates that a writer should do all the background research and maybe even write before submitting ideas around.

Therein lies the Catch 22: do you write your nonfiction piece and then search for a market that may not exist, or do you query an idea that may not develop into a full story?  Criminy!  I guess the best thing is to do is find that sweet balance between doing too much work on a project and not enough.  Do just enough work to know that a story has merit, what its market is, and how long it could be, and then query around before doing anything else.  This makes doing timely pieces very difficult.  Say you want to report on the issues surrounding the XL Keystone Pipeline.  If you do a bit of background digging, decide there is a great story, and query, the magazine may get back to you in a few months when the story is no longer valid — or other writers have already snapped up the story.

An image like this — taking down a GM sign — would have made a great article back in early 2009 when the stock market collapsed and GM was going under. To capture such a timely story, a writer must be ahead of the current events, uncover what will be a solid story, and pitch it before doing too much work in case no one buys it.

 

Canada Gets Creative

Canada: at least it’s good for literary prizes.

Reminder: the deadline for the prestigious annual CBC Canada Writes creative nonfiction contest is February 1st at 23:59!  For all of you who are Canadians or permanent residents of Canada, hurry and whip up something for this contest.  There’s a $25 entry fee and the word count must be between 1,200 and 1,500.  The first prize is $6000 and getting your work published in Air Canada’s on-flight magazine enRoute.

 

Survival Guide for Introverts in the Publishing World

Other people’s business: what you hoped to avoid by being a writer.

I’ll admit it: I’m not a people person.  One of the seductive aspects that drew me to the world of writing is the idea of being allowed to be thoughtful — not just pensive but having the time to articulate my thoughts.  This dream has yet to be realized.  All right, all right, this dream doesn’t even exist!  As you can tell by my raving commentary on this blog, the quiet contemplative world of an author is a charade!  From the moment inspiration pops into your mind and you pick up a pen to the day you see your massively edited work in print, you’re going to be interacting with people.  You’ll be searching for a market, sending queries to multitudes of agents and/or editors, working with publishing houses, and if you finally give up on that and try to self-publish, guess who gets to make contacts with presses and become a salesperson, distributor, and flagrant self-promoter?

How does a shy person deal with all this crap?  Here is my survival guide for introverts:

1. You’re a writer, so you’ll probably try to do most of your interacting via e-mail (or regular mail), and in fact there are certain interactions that can’t be started any other way.  Most agents, editors, or commercial magazines truly loath getting surprised by phone calls anyway, so do your magic with words in your gleaming queries.
2. When you get a response from an agent/editor, don’t get excited or unprofessional, but immediately write back that you appreciate their rapid response.  At this stage, an editor or agent is responding to you to say one of two things, either that they don’t serve the wretched likes of you, or that they’d like to see your manuscript.  Just do whatever they ask, even if it involves mailing them undergarments.
3. Make sure you know as much as possible about the subject before interviews, even if the interviews are over e-mail.  For example, you’ll need to know certain aspects of the publishing world to engage properly with editors and agents.  Research how much money you can reasonably expect to earn from your work in the current economy and how rights work.  If you are interviewing someone for an article, you should know most of the ins and outs of the subject so that the interviewee doesn’t think you’re a nobody who won’t do their subject justice.  You might want to begin your research by looking up your subject on Google Scholar.  You may even decide to interview the authors of the research papers you find there.
4. If you end up speaking with an editor, agent, or conducting an interview over the phone or in person, prepare your questions in advance.  Write out any conceivable question you might have on a pad of paper or your tablet computer, whatever.  Unless you have a voice recorder and permission to use it — which may be best for in-person meetings — leave plenty of space below each question for you to scribble down answers.  Find your own best way to scribble down answers in a hurry.  I tend to use a mixture of rushed writing and brainstorm-style word bubbles with arrows and dashes.  You may have to write just keywords so you can jog your memory of the conversation later.  By the way, after the conversation, type out your notes before you forget.
5. Use your written questions as a template, but the best information comes from having a less structured conversation.  Let it flow naturally with open-ended questions — ones that can’t be answered by yes or no — thereby allowing the other person to expand on ideas, and you can just listen with your recorder or scribbling pen in hand.  (In fact, if you’re conducting an interview for an article or a book, you might learn a lot more by going on an extended outing with the interviewee’s organization.  Ask if they have an upcoming event and whether you can attend.  Get in there and see how they do things, and ask questions as you go.  Don’t leave your camera behind.)
6. Try to maintain eye-contact with whom you’re speaking, if you’re in person.  If your eyes dart around and you get distracted by the scenery, the person will think you’re uninterested or insincere.  Obviously you’ll have to look down at what you’re writing, but be sure to look up very regularly.
7. If your conversation is in person, you might want to assess your tendency to sweat and wear an extra layer of antiperspirant.  Warning: do not walk into a meeting reeking of excess perfume, deodorant, halitosis, or that cigarette for your nerves you sucked down moments earlier.  You want the other person to be comfortable, not holding his or her breath for the entirety of the meeting.  If the interviewee begins to turn blue, you’ll know they smell something you can’t.
8. Listen very carefully to what the speaker is saying when talking over the phone or in the flesh.  This is more difficult than it seems.  Many people get distracted by all sorts of things.  Practice with your friends.  Count how many times during a conversation you stop listening and begin thinking about what you’re going to say next, or count how many times your mind gets caught up on a concept and takes a wee tangent.  Some people stop listening when they think the speaker is wrong; they focus on how they are right.  Or maybe your brain just occasionally gets derailed and you start thinking of something else.  Once you spot your weaknesses, you can work harder to improve your conversational skills.
9. For some reason, people have little patience for introverts — whether or not they themselves have introverted tendencies!  Never does the notion that you may just be shy occur to the other person if you’re quiet during a conversation, even if the other person is a bit shy.  Instead, people tend to think that quiet people are either idiots, spineless, or even intentionally difficult and belligerent!  We quiet thoughtful people normally prefer to compose our ideas in writing rather than confront others in a rash manner, but keeping this in mind we need to remove ourselves from our usual dispositions and pretend to be gregarious during the interview.  This sounds cliche, but smile, shake hands, start the conversation by saying “Thanks for meeting me,” and throw yourself in there.
10. Roll with the punches.  There will likely be difficult parts of the conversation where you fumble a bit, especially on the first several times.  Don’t let mistakes get to you, otherwise you’ll implode yourself into a neutron singularity right there on the spot and the other person will be left to ponder your existence.  You’ll have your notepad or laptop with you so when there is an awkward part of the conversation — for instance if you were doing a good job listening and not solely looking down at your notes — simply say, “Okay, let me just see what else I wanted to ask you…”

And this is only the surface of the interactions you’ll face in this world.  I won’t tell you you’ll get used to it after a while, because I don’t think you ever truly do.  But, I think you can get relatively good at faking it.

 

Brave New Fiction

I recently came across a bittersweet opinion piece in The Guardian by Robert McCrum.  He describes how the heyday of fiction was in the early eighties, when novels made headline news and new writers peppered the scene like potpourri, and now we may be in a sort of gentle decline.  Without going into any specific statistics regarding fiction’s downfall, McCrum rides out the rest of his article by relaying the winners of recent literary awards such as the Samuel Johnson prize and the Costa prize, and the possible winners of this year’s illustrious Booker prize.

Does the new world order of failing economies, floundering publishing houses, and cheaper e-books that will likely end up as a “free” torrent file on Pirate Bay have you throwing a brick through your out-dated laptop?

Well, if you’ve been trying for a decade to bust into the literary world and you’re confronted with McCrum’s despondent news that fiction is no longer popular, maybe the time has come for you to check out Wattpad.

What pad, you ask?  Having been around for about three years, Wattpad is an online community of readers and writers, sharing work and ideas.  People even offer writers feedback.  The downside is that your work is entirely for free, but apparently editors of publishing houses peruse through the work and approach the most popular authors with contracts.  According to the website, once a book has received a million views, a publisher might pick it up and so far over 500 writers have done so.  The creators of Wattpad boast 2 million readers per month, and popular authors such as Margaret Atwood have contributed — you can find her new batch of poetry called Thriller Suite and a new collaborative work with Naomi Alderman called The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home.  Wattpad also has its own annual literary prize called the Watty on which its viewers vote in a multitude of categories.

This is like the inverse of the publishing world, in which you must win the readers over before the editors.  Of course, that may be like taking the colander out from under the pasta of the publishing world.  Or, perhaps more appropriately, this would be like taking the sifter out from under the dubious bag of flour.  Analogies aside, if that’s where the situation boils down, we should embrace the new system.  Either that or be overrun in the imminent literary apocalypse, which would likely entail hordes of lumbering “unread” with dwindling vocabularies.

Ode to the traditional novelist in the Digital Age

 

Syntaxing My Patience

Purging Bad Grammar From Your Technical Writing (and Other Forms of Writing)

A warning to those doing technical writing: the limits to tolerance can be found nestled between grammatically incorrect independent clauses.

Those who are already decent writers are the general audience of this rambling little blog, which offers tips from the netherworld that may help someone get something published.  Yet today I’m unable to sustain the levies of my patience for terrible writers.  During the past week or two, I’ve undergone a bout of editing for university students’ assignments regarding technical writing.  Let me just restate that: university students, who were already required to be the brightest in their high schools to be accepted into university.  For the record, I’m writing this from Canada, not the United States.  Here in Canada, high school students must follow a special advanced track to be properly prepared for entry into university.  I mean no direct offense to United Statesians, as I hail from Old Glory myself, but I weep for the general state of writing, especially from people who are supposed to be good students in this new era of reliance upon automated spell-check and auto-correct, and txting lol and rofl as they hunch in their chairs with stoic countenances.  Hence, here are some of the main problems I’ve noticed repeatedly.

1. Get rid of misspellings.  There’s no excuse for them at all, even if you’re lazy.  No editor will be tolerant or lenient regarding the woes of auto-correct.  Use dictionary.com or, wtf, a real dictionary with paper pages.
2. Problems with choosing the appropriate plurality for your noun subjects.  The best way to make sure you’ve got all the correct tenses and conjugations of verbs is to read back over the sentence as if you stripped it to the skeleton.  For instance, the sentence “The considerable advances in plant developmental genetics from a few model species have provided a starting point for studying plant morphological diversity and evolution at the molecular level” (from a Citern et al. 2003 Plant Physiology paper) can be simplified to “Advances have provided a point for studying diversity and evolution.”  By removing all the adjectives, adverbs, and clauses, you can spot errors quickly.  If you were to strip all that away and find that you are left with “advances has provided,” you would know you have a problem.
3. This would also help you see where you went wrong if you have an incomplete sentence — incomplete sentences!  How is this a problem?  A sentence must have at least a subject and a predicate, which is basically a verb phrase.  An example is “I am enthralled,” in which “I” is the noun subject and “am enthralled” is a predicate phrase; “am” is the verb, of course, and “enthralled” is an auxiliary verb.  You can glob dependent clauses onto the thing as long as you can skeletonize it again and still end up with the basic structure of a sentence.  Like this: “Because I think that people whose native and only language is English should also be able to write coherent English sentences, I am, as you may expect, not enthralled by the level of writing in today’s university students.”
4. For the love of dogma, punctuate your sentences properly.  Know when to use semi-colons.  I’ve seen enough randomly placed rogue commas to donate winks to all the emoticons in need out there.  I’ve also spotted enough period-less sentences to make them all stop winking again.
5. No changing your fonts.  Stay in Times New Roman size 12, even for the titles, headings, and subheadings.  Editors will notice if you change the typeface and they will not be impressed.
6. Get people to proofread your monstrosity before submitting it to editors/agents/professors.  Trust me, you will not find most of your own errors.  You wrote them, so you’re not likely to think of them as mistakes.  First of all, read over it again yourself, but here’s the stipulation: read it aloud.  I’m serious.  Print the bastard out and grab a pen and pace around your living room or office reading out loud like a lunatic.  This will help you catch some of the errors you may not notice if you quickly read through it in your head.  For example, if you find yourself needing to gasp for breath as you read a sentence, you are the proud owner of a run-on sentence.  This will help you spot wordy reiterated sentences as well.  Also, if you have to re-read a sentence or try to think about how you meant the sentence to sound, your sentence needs to be sent back to the mechanic.  The illogical parts may be revealed in this manner, but you still need to swallow your pride and get others to critically proofread your garbage so that they can tell you whether your logic makes sense.

The following tips apply mostly to technical writers, especially in the biological sciences.  In most forms of writing, especially fiction or even non-fictional articles to a generalized audience, such as in a magazine, the following errors are often acceptable or even encouraged because you are trying to write in a conversational manner.  If you are writing in one of those styles, ignore the remainder of the post.

1. Plagiarism comes in many forms and one of them is not citing your sources, or even not citing them in the proper format.  The rule of thumb is this: cite everything.  Nothing is your original thought.  Even if you have an original idea, you’ve based your preconceptions on some sort of previous work, and that must be cited.  If, for instance, you were to write “Tremendous insights on plant development and evolution are being revealed through advances in mapping the genomes of model plant species,” you’d better follow it with “(Citern et al. 2003)” before the period, and then in your references section write out the full citation in the publisher’s established format.  Another form of plagiarism is citing an article for information that it doesn’t actually contain.
2. I’m using all sorts of contractions here.  Not birthing contractions, grammatical contractions — which doesn’t mean pushing an exclamation mark through its dot.  Don’t say “don’t,” “doesn’t,” “I’m,” and the like in professional technical writing.
3. Never refer to the audience as “you” or at all.
4. Stave off your impulses to use conversational colloquial phrases.  This isn’t an IM with your bff.  This includes anthropomorphizing your subject even slightly… don’t do it.
5. That bring me to the next no-no.  Be precise with your language, not vague or subjective.  Give values, not rough ambiguous or subjective ideas.
6. Don’t end sentences with prepositions such as “with,” “from,” “to,” “of,” “at,” or “by.”  An example would be if you had an idea to write “Cheating at Scrabble is something my donkey could get away with.”  When you set your fingers on your touch screen keyboard to hammer out the thing for submission, you’ll end up with the following after some teeth-grinding hours of editing.  “My donkey could get away with cheating at Scrabble.”
7. Italicize genera and species names.  If you know what they are, you know what to do.

Here are two more tips that will make me seem like a hardcore Nazi.  These are for really astute technical writers only.  First, have you ever had MS Word give you a squiggly green grammatical line under your sentence and you just can’t seem to figure out what it wants you to do?  Its only advice is “passive sentence.”  That means you’ve essentially replaced the subject with a secondary subject or an object.  Here’s what I mean.  Take the following sentence.  “The biomass for the treatments of high light and high nutrients was observed to be the highest among all treatments.”  You keep going back and trying to correct it, but continue getting the same message.  Hold on, don’t turn off the automated grammatical check yet.  The problem is that the thing that does the verb has been omitted.  The verb needs to be performing the action of the noun phrase.  In the above case, what did the observing?  Space monkeys?  Who knows!  Any of the following would be correct.

“The biomass for the treatments of high light and high nutrients was the highest among all treatments.”

“I observed that the biomass for the treatments of high light and high nutrients was highest among all treatments.”

You basically need to resurrect the subject noun that you butchered out when you tried to make it sound sophisticated and scholarly.  That brings me to my last pet peeve.  Often you’ll find this mistake even in well-known published works: use of the pronoun “it” as a subject pronoun when “it” doesn’t refer to anything.  Remember back in elementary school when you were taught about pronouns?  Okay, never mind United Statesians.  Everyone else, do you remember back in junior school when you were taught the articles of speech?  Pronouns must always refer to something.  This is an example:

“Carol and Jasmine had trouble finding their way through the dark corridor.  She was frustrated that she’d forgotten the headlamps.”

Pronouns are useful, but they can also be somewhat destructive to conveying your meaning and what is writing or any art form about if not about conveying meaning?  In the above example, the pronoun “she” can be replaced with “Jasmine,” but what if the first pronoun was replaced by “Carol?”  The whole meaning of the sentence changes from someone being frustrated with themselves to someone being annoyed with another person’s neglect.  Also, in this case the dynamics are changed so that the reader knows what Carol is thinking rather than Jasmine, effectively altering the main character.

However, this is what I’m really getting at… at which I’m really getting…  Anyway, read the following:

“It is the cyanobacteria Anabaena that makes up the largest percentage of the community composition in the trials with low light.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

Okay, the second one from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is just for dramatic flair in prose writing, but although you’ll find the pronoun “it” beginning phrases even in published scientific writing, the use of “it” when the pronoun doesn’t refer back to anything is incorrect.  Always ask yourself to which noun does your pronoun “it” refer.  To test whether the sentence works, replace the “it” with that noun.  If your answer is the very next phrase in your sentence, then you’re incorrect.  If the answer is that you don’t know or that the noun is a word or vague idea that is not obvious, then you are incorrect.  To correct it, say something like

“The cyanobacteria Anabaena makes up the largest percentage of the community composition in the trials with low light.”

Get rid of “it!”  Here’s a correct usage of “it:”

“Anabaena‘s adaptation to low light environments (in-text citation) may explain why it displayed the largest percentage of the community composition in the trials with low light.”

People do this everyday in conversation, but that’s okay because the use of the “it” is just colloquial in those cases.  Even though many people think the use of “it” to start a phrase sounds scholarly, don’t use “it” in professional writing unless it passes the above test.  (Now you’ll start to realize all the times people do this in conversation, especially regarding weather.  “It’s raining.”  “It’s sunny out.”  What’s raining?  The sky?  The day?)

Okay, that’s enough of a soapbox.  This blog will resume its normal task of helping those who are already good writers to get published.

 

Plot v. Character

or How to Infuse Your Fiction with Better Characters and Imagery in Mere Minutes

The paradoxical wooden character tries to at least be sad about being wooden.

Added to my growing pile of rejection letters is the following from On Spec Magazine, a science fiction magazine based in Edmonton, Alberta.

Thanks for sending us your story. After a close reading, we have determined that it will not be a good fit for On Spec. There are many reasons why stories get rejected. We look for the most effective combination of plot, characters, emotion and originality. Some stories have one or two of these traits, but only a few have all of them. And sometimes, the story just doesn’t suit our own particular editorial style.  While there is some interesting history here, the SF element is slim. Not for us.

Keep working on your stories, and do send this one to another magazine. We can’t use it, but someone else might.  If you haven’t yet read a copy of On Spec, now might be the time to check it out. It could help to give you a better idea of the type of work we are most likely to buy. Keep in mind that we publish only 5% of the 1,000+ manuscripts we receive each year. You can find out how to order a sample print or digital copy of On Spec by visiting our website.

The Editors

Although this is essentially a form letter, there is some good info buried in there.  Specifically, the letter says that good stories need to combine plot, emotions, and so on.  How boring, you say.  Everyone knows that.  Well, you might be surprised how many people, even good well-published authors, focus exclusively on one aspect of a story and ignore the others.  Stories are comprised of equal parts plot and imagery/emotion/character-based content.  I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen a writer who is good at plot, but isn’t terribly apt at creating a real world filled with tangible characters and images.  Popular authors who fit into this category are Michael Crichton, J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer… I dunno… George Lucas…  Most writers seem to fit into this description even though they try to innervate their writing with more thorough scenes and characters.  Popular writers who seem to focus more on emoting than plotting are folks like Miriam Toews and Margaret Atwood.  Very few have a knack for both.  One might be Khaled Hosseini.

The best thing you can do to instill a sense of reality into your writing is to be observant.  Don’t wall yourself off into your cocoon of keyboards and glowing monitors.  Sit at a cafe and watch how people act and talk.  Take note of the timing of events on street corners.  Ride buses.  Go to libraries or shops.  Think about colours, textures, temperatures, sounds, smells, and shapes or objects and how they might appear to another person.  See if you can describe the call of birds or the way alpine winds rush through trees.  Try to place yourself in the spot of the character and describing their surroundings, the feeling and appearance of everything.

Are you characters too wooden?  Here is a quick way I’ve devised to turn your Pinocchio character into a whole person.  For each of your characters, place them on the following spectrums:

• Traditional: range from being mostly conventional to being mostly unorthodox
• Political orientation: range from communist to socialist to social democrat to liberal to more conservative to totalitarian
• Religion: range from none (needing empirical evidence) to finding some things unexplainable to believing in magic, fate, afterlife, and god(s)
• Sexual identity: range from secure to openly curious to unconfident to denial
• Ability to discuss sex
• Intelligence
• Ability to see patterns: range from seeing patterns everywhere to seeing no patterns at all (chaos)
• Common sense: ranges from finding many everyday tasks easy or obvious to finding tasks generally complex
• Intuition: can sense unspoken or invisible qualities of a situation, can pick up on some hidden things like others’ emotions, or unable to understand unuttered things
• Creativity: actively invents new things based on original ideas, likes to look at things in new ways, or doesn’t care to invent or imagine
• Art: can interpret many works of creativity, can understand some art, can’t fathom most art beyond face value
• Musical tastes/food tastes/ interest in books
• Friendliness: range from very friendly to generally defensive
• Extroversion: is happy talking to anyone, comfortable around friends, has few friends, entirely introverted
• Assertiveness: ranges from very assertive to never assertive
• Willingness to assert/help the rights of others
• Temperament
• Ability to deceive: capable of breaking laws
• Judgmental
• Complaining
• Worrying
• Sense of duty

There are likely other metrics you can think of, and don’t forget that people usually carry with them influences from others they’ve known in the past.  They end up with all kinds of weird sayings and mannerisms.  You can make your characters all sorts of combinations of these traits, not to mention all the myriad of physical characteristics and health maladies.  Remember that people’s minds are often riddled with complexities and perplexities, or denial.  Also, one character’s turmoil is small potatoes to another character who has a worse life, or what one person views as another’s good fortunes may not seem as such to the person experiencing the “fortunes.”  Life is made up of warts and thorns, pitfalls and dead-ends, and not by the airbrushed anorexic airheads you see in all the movies and TV shows these days.

 

The Complete Dummy’s Guide to Dummies

Feliz Día de los Muertos and Happy All Soul’s Day!

Have you ever caught yourself banging away at a keyboard and daydreaming of doing a publisher’s job for them?  Ah, the smell of toner cartridges, the hours of toiling over a steaming Adobe product…  Honestly, is there anything more to life?  You, sir, may just get your wish if you are endeavouring to write a travel guidebook or a children’s picture book.  That’s right.  Peruse through the submission guidelines for publishers that print such material and you are bound to find many saying one of two things: (1) don’t bother because the industry is saturated with this crap no one reads, and (2) send dummy.  If you’ve been reading hundreds of listings and advice articles about the publishing market and you’re feeling a bit bleary, you might furrow your unkempt brow and think, What did he just call me?

No, a dummy is a real term used for an element of your manuscript submission to agents/editors.  Sooner or later, aspects of this industry were bound to be renamed to make the writer feel belittled.  Next thing you know, you’ll have a Miss Snark-esque agent shredding open a manilla envelope with her raptorial claws and spitting in disgust, “I can’t believe these hacks!  This guy gave me his manuscript, his SASE, his dummy, his moron, and his scumbag, but why would he be so stupid as to not send his freakin’ douche nozzle?!”

A dummy is a mock version of your book as you envision it, so the agent/editor can visualize how you intend the book to appear.  This is basically requested any time your writing will feature a strong visual component.  Right now I’m working on a dummy for a travel guidebook.  Here, you get to form a “rough” mock-up of the page layouts so the agent/editor can see how the images will interact with the text.  There are various ways of doing this, and although you might consider sending a dummy that is simply scribbled madness, somewhere etched into the pit of a writer’s soul is the law of nature which states that all work submitted before the royal eyes of agents/editors needs to be meticulously polished.  That means your rough mock-up will turn out to be the product of hundreds or even thousands of hours of layout design.

This probably means you need to buy Adobe Creative Suite, one that includes InDesign.  This software on its own is astronomically expensive and is in fact the leading cause of neck injuries resulting from double-takes.  You can try different software, but they don’t all work the same and they don’t all save work as the same or compatible file formats.  For example, Microsoft Publisher only saves as .pub and no other software is compatible.  There are various freewares you can download, such as Scribus and Fatpaint, but they also may not save the work in a compatible format.  The dummy isn’t going to be submitted electronically, of course, but if the editor likes your layouts the way you have them, they will then ask for your file so they can play with it, and therefore the file needs to be something they can open with their program, likely Adobe InDesign or Adobe Pagemaker (it’s still kicking and still pricey).  QuarkXPress is still the major competitor for Adobe on this, but it’s becoming less popular in the publishing world because Adobe sends men in black suits to advertising agencies and the homes of graphic designers to rough up the buyers and break the QuarkXPress CDs in half.

At your own risk, here is a good list that compares the various open source/freeware desktop publishing programs for those who are attempting to start working on their dummies on a tight budget.  That one compares among the open source software, and this list compares some of the those with the definitively for-profit software such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress.

Some really good tutorials on how to use the various components of the Adobe Creative Suite can be found on YouTube, where you can find their icons between “Sh*+ vapid girls say 4” and “Trampoline Fail Compilation Remix 2012.”

InDesign CS6 Tutorial: Basic Rundown of Design Tools

InDesign CS5.5 from Start to Finish

There are many more, of course, so keep searching and tinkering until you learn the techniques you need to make your dummy the way you want it.  Essentially, you’re building a book, from start to finish, including the table of contents and the customary empty pages at the front and back.

You know how you’re taught that when you submit a manuscript, you need to make it all Times New Roman, size 12, with the title in size 12 caps, and maintain one-inch margins?  Forget all that.  Here, you’ll need to decide when to wrap text around an image, or have an illustration bleed onto the next page.  You’ll need to format the sections and their headings.  The good part is that InDesign allows you to create a master layout and apply it to all pages in different sections.

Here is a book that may help: it’s called Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books by Uri Shulevitz, but you can see just by its name that it might be limiting when used for other types of writing.  As you work, you should organize all your illustrations and photographs in one folder, possibly with subfolders.  And to make it look really spiffy when you send it away, you may want to get it professionally printed.  Keep in mind that you usually send your non-dummy manuscript as well, so you might want to work on the writing phase with two saved files, one which will later be bastardized to form the dummy.

 

Worst Nightmare: Deadline Tonight!

Deadlines so close they melt a writer’s supple brains.

Calling all writers, calling all writers!

…At least those living in Canada.  November 1st is the deadline for submitting a short story to CBC’s notorious Canada Writes annual contest.  If you’re Canadian or a permanent resident of Canada, dust off one of your stories and send it in right away.  Ideally, you would have started crafting a new masterpiece back before the contest started back on September 1st, but it’s worth a shot even if you haven’t thought about it until this moment.  Who knows, you might be sitting on a gem.  Essentially the only restriction is that it must be between 1,200 and 1,500 words in length, but otherwise the world is your oyster.  Specifically, the deadline is November 1st at 11:59 PM, so hurry, hurry!

If your writing hand is too sore from scooping guts out of gourds to entertain blood-curdling notions of last minute deadlines, there are other Canada Writes contests coming up.  On December 1st, CBC opens the flood gates to their creative nonfiction contest, with the same limitation of 1,200 – 1,500 words.  The deadline for that one is February 1st.  Also, their poetry contest, whose word limit is 400 – 600 words, runs from March 1st until May 1st.

Beware that any submission requires a $25 fee.  Oooo!  Spooky…

 

‘Tis the Season

If you’re planning to submit anything about Halloween, you are, like a damsel fleeing a murderer by dashing upstairs, painfully out of luck.

I just got a rejection from a newspaper called the St. Albert Gazette.  Having penned a short seasonal article, I approached a few newspapers.  First, I queried The Edmonton Journal and waited.  The article was merely a Halloween piece designed to tell someone how to carve a decent jack-o’-lantern, so I saw no reason to not get at least a response.  By the next day, there still was no reply, so I tried The Edmonton Examiner, a somewhat lower tiered newspaper.  Still no response.  This has been my first real attempt at publication in newspapers and clearly I need some schooling.  Finally I tried the one in St. Albert, a lower tier still (don’t deny it, St. Albert).  Not until a few days later did the last one reply in the negative.  The editor explained that they had nearly finished with the Saturday edition when they got my query and there wasn’t time left before Halloween to print the story this week.  He said that I should have sent them the query several weeks ago.

I was already aware that editors of magazines need stories three to six months in advance of their publication date, a fact that constricts the timing of writing seasonal articles.  So, if you’re inspired to write a critical history of Thanksgiving or recipes for the Christmas holidays, you may be out of luck for this year unless you hurry.  For higher tier magazines, you will definitely be out of luck, so aim low if you still plan on writing anything festive.  My botched queries of yesterweek taught me two things: newspaper editors also need quite a long lead time and the ones who dwell on upper tiers may not respond at all.  Ooo, by the way, the newspapers don’t appear to normally give information on how to submit articles for pay, but instead post contacts for sending a letter to the editor.

To a seasonal writer, this is what time of year it is right now.

Here’s a rule for the amount of time required before publication you must take into account when submitting articles for magazines/newspapers:

• For upper tier magazines, six months.
• For lower tier magazines, three months.
• For upper tier newspapers, 1.5 months.
• For lower tier newspapers, 0.75 months (3 weeks).

Notice that my rule is exponential, doubling the lead time for each level up.  Basically, now is the time for submitting those Christmas articles to lower tier magazines and upper tier newspapers.  Don’t wait to get gooey-eyed in December to write about Hanukkah or inspired by autumnal leaves during autumn.  Fine, write everything out and have six to eight months to edit it and prepare to submit.  If you’ve really got your excrement together, you’ll be writing about winter in the middle of summer.

 

Literary Agents

Such a blunt title is deserving of a blunt post.  Here is a list of literary agents who literally want to read literary fiction.

Aragi, Nicole, queries@aragi.net, is interested in strong, controversial and international literary fiction.

Barer, Julie, submissions@barerliterary.com, likes literary and commercial fiction.

Bijur, Vicky, assistant@vickybijuragency.com, reads literary fiction and many types of nonfiction such as popular science and journalism.

Blasdell, Caitlin, QueryCaitlin@LizaDawsonAssociates.com, reads literary fiction.

Bransford, Nathan, nb@cbltd.com, reads literary fiction, science fiction, and political fiction.

Capron, Elise, queries@dijkstraagency.com, likes strong literary fiction.

Carlson, Jennifer, mail@dclagency.com, handles literary fiction, commercial fiction, and nonfiction such as journalism and political work.

Cheney, Elyse, submissions@cheneyliterary.com, reads many types of writing such as literary fiction, commercial fiction, and nonfiction that includes politics and journalism.

Eth, Felicia, feliciaeth@aol.com, prefers to read literary fiction and multicultural fiction.

Finch, Diana, diana.finch@verizon.net, prefers innovative and controversial literary fiction.

Fischer-Harbage, Ryan, submissions@fischerharbage.com, prefers literary fiction.

Folkers, Kate, kate@martinliterarymanagement.com, reads literary fiction.

Friedrich, Molly, mfriedrich@friedrichagency.com, is interested in “poignant” literary fiction.

Geller, Jonny, gelleroffice@curtisbrown.co.uk, likes genres such as literary fiction, science fiction, and multicultural fiction.

Griffin, Elizabeth egriffin@cookeagency.ca, prefers strong literary fiction.

Haywood, Samantha, sam@tla1.com, likes to read strong literary fiction and an array of nonfiction that includes current events and environmental issues.

Henshaw, Rick, submissions@henshaw.com, likes literary fiction and science fiction.

Hoffman, Scott, hoffmanqueries@gmail.com, selects innovative literary fiction.

Kepner, Chris, queriesvsa@hotmail.com, reads many genres such as literary fiction, science fiction, and political thrillers.

LaPolla, Sarah, sl@cbltd.com, reads literary fiction and science fiction.

Larmore, Phoebe, plarmore@aol.com, reads strong and controversial literary fiction, but isn’t taking on new writers.

Lazar, Dan, dlazar@writershouse.com, handles literary fiction and commercial fiction.

Lecker, Robert, leckerlink@aol.com, selects strong literary fiction.

Maass, Donald, info@maassagency.com, handles science fiction and literary fiction.

Mandel, Daniel, dmandel@sjga.com, reads controversial and innovative fiction.

McDermid, Anne, info@mcdermidagency.com, likes literary fiction and science fiction among others.

McGowan, Matt, mm@goldinlit.com, handles controversial and innovative literary fiction.

Robbins, Ms BJ, robbinsliterary@aol.com, likes literary fiction and current affairs.

Sagalyn, Raphael, query@sagalyn.com, likes literary fiction and nonfiction, including journalism and science.

Somberg, Andrea, andrea@harveyklinger.com, is interested in literary fiction and science fiction.

Stein, Anna, anna@aitkenalexander.com, likes international and literary fiction.

Swayze, Carolyn, reception@swayzeagency.com, is interested in strong literary fiction.

Zuckerbrot, Renee, submissions@rzagency.com, prefers literary and commercial fiction.