Untitled Poem

Summer lingers
Autumn’s nigh,
Not near enough,
The heated sigh.

My former home,
The great white north,
Fall here and gone,
The snow brought forth.

And they sigh too,
These frozen clans,
They miss the days
Of warm suntans.

‘Tis tough enough,
Creator’s job,
But please us all,
The fickle mob.

--can't seem to come up with a title for this one.  Any suggestions?

- TOSK

More Poetry

We used to laugh,
We used to cry,
For hours and hours,
Till dawn was nigh.

Both young and full,
Of life's best spice,
And neither knew,
There was a price.

Our stories twined,
About a core,
That all was us,
And wanted more.

And through the years,
The time we've lent
To social hours
We shan't repent.

But that was then,
And this is now.
Priorities
In others' bough.

My dear old friend,
It's time to go.
You hold me back,
You make me slow.

My time, I think,
You're now the crook,
And so I close
Your page, Facebook.

Let Me Hear Your Body Talk? No, Thanks

I grew up a bright-eyed child of the 70's and 80's, decades when Grease was The Movie and Olivia Newton-John was The Singer.  I'll never forget how much fun we had dancing to "Physical." 

"Let's get physical, physical,
I wanna get physical, let's get into physical.
Let me hear your body talk, your body talk,
Let me hear your body talk."

When you're a late teen or early twenty-something,  "let me hear your body talk" means something--well, physical.  Physically emotional.  Erotic, even.  "Ooh, baby, let me hear your body talk," was admittedly something I never, ever, had the guts to say to a woman, but there's no question what I'd've meant if I had mustered the courage to speak aloud such hypnotic eroticism.

Now, in my forties, I really don't want to hear anybody's body talk.  Nope, sorry, not interested in anything it's got to say or the aromas that might go along with it.

Slightly less annoying is that song by Wham that was quite popular back when I was--um, very, very young, really, I was.  You know the one, right?  We all cringe when we hear it cranking up at karaoke night, because we know that after the guy singing it goes through a few catchy lines about waking him up before the song's target can go-go (a line that has an extra meaning or two, itself), he's gonna lean back and, depending on how drunk he is, wail out a horribly off-key high note.

"I don't wanna miss it when you hit that hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh...." *screech*

High shouldn't be that high.  Nor, I must add, should most men's voices attempt be raised that high, no matter how--no, especially when drunk. 

But even when it's not a serious assault on the senses, it's got a double meaning hanging around in there, doesn't it?

What's your favorite double entendre?

- TOSK

Don't Quit Writing

By way of continuation of my post from Saturday, Quit Not Sucking, I have to add another (shorter) verse: Don't Quit Writing.

There are so many events in a writer's experience that suck the wind right out of our sails.  The obvious ones, of course, are things like never seeming to have time or getting negative commentary on your work.  But it's just as insidiously easy to drop off the writing once you're at a certain point of the noveling process--like, say, for today's example: querying.

Yes, it's rather easy to go through once you've successfully completed the novel and compulsively obsess on the query process.  Querying is challenging, after all.  First, you have to find agents to query.  This can require a lot of a lot of a lot of web searching.  Yes, you can find books in print that will help you, but to my opinion they're not worth the paper they're written on.  By the time the ink dries on their pages they're outdated, the agents listed in them having already shuttered their submissions windows. 

The best bet to begin?  Look up your favorite authors to see who their agents are (Google "[author's name] agent").  Then look up those agents online.  Odds are strong that most of the agents you find this way won't be accepting queries, but some will.  Once you run through those just start Googling for agents.  I've found absolutewrite.com to be an excellent source.  I've also found pred-ed.com to be an excellent source.

The second hardest part, unarguably, is crafting the blurb, the query letter, and the synopsis.  I gave a short and somewhat snarky rundown on how to approach those in my recent post titled What Does Being A Writer Mean?.  They're certainly not impossible to do, but they're not as easy as a lot of people seem to assume.

Then there's the seemingly progressive activity involved with the actual querying.  I open a Word document containing each component of the query process and an Excel spreadsheet containing the information on the agents, and use a lot of copy and pasting to piece together the submissions, painstakingly, one at a time.  If you do it this way, you must make sure that in each case you proofread what you're sending before you hit the "can't pull it back now" button, as it doesn't do to forget to change the currently queried agent's name from the previous one (not that, um--okay, fine, I've done that, yes, I have). 

And then--write.  There's a reason we're called writers rather than query submitters.  Yes, the querying is important if you wish to be traditionally published, but the efforts on continuing the string of productivity is just as important.  Can't get your head wrapped around another novel yet?  Fine--write a short.  Get a novella going.  Better yet: mentally dare the agents you just queried to get you signed up before you can finish the novella. 

Hey, look, you're going to get rejected.  Stephen King was rejected.  J.K. Rowling was rejected.  The Help was rejected sixty times.  If all you're doing is querying, though, you're going to focus in on the rejections.  Don't do that. 

Keep writing, keep creating.  Keep going.

- TOSK

What Does Being A Writer Mean?

"writer [n]: someone who has written something." - Merriam-Webster Dictionary

"You're a writer.  You should be able to write a query," I remember reading in one agent's post about queries and how badly we writers suck at writing them.

Uh huh.

It reminds me of when I was an IT guy.  Now, I started my work in IT as a cabler--office cabler, not industrial stuff.  Cabling sucks, by the way, because of how filthy the job is, but on the other hand it's wonderful to finish and know you've built something that is generally impervious to the mismanagement of users and so will likely last for several years, if not a decade or more. 

(at least, that's how it was before the IEEE started tossing out new cable standards every couple of years, but that's another story)

So one day I, by that point a fully qualified and highly certified IT guy, walked into a client's office.  Their copy machine was down.  "You're an IT guy.  You should be able to fix the copier," I was told.

Uh huh.

The very first English class I remember really enjoying was in my college freshman (though we called it "plebe") year.  It was a class on composition, and it involved a lot of creative writing.  I rather liked that.  Many other English classes involved us reading books and writing book reports--synopses, generally speaking, though sometimes the assignments got weirder--and that wasn't fun. 

Telling a story is fun.  Telling a story about a story is no fun. 

What's the difference?  Writing is writing, isn't it?  At least, that's the assumption that the agent's comment above is based upon.

But no.  No, it's not.  All writing is not the same.  And it's easy enough to forget the distinction when it's not staring you in the face at the end of a long rush of noveling. 

I just finished revising my synopsis for Dragon Queen.  A synopsis, like I said, is a book report.  It's really rather boring to write once you're done lovingly crafting epic scenes of emotional connection and battlegrounds.  And it's hard, too.  With fiction, there are several things you have to do--and several things you have to not do--to do it well.  With a synopsis, you have to throw those ideas out the window and just write about the book.  "Show, don't tell" becomes "eh, screw it--just tell, and do it in as few words as possible." 

I also revised, this morning, the other major piece of queries: the blurb.  The blurb is the part that actually goes in the query letter.  It's a tease.  In the blurb you neither show nor tell.  Instead, you make something up that'll hopefully entice the person reading it to want to read the book.  I mean, it really should have something to do with the story, but without actually telling the story. 

The blurb is--just weird.  It's actually less creative writing--much less, in fact--and more marketing writing.  Not boring at all, but certainly not within a normal fiction writer's normal mode of, well, normal efforts. 

Then, once you've braved the Boring Writing and the Marketing Writing, you get to do Sales Writing.  That's the query.  The query is nothing more or less than a direct sales pitch.  Hey, you're a writer, right?  You ought to be able to write a sales pitch with the best of 'em, right?

Uh huh.

I think that's the biggest challenge writers who're trying to be published face, though.  All writing isn't really writing, for one thing, and switching between major modalities is challenging and fearsome on the best of days. 

The good news is that there is some help out there. 

On the synopsis front, I found my greatest challenge to be encapsulating a lot of words (97,000, to be specific) into a single-page book report.  This site, though, has broken the task down well, into little bitty easy steps that even I can follow.  I recommend you approach it the way the linked site lays out.

For the blurb, I'm not gonna be able to help a lot, considering the tremendous number of ideas out there about what a blurb should be.  Some people think it's a one paragraph description of the book.  Others think it's a two paragraph description of the book.  Others think it's just a hook, maybe about the main character and a little bit of the main conflict, designed to get a reader into the story without describing the book at all.  Sheesh.

What helped me, though, was Facebook.  I posted my blurb idea in a couple of places, got several dozen suggestions, pasted everything into my blurb doc, and got busy snipping and pasting.  In the end I went with the ones I felt worked best with what I originally wanted.  Remember, though, that the blurb isn't supposed to make you want to read the book--heck, you wrote it, so of course you'll want to devour it.  The blurb is supposed to make others want to read the book, so the more help from others you can get, the better.

The query letter itself also is up to debate, since so many agents have such differing opinions.  I've read a lot of their "how to write a query letter" posts, and I've also looked on reputable places like WritersDigest.com.  Also, I've attended "Query Letters For Dummies" sessions at conferences.  They're all different, though to be honest, they're not as different as the opinions on blurbing are.  Through all that, I've come to the conclusion that the perfect query letter is just like the perfect resume: it's whatever gets you where you want to go.  Both are, in fact, sales pitches, and pitches resonate differently to others depending on their expectations (not yours!). 

That said, a query letter should always do the following: a) introduce the book, including word count, genre, and blurb; b) introduce the author; and c) ask for representation.  In about 300/about 500/no more than 250/whatever word count the agent being queried wants.  Just go write a sales pitch, okay?

Simple, right?

Uh huh.

- TOSK

Quit Not Sucking

As a career college dean, I'm being perfectly honest when I tell people that I love my job.  I know, there are a lot of people in a lot of fields who will say that between clamped teeth, fake grin plastered across tight jaws.  Not me.  I love watching students with a desire to make something of themselves, some of whom missed the path when it presented itself right after high school, and some of whom never had the path in the first place, yank their courage out of their pockets, meet the challenges, and become professionals in the field of study.  I love seeing people who haven't had a job worth their time in years--decades, sometimes--go off to join new career-mates with smiles on their faces.

But there are some that make me want to eat my desk in frustration, yes there are.  And it's not because of lack of ability--all of our students, by definition from the outcomes of the admissions testing and criteria we apply, have the ability to complete their chosen programs.  And you know, sometimes life happens along the way, causing people to have to move away or stop studying for a period of time--just like happened to me before--and I understand that.  That's not what frustrates me so much.

What makes my face turn a frustrated shade of crimson is people who self-sabotage.  I mean, career colleges more than anybody else in the education field have honed our craft, using the data we have on both previous student outcomes and current employer desires, to create a process that is as near to a guaranteed path to success as is possible with the human mind being involved.

And they don't do it.  Most do, granted, and as a result I have a lot of very successful people on my Facebook page as well as my other social media feeds--folks who followed what can be a rather difficult path, who pushed through, who succeeded.  Folks who earned their success one quiz, one study session, one classroom exercise at a time.

At some point, it was because they decided/realized that it was more important to learn than it was to worry about not sucking.

I do know this.  I've got tons of data about why dropouts tell us they leave.  It's family issues, it's stubbed toes, it's hurt feelings when instructors call them out in front of class, and it's all the other, legitimate, life-happens stuff, too.  But there's a pattern I've seen over the past many years.  Way too many people are still caught in the "don't suck" fear-based mentality, and that causes them to stop trying when the chance to suck becomes very real.

You remember primary school, don't you?  You remember when everybody's hands would burst up and all the kids would try to answer the teacher's question, joyfully, because they knew the answer? 

You remember when somebody--you, perhaps--got one wrong, don't you?  Way wrong, in fact.  Wrong enough that people laughed.

Wrong enough that you sucked.

How'd it make you feel next time you wanted to answer a question?

Thing is, though, school is, or at least should be, all about sucking.  (no, I can't believe I just wrote that, either)  Learning is nothing more than the process of assimilating new information in with the old.  In order to do that, though, especially once you're of an age where your brain is already full of old information, you have to come to grips with what you don't know.  Come to grips, too, with what you knew that is actually wrong.  Come to grips with sucking, to put it basely.

"There are no stupid questions," right?  How many times have you heard that little lie?  Yes, it's a lie.  Yes, there are stupid questions out there.  But in the classroom, the stupid questions need to be asked.  If you're not asking the stupid questions, then you're not really learning.

The more complicated the learning you're trying to obtain--like, say, a nursing degree--the more you need to be willing to suck sometimes.  Because, you know, it's hard.  Nothing about nursing school should sound like it's easy to do, or to learn.  And when you try--really, truly try--you're going to make mistakes.  Yes, you're going to suck.

Hopefully, you'll learn from that, and you'll some day laugh at it as you recount how you became a professional nurse, be it practical or registered.

That's just how we learn.

Would-be novelists, y'all are the worst at this, though I haven't yet been dean over one of those programs.  Some writers are so afraid to suck that they don't write anything of substance.  Others will, and then they'll realize it sucks, and then they'll put it somewhere it'll never see the light of day again.

But writers, it's okay to suck.  I mean, granted, don't send sucky prose to an agent and hope to get picked up, at least not unless it contains sparkly vampires or repetitive bondage scenes.  (sorry, couldn't resist)  But so many people I run into tell me how much they've always wanted to write a book, except that [fill in the excuse here].  Over, and over, I hear this.  It's the same pattern I've noticed as a career college dean.  People have grown up afraid to suck, and so out of fear of sucking they never learn what they need to learn.

So go out and--um, no, I can't finish that exhortation with a straight face.  Just--just do it.

- TOSK

And So, On To The Hard Part

"Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you -- as if you haven't been told a million times already -- that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching." - Harlan Ellison

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway

"Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil - but there is no way around them." - Isaac Asimov

You'd think, reading my fellow author's, or even my own, Facebook comments about writing, that the writing is the excruciating part.  Oh, no, we say, we must make our word counts.  Oh no, we say, this or that isn't working.  Oh no, we say, I wish I could afford a better Scotch.

Okay, that last bit is just me.

I think it's a matter of perspective and memory, though.  If we're serious about writing, we do it every night, or at least four or five times each week.  Anything we do that frequently will stand out in stark relief when we're considering the overall experiences of the craft. 

But no.  The writing isn't the hardest part.  The hardest part, instead, is something we only do when we finish writing, and rewriting, and revising, and reading, and re-reading, and revising yet again, and so on.  It's, maybe, what?  Once or twice a year?  If that? 

The finishing is the hard part.  No, not the actual finishing, though to be honest that can be challenging as well.  You never really know, as I mentioned in a previous post, whether you're really done or not.  Sure, with experience you can get a better feeling for how the pace is (or isn't) working, and thus you come to a conclusion earlier on.  Still challenging, then, but not The Hard Part.

The Hard Part is what happens after the finish.  It's the "okay, so what do I do now?" part, followed by the efforts that the decision leads to. 

Obviously, if you're writing for the cash flow of it, the next part is figuring out whether you'll go Indie or traditional publishing.  The former involves lining up editorial, formatting, and graphic design plans.  If you haven't done it before, it involves figuring out how to use the KDP (Amazon) web site or the Smashwords web site.  It involves all sorts of technical things, and then all sorts of marketing things, all sorts of which I've already discussed on the blog in all sorts of places.

If you decide to go traditional, though, now you're thrust back into sales mode where you, not your novel, happen to be the chicken nugget under the sales spotlight.  It's time to find a publisher, which for the most part (though there are exceptions) means finding an agent.  This is the process known as querying, which basically involves ripping your own heart out through your chest and holding it up for the literary gods to decide whether to squish it, to accept it for dinner, or to just ignore it. 

That, I should add, is where I am.  The heart-examining part, specifically. 

And yes, I jest.  There really isn't any pulling out of your heart required in the act of querying.  That would probably actually be simpler than the real process.  What querying really consists of is research, research, and more research, to begin with.  There are a baziggaton of agents out there, ninety-nine percent of whom despise the genre in which you write and will press the Delete button a few scant milliseconds after receiving your e-mail.  The rest of the agents like the genre you're in, but ninety-nine percent of those either aren't accepting new queries, aren't accepting new authors, or don't like the voice you write in.

Bummer.

There are ways of finding agents, incidentally.  One way is to purchase a book that describes the marketplace and contains some already-outdated information, but that's pretty much The Stupid Way.  Smart authors use the web instead.

A couple of years ago, I started out with the authors I like and looked online to find out who their agents are.  Most of those folks are already too busy and thus aren't accepting queries, but they usually work for agencies where there's at least one person who's hungry.  So you look up the agency and then you comb through the list of its agents, stalking each till you find the right one.

Oh, and make a database, by the way.  A year or two from now you'll be doing the exact same thing, and you'll be oh, so happy that you took the time to list what you found in Excel.  Two years ago I made a file that lists the agent's name in one column and the agency's name in the next one, and it includes how I found them, the query method (email or mail or web form), the address, the query requirements, and so on.  This time, then, I at least had a starting point, and I only had to worry about which agents had retired or stopped taking queries--which, um, adds up to a surprisingly large number.

The query requirements is an interesting part, because agents like what they like.  Some just say to send them a query letter (which, incidentally, follows a standard format).  Some want a query letter and a synopsis.  Others want a query letter and the first X pages.  Some want all three.  Some want you to submit a query letter, a synopsis, the first three letters of their pet's name, the minimum number of words their favorite publisher requires for a work to be considered a novel, and the birthdate of their favorite author, all ciphered in the Davinci Code.

Okay, that last was an exaggeration.  Just a little one, though.

Oh, and you need to write marketing material.  No, I'm not kidding.  You need a blurb to go in the query letter, which may or may not be the same blurb you'd put on the back cover of the book.  You also need to write a synopsis.  Neither sounds all that difficult till you realize that it's you, the person who's just convinced something near a hundred thousand words to all fall in line and make sense together, who's trying to condense all that into a single paragraph or a single page.

Sheesh.

So anyway, with Dragon Queen I'm going to see once again how the traditional path works, now that I'm older, wiser, betterer at writinger, and actually have a bit of a resume to speak of.  Why not, eh?  Worst that can happen is my heart gets squished another thirty times and ignored another fifty, right? 

So, here goes.  Wish me luck, okay?

- TOSK