Bloggy bits: August 2008 Archives

Not feeling at my best today, I'm afraid, but there's still a lot of great stuff out there on the interwebs to read. Such as:

1. A day in the life of a literary agent, from fellow Coloradan Rachelle Gardner
2. Nathan Bransford's thoughts on unagented revisions
3. New kt literary client Carrie Harris is throwing a party, and you can invite five literary characters of your choice!
4. Another fab kt literary client, Susan Sandmore, is putting together a sort of cultural literacy quiz for writers of children's books. Stop in and help her out!
5. Galleycat's taking another look at the YA morality clause Random House UK is rumored to be inserting into contracts.
6. And Friend of the Blog De offers some useful thoughts (in a six-part series) on writing intriguing minor characters

What other interesting links have you come across lately?

Unfeasible Enterprises over here is having a bit of a water pressure problem -- in that there is none -- as well as a pressure to get a bunch of reading done, both to get back to authors whose material I've been sitting on for too long, and also because I just picked up three new books at the library and I'm eager to read them. And I can't do that until I clear out some of my work reading.

So, on this beautiful summer Friday, I'm popping some stuff in the mail and then taking a reading day. If you need me, I'll be on the deck.

Oh! And if you're looking for something to read yourself, may I suggest Cruel Summer by Alyson Noel? It just got a great review on Teenreads.com!

I got a lovely shout-out on Nathan Bransford's blog for my presentation at Saturday's Agent's Day, and I wanted to follow up some of his comments about using blurbs in your query letter. Nathan describes four possible tiers of blurbs, with an actual personal referral from a client as Tier 1 down to praise from random children as Tier 4. He was very polite, however, in not sharing one of my biggest reasons for not caring too much for blurbs in your queries -- sometimes, they make me feel dumb.

And I hate feeling dumb.

I mean, you must be so excited about some random praise from author Joe Schmo to put it in your query. And I'm sitting here reading it going, "Who the heck is Joe Schmo? Should I know him? Did he win a major award? Is he an international bestseller?" And then I have to go look it up, and find out more about him, and maybe check to see if my local library has any of his books, so I can see what's so great about his blurb.

And do you see what you just did there? You managed to completely take my attention away from YOUR book!

So skip the blurbs in your query letter unless they're Tier 1 or the top of Tier 2, and check out Nathan's post for further descriptions of the tiers. And thanks for not making me feel dumb.

Sometimes I think I'm the luckiest girl in the world. I've got Rexroth, and Trixie, and two of publishing's cutest dogs, plus some of the greatest clients an agent could ask for. I get to go to fun conferences in great places like San Francisco and enjoy the company of my peers, while sharing my insight on the publishing process with eager authors who welcome my opinions. But that's not why I feel so particularly lucky today.

No, today I feel lucky because I just finished reading another client manuscript, and it was SO GOOD! The rest of the world may have to wait until February 3rd to read Alyson Noel's new novel Evermore, but I already have. Not only that, but I got to read the sequel as well. And let me just say, when you finish these books, you're going to be salivating for book #3!

Think that's cool? (I do.) Well, it gets even cooler. I also got to read the sequel to Band Geek Love by Josie Bloss. Band Geeked Out won't be out until next July, but I get a sweet sneak peek. Oh, and the sequel to Suite Scarlett? Yeah, I read that already, too.

There's a lot of perks to being in publishing (free books, free books, and oh, free books, mostly) but some of the best are these early peeks at eagerly anticipated books to come. Of course, I eagerly anticipate all of my clients' books, but every once in a while -- like getting an advance reader's copy of a soon-to-be-bestseller -- I get to feel proud and a little bit cooler than usual.

It's not free popcorn when you work at a movie theatre, but I think I'll take it! What about you? What's your favorite perk about your job, whatever it may be?

I've had occasion in the last few days to recommend this brilliant article by Jon Scalzi to several writers, and figured it was worth sharing with all. It's a few years old, so you may have seen it already, but it's a practically timeless piece of advice on writing for teenage writers. An excerpt:

The fact that your writing sucks now only means that your writing sucks right now. If you keep working on it it'll very likely get better... and then comes the day that you write something that really doesn't suck. You'll know it when it happens and then you'll get why all that time banging out stuff that sucked was worth it: because it's made you a writer who doesn't suck anymore.

So don't worry that your writing sucks right now. "Suck" is a correctible phenomenon.

Well worth reading. I feel like Meg Cabot also had some brilliant advice for young writers, but I couldn't find the specific bit of it I was looking for on her blog. If anyone has better luck in searching her archives and helping me find what I'm oh-so-vaguely describing, please share it in the comments!

This guy doesn't have enough blogs, he has to take over mine as well? Man! In any case, here's his latest column from Locus Magazine's special Young Adult issue.

That's one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences -- it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There's a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying. You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby.

Betsy Bird over at Fuse #8 posted the other day about books with unsatisfying endings, mentioning a new book by an author I love (which I haven't read yet, and don't even want to talk about too much for fear of spoiling the ending for myself), but also citing one of my ALL-TIME FAVORITE BOOKS IN THE WORLD, The Princess Bride. And thus the gloves are thrown down. I love The Princess Bride and its ending, to me, is an all-time classic.¹ It has a sense of continuing on that allows the reader to imagine what happens next, and to me, that's one of the greatest gifts an author can give his or her audience -- the chance to contribute to the story. I'm representing a novel that has that same kind of ending -- without giving it away, it's not so much a cliffhanger as fading to black the very moment before the grand conclusion, allowing the reader to envision what happens next and not spoiling it for their own imagination.

Or maybe I just can't bear to hear anything bad about The Princess Bride². What books have left you unsatisfied by the ending? Not counting titles within a series, please. Or which ones do you feel have an ending that still leaves things up in the air, but works for you? Let the commenting commence!


1 - I'm not talking, btw, about the lost chapter of the sequel to TPB which appears in the 20th Anniversary Edition of the TPB, and all subsequent printings, although the edition I'm linking to does include that. I'm talking about the original ending.

2 -And what ever happened with this? I'm a nerd gamer, I want to know!

My client Kater Cheek blogged recently about poor punctuation in stores:

Today I was at a grocery store and they've made their labels print out a little tag at the bottom that says "Thank's from Fry's." That one I couldn't let go. I wrote them an email telling them that they ought to have their signage written by the educated, native English speakers on the staff, because bad grammar sends a negative impression. They'll probably ignore it.

A lot of people do ignore bad grammar, but when you're writing an email to a prospective agent, you really do need to pay attention.

Now, granted, I'm not sitting here as the grammar police, and I'm sure I use words incorrectly at times. I frequently mispronounce words in conversation that I've only ever seen read and not heard, and Rexroth often finds himself correcting me. (Thanks, sweetie!) But that's among friends and loved ones. Do you want a typo on your resume? No, of course not. And you don't want it on your query, either.

Give your query a meticulous going-over before you send it -- if you can, have a impartial friend take a glance as well. Make sure you're not substituting "you're" for "your" or "there" for "their" or any of a million other small mistakes a spell check won't catch.

And for those of you who've done the whole Grammar Police thing, tell me: what are your punctuation pet peeves?