An explanation for the Agency Model for E-Books.

Writing Tips and Tricks!

DIY MFA: Getting to know supporting characters

Musetracks talks about the Byronic Hero.

Nathan Bransford on the Biggest Challenges in the New Era of Publishing.

QueryTracker.Net explains agents who  have ‘revise and resubmit’ requests.

Agent Rachelle Gardner has 9 ways to outwit Writer’s Block. Also: what if my agent doesn’t like my second book?

Writer’s Relief: The 7 best Books for Self-Published authors.

Learn how to draw in your reader, from write it Sideways.

Three Ways to Strengthen your writing, from the Writer’s Digest.

Susan Morris has rules for critiquing.

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Teachers.

Contests and Blogfests!

A Twitter Pitch Party on May 24, featuring agents Vickie Motter and John Cusick!

Create your E-book and make money now!, on May 17 by Jane Friedman.

Images of the Week:

Happy Mother’s Day!

A police station where policemen are allowed to stop suspicious-looking motorists in order to prevent anti-carnapping in the area. The absence of police and the two women sent to guard the station is probably one of the better visual explanations of general police efficiency here in the Philippines.

The Del Monte market, which sells fresh meat and some produce, but is also more known for one of the best places to buy cheap but good quality flowers of different varieties.

A queue of jeeps lining up to take passengers across from the Virra Mall shopping complex.

Deep-fried crablets are a specialty here in the Philippines.

All known Kitkat flavors known to man!

The Working Man: The Modern Sherlock Holmes and His Fashions.

Kim Newman on Why are so Many Vampire Stories so Weak?

What’s going on at this year’s BEA!

The Top 10 Most Read Books in the World!

A chance to ask a literary agent anything you want!

Writing Tips and Tricks:

DIY MFA explains between Villains and Antagonists.

How to Write Shop address Race in YA Fiction. (although it’s hard to argue this when you’ve got Fox News bemoaning the fact that women are allowed to vote.)

Agent Mary Kole explains what makes a lasting Novel for her.

Nathan Bransford wonders if it’s ethical to watch football.

Agent Kristin Nelson explains Plot Catalysts.

Query Shark has the motherlode of all query letters.

Querytracker: Making the character connection.

Five Famous Literary Flops from Writer’s Relief. Also: how to determine if you’re a good candidate for self-publishing your book.

Agent Jennifer Laughran on writing sequels and series before signing on with an agent.

Similarly, Writer’s Digest has 7 Ways to Write a Stand-alone Book (with Series Potential).

YA Highway explains Making your Characters as Emotional as Adele.

Contests and Blogfests!

Want a challenge? How about joining StoryADay, where writers write one story everyday for a month?

International Creative Writing May is here!

Images of the Week

 
Apparently, the sixth book of the Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire

The spreadsheets and costs of a semi-pro online magazine

A message from the Avengers:

And finally, just because:

Title: The Unnatural States of Dead Girls in Wells
Genre: YA Psychological Horror
Word Count: 59,000 words

Query:

In the small town of Applegate, there is a dead girl walking – and killing.

Her victims are child murderers, much like the man who bound and threw her then-sixteen-year-old body down a well in Japan, three hundred years ago. Unable to move on, she justifies her existence by slaughtering these killers and freeing the spirits of children whose lives they took. But though she spares the innocent out of a self-imposed duty, the living holds little interest for her.

This changes when a fifteen-year-old boy moves into town. She finds herself drawn to his strange, unearthly tattoos, repelled by the intermittent apparitions of a woman in black haunting him, and curious by the growing number of deaths he seems indirectly responsible for.

But the boy has more connections to the spirit world than either realizes. Soon they are drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan. Here, they will make a terrible discovery:

There is a malevolent, horrific ghost trapped inside the boy – and it is trying to get out.

First 250 words:

I am where dead children go.

With other kinds of dead it is different. Often their souls drift quietly away, like a leaf caught in the throes of a hidden whirlpool; slipping down without sound, away from sight. They roll and ebb gently with the tides until they sink beneath the waves and I no longer see where they go – like sputtering candlelight, like little embers that burn briefly and brightly for several drawn moments before all their light goes out.

But they are not my territory. They are not my hunt.

And then there are the murdered-dead. And they are peculiar, stranger things.

You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gently, as your poet encourages, into the good night.

We are the fates that people fear to become. We are what happens to good persons, and to bad persons, and to every one in between. Murdered-deads live in storms without season, in time without flux. We do not go, because people do not let us go.

The man refuses to let her go, though he does not know this yet. He is inside an apartment that smells of dirty cigarettes and stale beer. He sits on a couch, and watches television, where a man tells jokes. But this man who wears a stained white shirt, with his pudgy arms and foul vapors; this man does not laugh.

Tor / Forge ebooks are now going to be DRM-free!

Story Siren and plagiarism allegations.

Writing Tips and Tricks:

Steve Ulfeder explains how you know you’ve made it via Jenny Milchman.

Writer’s Relief: How you know you’re ready for Self-Publishing.

DIY MFA shows how you can get more writing time.

Kathy Steffen from How to Write Shop shows you how to write your character well through their professions.

Agent Kristin Nelson explains why agents don’t take on anything (even if they think it sells).

Getting Facts straight in your novel: Kristy Lahoda explains Expert Witnesses.

Rachelle Gardner: is a writer responsible for what their characters say?

The single best piece of writing advice from Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, and Carl Sandburg, and more!

YA Highway has expectations within genres.

Kevin Federline’s aunt wrote erotic fanfiction about K-Fed and Brittney Spears…. wait, what?

Contests!

Check out Agent Kristin Nelson’s Agent Reads the Slush Pile seminar on May 2!

The 10th Dear Lucky Agent contest live until May 14, 2012!

The Writer’s Digest Conference West on October 19-21, 2012!
Images

And throwing in some Game of Thrones humor on politics.

Sign reads, “Largest and Only Grizzly Bear in the Philippines”. Well, doesn’t it follow that if it’s the only bear in the Philippines it’d also be the largest?

CD-R King, the compact ‘techie’ version of Walmart. Minus the food, and everything was made in China. Find anything from blank CDs to LCD monitors and security cameras, to memory cards and foot massagers to  even large safes and filing cabinets.

The ‘tiangge’, or flea market. A common sight in Manila. This aisle sells bags of all kinds – sometimes, including fake brands.

Filipino cuisine – not for the fainthearted, or the vegetarian / vegan.  Most of the meals found here are made from various pig parts (brains, tripe, ears, etc.)

roasting chickens on a spit, from a popular chicken stall called Chooks-to-Go (I understand Chooks is Australian slang for chicken, but am uncertain whether a connection exists in this case.)

World Book Night 2012 officially begins!

Audible promises to pay authors who social network.

Showcasing 15 famous writer’s bedrooms.

Nobody wins the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and by that I don’t mean any character from the Graveyard Book.

Canada also files lawsuits regarding fixed ebook pricing.

Author loses 5,000+ books and his WIP in a fire. Ouch.

Writing Tips and Tricks:

How to Outline like Janet Evanovich, by the Writers Digest.

Writer Kathy Steffen explains the IT factor for your protagonist.

Agent Mary Kole tells you how to adjust expectations for conferences.

Agent Ayesha Pande on great queries.

Agent Kristin Nelson tells you how to distinguish a good agent from a bad one.

The journey from query letter to bookshelves: Liz Pelletier explains.

Letters of Note shows Norman MacLean’s letter to the Alfred A. Knopf agency after expressing their interest in his next work – after rejecting A River Runs through It for its unsaleability.

Contests!

The Writer’s Voice contest (hosted by Cupid’s Lit Connections, Brenda Drake Writes, Lova YA, and Mother. Write. (Repeat.)) opens for applications on May 3!

Images

A real hobbit hole house in Switzerland

There is a certain stigma that prevails among many unpublished authors regarding the duration and extent at which they should talk about the manuscripts that

1.) they are writing

2.) they are revising

3.) they are currently sending out on query

4.) they are stuck on, and are bemoaning incessantly about

in their respective blogs. People consider authors with unpublished material (in the novel-making category, anyway) as something of an untried breed – unless you’d proven your worth with the world-weary editors and agents of the publishing world, your work is original fanfiction as far as the majority is concerned.

And I understand that. Really, I do. Whether it’s about a one-legged heroine in a dystopian America led by Donald Trump’s mutated hair, or a paranormal romance between a “plain” girl and a half-unicorn half-merman, or an erotic romance about a woman’s unusual chapstick fetish, writing is a private endeavor, and isn’t something you can dangle before the public without being plagued by the self-doubt of not being good enough to even warrant a serious critic.

I’ve written two novels query-able novels, but I can only count on one hand (if the hand had been amputated by a serial killer and now only had three fingers left) the number of times I’ve mentioned either in detail in this blog. In fact, I’ve used up more blog entries talking about my refusal to share tidbits of my work than otherwise. Part of the reason is my irrational, compulsive fear that potential writers wandering in may pick up their own ideas from my self-proclaimed high-concept themes and wind up oversaturating agents’ inboxes with similar – okay not really, the five people visiting this blog won’t have that much staying power.

The real reason is my fear that most people – family, friends, significant other, frenemies (or as I’d like to call them, enemiends) – won’t understand why I’m spending the majority of my time making things up and writing them down instead of some other noteworthy jobs like organic farming or curing cancer.**

And that isn’t healthy, at least for a writer.

No matter how ridiculous you think the work might seem in the eyes of others, you owe it a chance to breathe out in the open and to, as a compromise, talk about it the way you should take everything else – within a certain modicum of moderation. Talk about it more often, adjust to the feeling of letting more people inside your secret world. It’s hard to stem the flow of self-criticism, nitpicking at every bit of text from inside your own headspace, and the idea that other people could possibly confirm your worst fears that it really does suck is a frightening notion. But that’s what being a writer is all about, and if you can’t deal with what a handful of people are going to say about something you’ve written, then you will never make it past the agents, the publishers, the book bloggers and critics, that self-governing body we occasionally refer to as the internet. Like any Alcoholics Anonymous member , you need to stand up, face your peers, and say:

Hi. My name is Rin. My most recent manuscript is a YA psychological horror novel that I am pitching as The Grudge meets Dexter in the Dark, and I am a writer. It deals with the first-person perspective, semi-literary present tense narrative of an undead girl protagonist, and I am a writer. It will include doll rituals, exorcisms, shrine maidens, and nasty masked ghosts in black, and I am a writer. It is 59,000 words and based on a popular Japanese ghost story that inspired such works as the Ringu, and I am a writer.  

It is called The Unnatural States of Dead Girls in Wells, and I am a writer.

———-

** I find no contradiction in sending my queries and manuscripts out to agents, on the other hand. Mostly because I assume they’ve seen so much ridiculous submissions in their emails that my shame won’t make much of a difference to them.

banner credits here naominf.com

Some major US publishers refuse to renew their contracts with Amazon.

The Department of Justice’s ongoing lawsuit against Apple and other publishers regarding ebook pricing. Nathan Bransford explains.

The Casual Vacancy: J.K. Rowling’s adult book!

Book Ends, LLC says goodbye to their blog (but not their agency!)

Idiots from Twitter come out to admit they never realized Titanic was a real ship.

Writing Tips and Tricks:

Why writing your book based on the next trend is the wrong way to go, from Pub Rants.

McSweeney has the Ultimate Guide to Writing Better than you Normally Do.

Why Flight of Imagination Pictures won’t work with agent Mary Kole.

Chuck Wendig shares 25 reasons he hates your character.

The Intern explains the perks of Indie publishing versus the perks of Big 6 Publishers.

Kathy Steffen shares why Fiction Writers should write Poetry. And DIY MFA has some Poets on Poetry.

Ten Tips for Reading your Writing in Public by Writer’s Relief.

Writing Tools

You can Write Children’s Books by Tracey E. Dils. Available at Writers’ Digest!

Images of the Day: