Vance. Jack Vance.
Or that Ellen Kushner/Delia Sherman book I was reading at the same time as Tigana and always get them mixed up - The Fall of the Kings????
oh, and I forgot to tell you, she sent me pictures...the kitty is adorable...
I'm just popping in to let you know that ginmar has agreed to speak at the Writer's Weekend next year...
Faren -
I love coffee gelatin - it's not quite coffee yogurt, but...you can make it with hot coffee for the hot, to dissolve the gelatin and cold coffee for the cold...you can add sugar or fake sugar to the hot mix, if you like sweet. Then, when it has set, cut it into cubes and pour either coconut mild or sweetened condensed milk over it. You could also make the milk the cold wet ingredient...different texture, but easier to use in a food fight.
If it's not a hoax, she's probably gonna be in a lot of trouble.
Also, how smart is it to basically identify your position and how vulnerable you are and then put it on the web? Maybe if you're so scared you just don't care...
I've seen her weblog before. I can't wait to meet her.
I could never get through the Narnia books (forgive my heresy). Probably because reading them as an adult, I caught on early to the whole dying and reborn god thing - a religious friend assured me that Lewis intended it to be as Christian as it sounded, but later I read that he was agnostic (Lewis, that is).
Xopher - wow. I just remembered for the first time in over 30 years that I was cast in an original stage version of WWTW many, many years ago. I had a bad knock on the noggin in '74 that made a lot of things leave my brain and this is a pleasant recovery of one of them. We were all young and so thrilled that as original players our names would be published in all future copies of the script. A blue dress doesn't ring any bells, though.
PS does anyone know for sure if that whole deal with Jay and Silent Bob is true, I mean the part about owning the rights to your true-life persona? The reason I ask is this: We're thinking of putting together a comic book and including stories a la American Splendor of the people we get to meet. But our budget doesn't include funds for attorneys...
Bill - Brust is pile-worthy alright. As one fine editor said, "'Swashbuckling' doesn't even begin to cover it."
What a shame visual art cannot make a more lasting impression on the 'dominance of the left hemisphere'. I agree with Leonard Shlain - this is the dark side of literacy. Bible thumping leads to people thumping.
We got some kittens from a friend who had raised them to the age of eight weeks. They'd been locked in a room with their mother and remained feral. They attacked us when we tried to feed them. They attacked us pretty much any time we were within attack range. I think cats, like humans and dogs, need a certain amount of human interaction in their formative weeks or they're going to be trouble. Also, I think sometimes the cats we get at the Humane Society are on their best behavior until we've had them at home for a while.
But a word of advice - do not get a Mastiff. They snore with the force of a .4 earthquake, eyes wide open, then fling slobber on every possible surface, including your keyboard.
Thank you for the links, Kate - I think maybe what I meant above was that I want to hear it from her own lips. As in the theory that we all learn in different ways, reinforced visually, aurally, etc...I like to cover all the bases.
This conversation is a wonderful resource. Thank you, all.
CHip - I've started with trying to write romance as a form because I've figured out those are the writers who have the most (or so it seems to me) support in place- workshops, classes, writer's association that doesn't require members be published, magazines devoted to the genre, lots of websites and other online groups. The romance writers seemed less fearsome to me than wading through a crowd of Klingons. No offense meant to any Klingons, of course...
Some of my friends and I write cross-genre stuff, maybe not exactly what you'd call interstitial, but we don't throw our hats squarely into any one ring. I've discovered the expectations for mystery writers are not the same as romance or fantasy, yet some of us include all of those elements in our work. I'm going to spend $1500 to go to a conference in April so I can ask Diana Gabaldon how she pitched her books (okay, and take a class from Donald Maass...)
A lot of us spend our days writing, learning how to write better and networking to divine how best to position ourselves - to get a recommendation from a friend to their agent or anything else that will get us closer to the top of a slush pile. For those of us who didn't fit in well at school, these networking skills are a bugger to learn in adulthood. Some of us will never have the capacity to self-select out of the game. Like the morbid hoarder, I'm pretty much obessed with acquiring all the scoop I can get about agent/editor likes and dislikes and how the winners ran. Some of us talk about this amongst ourselves so we know not to bother Famous Editor X or why we don't want to get hooked up with Available Agent, but I'm all for spreading the word. Writer's Digest doesn't tell us all we need to know.
And yes, I've got 'read Mike's work' on my list.
Thank you, John, I appreciate and respect your opinion. I'm not saying I'm an expert...I'm operating under the advice of published romance authors who teach in their workshops that a writer ought to condense their novel into a high-concept pitch. They say this is to provide a hook that will grab the agent/editor and provoke a conversation about the work. Also, I've been to dozens of workshops that advise (romance) writers to open a query letter the same way, one to three sentences. My question to you is - do you think this means writing anything else is not like writing romance? I'm not phrasing that very well, but...I've been repeating this advice to a lot of people, so if there's a better way, I want to change what I've been telling folks. Also, if you think this may apply to romance but not to other types of writing, I'd like to hear your views on that.
I guess the point is that they don't want the editor/agent's eyes to start to glaze over too soon. How would you advise a new writer to pitch to an agent?
Faren- thanks for the link...I'm having the agents who organized the event at my con this summer. They plan to do a longer meeting with writers, go over the first page of a manuscript and talk with groups of 10. The speed-dating seems similar, if shorter, to agent appointments I've had at other writing cons.
It would be fun to know what the follow-up numbers turn out to be and if anyone gets a contract as a result of the SF event. I practically stalk my alumni to find out how their careers are going. It's not as if coming here is the turning point (well, in a few cases I know of, it was), but it all adds up.
I think speed pitches must prepare a writer to pitch a book succinctly, if nothing else. I like to watch the movie The Player for hints on how to get the meat and potatoes into a dazzling package.
Mitch - I'm curious about paying for editing help, too. The publisher I'm trying to write for has a paid manuscript critique service and they are the only publisher that puts out the sub-genre I'm writing. So, if it's okay for them to do it, where do we draw the line? PS a friend paid for the critique, submitted the corrected manuscript and was rejected. It seems opinions vary in-house.
To paraphrase a writer friend - I'd carry dog poo in my bare hands for miles to write like Atwood.
At this stage, I reckon it's too soon to know if breaking a few of Elmore's rules would help.
Didn't one of last year's NaNoWriMo folks sell her novel to an actual publisher? Now I have to spend days trying to find her name...
For young writers who bring their parent/s, we give scholarships to our conference. I hope it's not inappropriate for me to mention this here.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 44 |
| 2003 | 4 |
Total: 48 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Karen Junker:
Show all comments by Karen Junker.