When to Submit

One problem with this industry is trying to work around all the dead periods. For me, I can't submit anything after mid-November, because so many industry people are on vacation that emails return out of office messages, and even if you break through and reach someone, they wouldn't be able to get together an ed board meeting for an offer anyway.*

But that's me. What about you? Should you stop submitting the last six weeks or so of the year?

My query inbox has been really quiet the last few days, and it will remain quiet until after the first of the year, when the dam will break, and everyone will send out the stuff they've been working on the past couple of weeks.

And how will I read them? First in, first out, of course, with the occasional exception for the queries I need to think about a little harder, or those that merit a personal response because I've met the author or read her work before.

So it doesn't do you any good to hold off on queries. I'm not going to read them on Christmas Day, of course, or other days where I'm busy with holiday stuff, but I otherwise go through a lot of queries and manuscripts over the holidays, in part because there's often not much else to do. This year I'm preparing to go on submission with one project in January and do some followup work on another, but I'm still doing a lot of reading.

You'll notice a theme from me over time, and that is that as an aspiring writer you should be continually working and never waiting for the industry wheels to turn. Submit your queries when they're ready, and not according to the calendar.

*My colleague at Veritas, Katherine Boyle, got an offer for a project just a couple of days before Christmas, which left her surprised. It's by far the latest offer the agency has ever received before the holidays.

Choosing What to Write

For as long as it takes to write a book, and for as few books as a typical writer will produce in her lifetime, I'm sometimes surprised by how little thought some writers give to choosing the next project.

Some writers start working on the first thing that pops into their mind, without giving any thought to the market. Others look around and say, "Hey, looks like Jane Austen retellings are selling, so how about if I make a Darcy the secret son of the French king and re-imagine the story? Hmm, I'd probably better read Pride and Prejudice at some point, since I've only seen the movie."

In the first case, there's a high chance of failure if what seems interesting to you doesn't interest agents, editors, bookstore reps, or the reading public. Maybe dystopian novels were hot a couple of years ago, but now editors are sick of working on them, the reading public has moved on, and a few expensive flops have given the industry an excuse to say that the category is dead.

As a kinda, sorta fabricated example.

In the second case, you're almost certainly going to fail as well. There are people who love Jane Austen (raises hand), and authors who have read those books so many times that they can tell you what Lizzie Bennet was wearing the first time she met Darcy and the sum of her limited fortune*. Those authors are going to crush you, because they love their work and you don't and people can spot a phony from a mile away.

So if you shouldn't write to the market, and you shouldn't write whatever first tickles your fancy, how do you choose? This is my answer:

A writer's imagination can churn out an endless number of story ideas. They are everywhere and yet come from nowhere, and most writers could brainstorm the bare bones of an interesting plot in something between a few minutes and a few hours

I would suggest you gather and scribble down any old idea that occurs to you, then make a list of those that most speak to you. Next, compare them to what you think the market might want, what feels like a story with universal themes, or whatnot (keeping in mind that this is always a guess), and then look for the intersection. Make sure you're not bullshitting yourself about this or you'll regret it down the road.

*Lizzy is forced to get by on £50 per year, which is the interest on a modest £1,000 that came to her after her mother passed away. Also, of film adaptations, the 1980 version is the best. Sorry, it just is. I'm not anywhere near the biggest JA fan in the world, but I'll bet I'm pretty high on any list of male fans.

Working From Home or Living at Work*

The good thing about my job is that I can work from anywhere. The bad thing about my job is . . . well, that I can work from anywhere. I just got back from a short trip to Mexico, where I ate a lot of spicy food, soaked up some sun before returning to the frozen wastelands of the north, and read a lot of manuscripts.

None of these requested works I'd had for more than a few weeks, but due to an unusual confluence of events, I've seen an unusual number of promising manuscripts this year, which has led to an unusual number of new authors.

One thing I didn't do was to read any queries, which gave me a chance to test the current input levels. My queries have nudged up from about 7-10 a day to 12-15 per day. I attended more conferences this year than usual, which increases visibility, I've got a couple of authors doing really well, which further increases visibility, and I recently put out a call for science fiction and fantasy, which is an area where my agenting has some openings, but where I haven't yet been grabbed by the right project.

Or maybe it's just that we're three weeks past NaNoWriMo, and all those rough drafts are hitting the query-go-round. Kidding. Mostly. Maybe not at all.

*That was my response when I used to own an inn and people told me how nice it must be to work from home. Actually, it felt a lot more like living at work.

What to do While You're Waiting for a Response

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I try to be more responsive than average with my queries and requested manuscripts. There's a lot of waiting in this business, some of it unnecessary, and I don't want to contribute to the problem.

Having said that, there's no way around it. You're going to be waiting. And waiting. And waiting. You'll be waiting to hear about your query, waiting to hear about the results of your full manuscript, waiting for the agent to get back edits, waiting to go on submission, waiting for editors to respond, waiting for the contract to get executed, waiting for your pub date. Etcetera.

The biggest risk is that you use this waiting period to . . . well, wait. You've got a book, so let's see how the world reacts to it before you work on the next thing. Don't want to waste time chasing the wrong type of squirrel, after all. Or so goes the internal monologue.

Meanwhile, a year or two goes by, and you haven't written a damn thing. Then the response comes, and it's not what you hoped for, and you're devastated.

Instead, I advise starting a new project as soon as you start querying. The main reason is that a big reason a lot of aspiring writers fail is that they simply don't produce enough. If there's any one thing that successful writers have in common--and there really isn't, but this is as close as it comes--they tend to produce more than their perpetually aspiring peers.

But also, it helps you psychologically. You get hit on the head with all those rejections, probably one after another as you're querying, and you feel like a failure, instead of how you should be feeling, which is that maybe this manuscripts isn't the one, but something else will be.

But if you've got a new work in progress, you can say, "Oh, yeah? Wait until you see THIS brilliant piece of fiction, you illiterate dolt." (In your quiet, indoor voice.)

What I'm Looking for Right Now

I've signed a couple of historical and women's fiction authors in the past few months, and while this is a good part of my bread and butter, I'm hoping to establish more of a presences in science fiction and fantasy in the next year or two.

I represent David Dalglish (Orbit), of course, but right now I have more sf/f contacts in the industry than good books to send them. My background came from this genre, with my own first professional publication going to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I attended Clarion quite a few years ago.

Like everything else, it's got to drag me into the story and never let me go.

Critiques: the Crap Sandwich

I've recently signed a couple of new authors, and am in the process of giving manuscript feedback. When I started agenting several years ago, I did a lot more of the heavy revisions than I do now, frequently telling authors to revise and resubmit, or even signing people with great manuscripts that needed a little work.

The results were almost always disappointing. Heavy revisions sometimes led to half-hearted fixes of troublesome spots, while buffing down the parts that previously stood out in a good way, as well. Now, I'm more likely to say go ahead and try me with your next project instead.

Having said that, a manuscript always needs a little work, no matter how good. There's a part that confuses, a draft artifact that the author missed, clunky dialogue, and lots of typos (or, as semi-literate Amazon reviews frequently complain, "typo's").

I read manuscripts on the Kindle, draw up notes, and send them in to my writers. Not my favorite part of the process, and certainly not the author's. A good critique partner is skilled at giving a crap sandwich, e.g.:

You have lovely prose here, and these characters are alive and vibrant. Your dialogue is stilted, unfortunately, and I got bored with all of the scenes in coffee shops. When you stop long enough to paint us a picture, it feels lively and interesting, but most of the time I feel like I'm listening to talking heads.

The climax for me is clearly the highlight of the story, and I had a hard time putting the book down during the last forty pages.

In other words, good stuff, bad stuff, good stuff. It gives the reader some encouragement to start, slaps down the ego a little by presenting the issues to address, and then builds the author up again.

Remember, whether you're giving professional feedback or performing the role of beta reader, a good critique is neither for ego stroking, nor to tear down the writer. Be helpful, but be kind at the same time.

Your Protagonist Smells Funny, and I Want Him to Die

Does any of this sound familiar?

 "I hate your main character. She's whiny and entitled, and I didn't buy her transformation."

"Why on earth would she go up to the attic anyway? Her Dad told her not to, and then she goes and pries open the old sea chest in a way that he'd be sure to see later."

"You need a new villain. This guy is just pure evil. I half expected him to twirl his mustache and tie up the protagonist on the train tracks."

Advice from your beta reader, hopefully, but maybe from your agent or editor.* It's cringe-worthy, no matter its source. The first thing to do is to take a step back, remember that you are not your manuscript, and vice versa, and that almost any problem can be fixed in revisions. Ultimately, nobody is going to care about the clunky first draft, only what you come up with in the end.

It's safe to say that if one person in your writing group tells you to do something, and everyone else shakes their heads violently in disagreement, you should toss the advice in the round file. But what if they all say the same thing, and it doesn't ring true to you? Or worse, if everyone says that a scene or character doesn't work, but they all have a different solutions for fixing it?

What's really happening is that you're waking readers from the fictive dream. They were immersed in your story, convinced at some deep level that it was real, and then your story telling showed its seams. The reader woke up, looked around, and thought, "My God, she's just making it up as she goes along!"

Of course, that's what we're all doing, and there are always seams. Find the best book, play, or movie and start discussing it, and you quickly find flaws in the story. You just have to force yourself awake to do it.

So when the reader says he doesn't believe your protagonist would defy her father and open the sea chest, it just means that you didn't put the reader asleep deeply enough. Re-imagine the scene, go back and give better justification, find the villain and give him a better back story, or a period of doubt, or something that he does that is noble enough to offset the mustache twirling.

The critique, at the end of the day, is not saying "Fix this problem in this specific way." It's saying, "In this spot, your storytelling is not as skillful as it could be. I woke from the dream, which frustrated me."

* Author Densie Webb had an interesting blog post a couple of days ago about getting the dreaded editorial letter that you might check out.