Check list

Does your novel have a clear emotional arc?Do your main characters have a clear desire that can be illustrated in a through-line?

Captain Hook. Are you?

Warning: crass analogy ahead. For all you query virgins like myself, the hook of a query is its ever elusive, throbbing clitoris - untouched, unloved, and sometimes frightening. Learning to stroke it just right takes several failures, feeble attempts of polite but otherwise disappointed feedback from partners, and a very sexy attitude. Like any suave swinger who knows his assets, a writer must know what it is about her story that titillates readers the most.

Yes, I know. Easier said than done. How do you boil down a world down to a sentence or two? How do you take all the tension, emotions, pain, intrigue, and mystery into account? In many cases, it is simply impossible. "The Little Engine That Could," for instance, is about a little engine that struggles uphill (fetched from Nathan Bransford's How to Craft a Great Hook, which was, in turn, fetched from Colleen Lindsay's Some Posts You May Find Helpful). It does not even scratch the surface of an otherwise agonizingly repetitive struggle. But the phrase itself is iconic because it boils down the essential story - which isn't exactly an arc, theme, allegory, or symbol. It really is about a little engine that can. It is conflict. How, then, do we take a boiled down version of our work (just conflict) and make it sexy?

I don't know. I haven't gotten that far yet. I already told you I was a query virgin. But! I did read a hook that I thought was pretty sexy. Written by S.J. Maas querying for her novel, Queen of Glass, to be published in Bloomsdale by 2011:

What if Cinderella went to the ball not to win the heart of the prince, but to kill him? In THE EYE OF THE CHOSEN, the first book of my fantasy trilogy, QUEEN OF GLASS, Celaena Sardothien is not a damsel in distress—she’s an assassin. Serving a life sentence in the salt mines for her crimes, Celaena finds herself faced with a proposition she can’t turn down: her freedom in exchange for the deaths of the King of Adarlan’s enemies.

Not a fan of rhetorical questions, but it still is a fascinating hook. Maybe someone can add to this post a few of their suave hook-writing techniques.

Being the editor of your own journal.

In 2007, I published a short story in The Green Silk Journal. When I checked in 2009, the journal was gone. Then I received a newsletter and checked, and now The Green Silk Journal is back, and my story is still there (good news!). Green Silk has operated for about five years now, which is remarkable. I have always wanted to start my own literary journal and read submissions day in and out, but I have no clue how to advertise or monetize, or how to run a site, or do all the things that come with being the editor of a literary journal. I guess I will start doing some research. Maybe even join a new reading staff.

Writing addiction. This is bad, guys.

Today I should have finished reading half of the two-foot-tall stack of manuscripts by my work desk. Instead, what was I doing? Working on my own novel. I am almost positive I won't start querying for it until I'm fifty, which, give or take, is twenty-five years from now. I have been hopelessly engrossed with writing. I have no audience, except for my boyfriend, and he's not even around because he is reasonably busy preparing for his graduation, last exam, and last big report.

I haven't been this engrossed in writing for a couple of years, and this is probably the worst I've seen myself. I ate at 8:00am. I sat down to type. I took a break and looked at my computer clock. It was 12:30am. The sun was gone. I missed lunch and dinner. Someone who could eat five times a day and still be hungry missed lunch AND dinner, folks! This has to be some form of emotional infidelity. I spend all my waking hours with this novel when I could be, er, poring over the fourth revision of a heart-felt e-mail to my boyfriend.

Small update; literary journals.

My work pace has slowed down tremendously, but I still feel as excited about reading as when I first started. I just burned myself out by working too hard on critiques and letters.

Writers, editors, reviewers - please don't push too hard. You are big, happy oranges that can produce for years to come if you don't squeeze yourselves dry this year. You can always go back and work through your projects; perfection on a first-anything is a Sisteen Chapel waiting to happen. Don't be afraid to rest.

Through The Rejecter's blog comments, I found this amazing list of competitive literary magazines, listed in tiers of how competitive they are. This list made me so happy, and it will make you happy, too, aspiring writer.

BookFox's Ranking of Competitive Literary Journals.

Concerning Queries.

Hundreds upon hundreds of e-mail queries to sort through today, while my co-editorial assistant worked on snail mail. I am relieved that he is there because he is genuinely interested in everything that is sent in. The office space is nice, too, with a lot of flora outside. It is very quiet. I spent today peacefully looking through the queries and sending out replies.

A majority of e-mail queries are...

1) carelessly written, e.g.: queries that have grammatical errors or misspell the name of the agency.
2) queries that do not know their own genre(s)/markets or target audience.
3) queries that do not follow directions given by the literary agency's site on how to submit queries.
4) queries that do not provide clear synopses.
5) queries that have not done enough research about the literary agency's interests, e.g.: sending in a Young Adult Romance about vampires to an agency that discourages against that kind of work (though this isn't what my agency discourages against).
6) queries that take too long explaining things or do not explain enough about the work.
7) queries that expand upon irrelevant things, e.g.: talking about a person's life story or their battle with addiction and then sending a query for a Young Adult romance about vampires.

I placed The Rejector's blog and Miss Snark's blog (retired) in my recommended blogs section a while back. They are really good tools for writing proper query letters, which can increase your chances of having your work read and published. It also saves people who are genuinely interested in your fiction a lot of grief.

Jobs and other information for writers and editors.

Today is my birthday, and I would like to offer you a gift, dear reader/writer/editor. I have a treasure trove of different sites that I've trekked through, and I'm going to list a few that you might be interested here with blurbs. Let me know if these sites are helpful, so I'll know what other sites I should suggest to you, my precious readers, writers, and editors.

Duotope. I am not sure how many times I have recommended this site. It has nearly 3,000 listings for publications, nearly 90% of them fresh and operational. Duotrope is a search engine for the literary journal that you're interested in publishing in, and it doesn't matter whether you are interested in science fiction, romance, dark fantasy, literary, erotica, magic realism, or westerns or anything else under the moon and sun, because its comprehensive search boils down all the magazines in alphabetical order for your beloved genre. It also lists magazines by length requirement for submissions, whether they accept electronic or snail mail, multiple submissions, re-prints, and even whether they give out monetary rewards for accepting your piece!

Duotrope also has a handy-dandy submissions tracker, which is great if you're bulk-submitting tens or hundreds of pieces at a time. It will keep track of the date you've submitted, your acceptance-to-rejection rate, and even when it's time to send a query letter to magazines that haven't responded to your submissions yet! If you subscribe, you will get monthly e-mails updating different markets, fresh journals, dead journals, journals closed to submission and journals open to submission. This site has been growing exponentially and includes not just mainstream magazines, but university journals and more obscure journals, too, for every type of writer.

6S. Sounds a lot like "success," but "6S" really stands for "Six Sentences." This community is all about writing, or learning how to write, beautiful, provocative, enlightening thoughts in, you guessed it, six sentences. These sentences can be as terse as Ernest Hemingway or elaborate (and sometimes perplexing) as William Faulkner. Find your personal style for creating brief, powerful, poetic prose at this lively community, full of maturity and more feedback and support than you know what to do it. 6S on Ning was created by Robert McEvily (who has one of the best last names known to man), born from the labors of love on his blogspot.

Here is one entry I saved from this month, entitled "Everyone Thinks Ted's Dad is Gay" by Shavar Salinas:

Ours is a town with an easy chair's allure. A lack of urgency - and I don't mean the sort born of stupidity, I mean a calm born of discipline and respect - is recognized, enjoyed and appreciated. Suitable weather arrives each season, it's never too warm or frigid. Trust me - you'd give more than a passing thought to uprooting yourself and moving here. Time moves as it should. We all feel bad for Ted's mother - whatshername - taking care of her mother over in Sioux Falls, but truth be told, she smells like mildew (Ted's mother I mean); no one misses her.

And one more, less clever and tongue-in-cheek but more ambient, paced, and eerie, entitled "Blue Splendor" by Todd Banks:

I vaguely remember what my Dad had told me on that August day with the hot sun at our backs and the lake spread out before us in its cool, blue splendor. His exact words are fuzzy you see, I was just a tot then, not aged more than three years. But, I do recall his putting an arm around my small, bony shoulders and looking deep into my blue eyes. “I need your trust, son - do I have that much from you?” I nodded in affirmation and he smiled in a way that caused me to shrink into myself. “Don’t worry, boy, we’ll be right as rain, you’ll see,” he told me, as I watched my mother’s body drift off into the murky depths of the cool, blue splendor before us.

Jobs at Publishers' Lunch Job Board! Looking for jobs can be a dismal affair, not because there aren't any, but because finding them is like trying to look for a black stray cat in an alleyway (or, er...). For such a verbose trade, you would think there would be more information on how to find jobs in the writing/editing/publishing world. Luckily, there are sites that can help. Through Preditors & Editors, "a guide to publishers and writing services for serious writers," I have found Publishers' Lunch Job Board! It's self-explanatory. It lists jobs that are up to date, even as of today, that might be available in your area. Check it out. There are jobs that will even pitch in to help you move to whatever state they're in, if you are currently a resident of the United States. I have a lot more to say about Preditors & Editors, which is just a darn good site with a very 90's-looking interface (thumbs up to them!) - but I'll say it later.

I wish well to you and yours and all your reading/writing/editing/publishing endeavors.

On board.

I want to help you. You might be just like me, someone who has come from a family of non-writers and non-editors. You might come from a background rich with published writers, seasoned editors, and professors. You might be surrounded by people who ask you, "What can you do with an English degree?" You might be someone who loves reading but dislikes writing, or someone who loves writing and dislikes reading. You might be someone wondering for the first time in your life, "How the hell do I get published?" or "What in the world is a literary agent?" or even "What am I writing about?"

I call this place The Awning. It is the place under which great inquiries, great observations, and fears, and wishes on stars about reading, writing, editing, and English academic interests and struggles rest easy.

You have to trust that I know what I'm talking about when I answer your questions. I will never lie to you. This would make my life miserable.

Writing is a tough business.

But I think critical reading is tougher.