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Those of you who click over here from my website may have noticed that it hasn’t been updated since Christmastime. There’s a reason for this (it’s not a very good one, but there is a reason): I don’t know how to use Dreamweaver. I want to know — it seems like the web deisgn program all the cool kids are using — but I can’t wrap my head around it. My website was desinged on [whispering] FrontPage. And since moving away from Florida, I’ve lost access to my PC and my FrontPage and my little red-haired-girl web set.
The practical upshot of all of this is that I now have a webpage that tells everyone everything about my unpublished romance novels and precisely zip about my soon-to-be-published mainstream women’s fiction. And there’s not a dang thing I can do about it, unless I want to scrap all pretenses of decent web design and do a simple html page. (The horror!)
The way I see it, I have two options:
1)Try to learn Dreamweaver. Again (this will be attempt #4, by the way).
2)Hire a web designer.
The problem with number 1 is that I don’t know if it’s worth my time and effort to do so, and besides, I want something that is specifically MINE, and the problem with number 2 is that I’m a total control freak, and I would want to have easy access to my site at all times to be able to update and fool around as I see fit. I don’t want to have to pay some web designer 50 bucks every time I want to add a new book review to my site, and I don’t want to have to wait around until my updates fit into their schedules. What I really want is for someone to design me a template like the one I bought from My Art’s Desire, though maybe a bit personalized, with specifically “Diana Peterfreund” graphics that I can then use on business cards, etc., that I can update and maintain with the same ease that I did with my old website. Man, I was adding stuff to that daily. Do people do that kind of web design? Where they give you a personalized template and let you run with it? I contacted one designer, and I love her stuff, but her design program isn’t supported by my Mac. And if I was going to go ahead and wait until my boyfriend buys his new PC so I could maintain whatever she designs, I might as well just do it myself and save myself the thousand bucks, since I can do Frontpage templates fine.
Just ramblin’ here…
Yesterday, I seriously applied myself. I wrote 8 pages. This is a lot for me. I know some of you regularly crank out upwards of thirty, but for me to write 2,534 words in 24 hours (I’m writing TNR 12 double spaced at the moment) is pretty damn amazing. Maybe my output is closer to Robin Owens, whose blog I just started reading. Good stuff, by the way.
How did I do it? I applied my ass very seriously to the well, in this case, to the carpet, since was writing at the coffee table, and made myself a pot of cinnamon tea, and just got to work. Is it any good? I think it needs what Julie would call “layering” becuase right now it’s a bunch of dialogue. It’s good dialogue, but it’s pillow talk. I don’t know if that’s interesting enough. Ten pages of pillow talk. Though again, maybe it’s time. Poor Amy (that’s my heroine’s name, Amy) has been on the go since chapter one. I’ll have to run it by my CPs.
But enough about my amazing output (which by the way, has better be repeated today, per soddisfare gli Italiani. Let’s talk about agents. I am lucky enough to have a total peach of an agent. But she wasn’t easy to get. It took more than a year, several books, several attempts and a huge stack of rejection letters before I triumphed.
The best advice I ever heard about getting an agent is as follows: If you have a well written, extremely marketable book and/or a good track record as an author, getting a good agent should be pretty straightforward. That’s the advice. It’s similar to Gena Showalter’s Magic Formula To Getting Your Book Published. Write good books. Sell them.
The real question is, how do you know that your agent is any good? Here’s a short checklist:
1) Does the agent regularly make sales to a variety of well-respected publishing houses for a variety of authors?
2) Is the agent a member of AAR?
There you go. Simple again. Now, it gets a lot more complicated than that, becuase some decent agents are better than others, and there are some agents who fit those two requirements that I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, and everyone has their own requirements about what is going to make an agent work for them — and despite following those two guidelines, you can still wind up with an agent that isn’t working for you or has a sucky contract (life of the copyright clause, anyone?) etc. etc., but you’d be surprised how many pitfalls can be avoided by cleaving to these two standards as your absolute bare minimum.
In fact, the list of what you don’t want in an agent is a lot longer. For instance, you don’t want an agent who does thisor any variation of it (it’s your agent’s job to know the market. If he or she doesn’t, find a new agent). You don’t want an agent who has been having a “building year” for the last three and can’t claim a single sale. (I’m sorry, but “under consideration” is like being “almost pregnant.”) You don’t want an agent who claims sales he/she hasn’t made, lies or manipulates the client list to make it look more impressive (I call that cooking the books, frankly), or in general who you catch lying about anything, ever, that isn’t in direct advocacy of their client to the publisher (e.g. “omitting” the fact that the client’s sales at his or her previous house were somewhat less than stellar in order to sell him or her into a new house, or perhaps not revealing that the author is late on her deadline because of a stint in rehab is okay, but anything else is beyond the pale). You don’t want an agent that advertises his or her “Critique Services.” EVER.
I’ve actually observed each of these. It makes me sick. It makes me sick that writers would put their trust in these scam artists — and they aren’t even the type of scam artists that Preditors and Editors warns you about — you know, the ones that charge fees and make you hire pricey “book doctors” (that are part of their company, natch) etc. etc. These people present themselves as legitimate agents, and I honestly believe that a few of them (not all) are trying to be. But they are going about it in all the wrong ways.
Now, before you jump down my throat, I know that every agent has to make a first book sale, have a first client, etc. Most of them do it as junior agents or assistants to already-established agents, and that way, they have the backing of their established boss or agency to help them break in. The ones that don’t usually have their boutique agencies burst onto the scene with property so hot that you hear about the agency’s inception at the exact same time that you hear about that sale. Agent comes from the Latin verb for “to do” or “to make” — agents “do,” they “make.” No one becomes an agent just by hanging out a shingle. They become an agent when they make a deal.
Went to go see STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH last night. Now, after the ginormous disappointment of the first two films, I walked into that theatre with absolutely ZERO expectations. And it was pretty good. Not EMPIRE STRIKES BACK good (ten on a scale of ten) or even STAR WARS (a new hope) good (9 on a scale of ten). It was a little bit closer to a RETURN OF THE JEDI good (7.8). Maybe a nice, healthy 7, compared to the first movie (3) and the second (4, but only becuase that scene with Yoda was so flippin’ cool I gave it an extra two points right there). The whole Darth Vader plotline was pretty freakin’ well done. The hunting of the Jedi (and no, this is not a spoiler, you know he was going to do it, Ben Kenobi tells you in the first half hour of Star Wars) was excessively well done.
The love scenes made me sick. I honestly don’t know how Natalie Portman could bring herself to recite some of that dialogue. And who goes to sleep wrapped in pearls?
Oh well. I thought it was a respectable ending to one of the greatest stories in human history. Go, George.
However, something that got me really really really really REALLY excited was one of the trailers. Though other of the trailers were huge WTF moments (The Island? Anyone? Does anyone think that sounds remotely original? And that movie about the stealth bomber robot killing machine? Quoth Sailor Boy, “The only way to guarantee that a computer will develop artificial intelligence is to hook it up to a weapon”) THIS trailer made me so happy. Ecstatically Happy. From the very first scene, from the very first moment of four pasty little British kids in the back of a wagon, I *knew* I KNEW! I grabbed SB’s arm and sat up straight in my seat and started quivering.
Sailor Boy, who despite his slavish obsession with Tolkien, does not share the same appreciation for Tolkien’s very very very best friend, was all, “What? What?”
“Narnia!” I hissed. “It’s Narnia!”
He didn’t believe me until he saw the wardrobe.
Oh, God, it looks good. Aslan’s a tad thin, and it looks as if there’s a danger of Weta Workshop going back to the well a few too many times, but what the hell. If Narnia looks a bit like a really really colorful Middle Earth, I think Lewis and Tolkien would have wanted it that way. And Cair Paravel was *perfect* — and the minotaur, and the winter, and the *look* — oh, perfect perfect perfect. Sigh, I cannot wait for this movie! CANNOT WAIT!
But today, I think I’m going to have to watch STAR WARS (A New Hope) — and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
One more thing, before I bow out: Warner Author Kelley St. John has interview me for her “The Call” featurette on her website. Hear all about the my exciting sale to Bantam Dell!
Over on Marianne’s blog, she’s been doing a series on blog-reader favorites: favorite 80s song, first celebrity crush, favorite romantic movie… you should check it out.
I was inspired to ask my own question of blog visitors. Last night was crappy and traumatic. To cheer myself up I watched Romancing the Stone. It’s so fun and light hearted and romantic that it cheered me right up and chased (most) of the demons away.
What’s your favorite movie to watch when you’re feeling bad, scared, angry, sick, otherwise indisposed? Post here!
Brainstorm is guest blogging about the Elusive High Concept (a formidable weapon, truly) over at the Knight Agency Blog.
Lettori delicati,
Non lo vedrete per sei giorni. Quando rinvio, tutti saranno fatti chiaramente.
Arrivederci.
Everyone hustle on over to my agency sistah Shannon’s blog and congraulate her on her brand new SALE!!!!
There’s a saying you hear a lot when you are single and depressed about the lack of good men around. Some sympathetic, well-meaning, and incredibly grating person will come by, pat you on the shoulder and say, “It will happen when you stop looking for it.”
What the heck is that supposed to mean? If I sit alone in my little room all day, Prince Charming will come riding up on a white steed and sweep me off my feet? Bull. It will NOT happen when I stop looking for it.
No one ever says that about the publishing industry. In fact, the prevailing wind around here blows, “You miss every shot you don’t take,” (read: keep looking sweetie, or you’ll never find it.)
But it occurred to me this morning that that’s exactly what happened to me. For a year, I did NOTHING all day but chase after that contract. I didn’t have a full-time job, or an apartment, or anything that distracted me from an all-consuming obsession with “the industry.” I went to conferences and entered contests and and queried agents and participated in thirteen separate internet writing loops, not to mention running a contest and serving as a board member. I had NO LIFE. My friends were all writers.
Amazingly enough, I didn’t write much during this time. And every single shudder of the publishing roller coaster hit me like a shock wave. Naturally, It was all I had going on.
On January 17th, I packed up and moved to Washington, D.C. Two days earlier, in the midst of packing, during a whirlwind tour of restaurants designed to get me ahead of schedule in my food critic job, I came up with the idea for (Secret) Society Girl. It was right there, in between the bruscetta and the cioppino. I told my boyfriend that it was a really fabulous, amazing idea and I was going to sell it. He shook his head, told me I had four outstanding full manuscript requests, a cross-country move, and a job search to deal with.
Fine. (In his defense, I’d been telling him the same thing every time I got an idea for the last three years.)
I moved across the country, I looked for a job, and I finished those full requests and got them out the door. I had another manuscript that I should have been working on, but this was the story I wanted to write next. I didn’t have steady internet, so I disconnected from the vast majority of my writing lists.
I started (S)SG in a tea shop right after my job interview for my current job. I wrote the first chapter while waiting to hear if I got it. I wrote the third chapter during my first week, and edited the partial on my lunch breaks. One of my new cowrokers copyedited my pitch. I was packing for my move into my new apartment when I got the first agent offer, and in a UHaul when I got the second. The auction took place in the midst of me training for my new job.
Was I writing any less? No, in fact, I was writing more. And I was still submitting. But what had changed was that I had, in effect, stopped looking for it. I’d broadened my focus — no longer “Sell a book, and you’ll be a complete person” but “Be a complete person, regardless of your publishing status.” (This was a very difficult step, by the way, since I was incredibly unsatisfied with all aspects of my professional life, not just my fiction-writing one, and was depressed enough to almost believe that I was already too late.)
I think, when we become too focused, too obsessed, with this one goal, then the desperation begins to show. We’re like the woman who goes to a bar every night, hoping against hope that Mr. Right will be there. When she lets go, joins a class or a gym, or a political activism group, has some fun, forgets about how badly she WANTS to meet a nice guy, then he shows up. She’s still available, she hasn’t stopped putting herself out there or taking those shots, but it’s no longer her all-consuming, single, focused desire. She’s going out becuase she ENJOYS (what she’s writing) going out, not because it’s the hot new (market) nightclub where her friends found (contracts) guys. She won’t accept the sleazy, easy (sketch agent/house) guy just because it’s better to have someone than no one. She knows she’s better than that.
She has her focus where it belongs.
Here it is! My very first (non-authorial) cover! Eat your heart out, people. And no, that guy was NOT photoshopped in later. [vbg]
Got this from Monica Jackson’s blog. Where I also read about her cover, the cuddly, tropical print sundress-wearing ass covering a book about a dark demon slayer. Um, hello? And we aren’t supposed to complain about covers because the poor art department has so much to do?!?!?!
Bullshit.
Off to buy Monica’s book, which I wouldn’t have based on that wretched cover, since I’m not into the Adirondack-chair, holiday fling, Stella-getting-her-groove-back kind of books.
(The movie is another story. I’ll put up with anything for a shot of Taye Diggs in the altogether.)
Your Linguistic Profile:
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| 55% General American English |
| 30% Yankee |
| 15% Dixie |
| 0% Midwestern |
| 0% Upper Midwestern |
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