On Thursday, I finally sat down and started work on my new book. See the word counter over there on the right? Pretty, pretty orange! Look at the way it creeps up on that vast swath of unwritten white!

So, despite the fact that until Thursday, I hadn’t written anything for the better part of a month, I don’t feel too bad. Because I have written over 70,000 words already this year. (Cf. the top word counter over there on the right — the one labeled MG — which is ALL ORANGE, plus “Errant” which never did get a word counter, and I don’t feel so bad about that.) And I did two rounds of revisions on the aforementioned MG.

(BTW, MG in this case does NOT stand for middle grade. People keep asking me that. Carrie asked me that, which I thought was especially weird, since she actually knows what it stands for.)

I’m still busy, though. I expect I’ll be getting some revisions on “Errant” and possibly a bit more work to be done on MG, not to mention the 1st pass of Ascendant that showed up here yesterday morning and is due at the end of the week. Like, today, before I can do any work on this new project (codename: PAP) I need to look into these first page proofs, put together a quick project proposal, and finish up the Rampant paperback extra content (yes, owners of the Rampant paperback get fantastic and exclusive extra content, including, but not limited to, an excerpt from Ascendant. Not to mention take Rio for a walk. Rio has been sorely neglected recently.

But I’m glad to have started PAP, and I’m really, really excited about the direction I’ve decided to take it in.

In other “life of the freelance writer” news, I really love getting surprise royalties. I say “surprise” because at this point in my career, most of my projects are just starting to earn out, so it’s still a new thing for me for royalty statements to come with checks attached. When I talk to writers who have been around for a lot longer than me, they do count their royalties as a larger and larger percentage of their income, and I know more than a few writers whose living expenses are entirely paid for by “evergreen” items on their backlists, which… wow, that just sounds like a dream come true.

Right now, the way I get to keep this job is by getting new work. I got two new contracts in January that will keep me employed for a while. As I said before, I have four all-new projects (two books, two short stories) coming out in 2010 (plus the Rampant paperback). And those are all parts of contracts that I signed anywhere from 2007 to 2010. In some cases, I was paid for those projects back in 2007. In other cases, I haven’t been paid yet.

I share this because I know there are a lot of writers and aspiring writers who read this blog, and they are curious about how the money part works. I think, in the beginning of your career, it’s important not to depend on royalties, and to really figure out WHEN you are going to get the various portions of your advance when you are planning out your work and your ability to go freelance.

For instance, say you have decided that your budget is $30k per year, and you can net $10k (i.e., after agent commission, taxes, and business expenses — or, just to make the math easy, let’s say we live in a world where those things don’t exist) for a book you wrote. So you think to yourself, “Easy, I’ll write three books.”

Au contraire, my friend.

Because you usually only get half of that advance upon signing a contract for those books (and some houses are going to thirds “upon signing”). So let’s say you do get a three book deal (in this magical world where there’s no agents, taxes, or business expenses) at $10k per book. You get the contract (anywhere from a few days to a few months later — and if you think I’m joking about the few months part, I know people who have waited a year on their contracts), and sign it and send it in and get your “upon signing check” — for $15k. Because 1/2(10k per book) x three books = $15,000.

Then, if you’re lucky, the D&A (delivery and acceptance) date for the first book is that same year (again, I know writers who get their D&A at the same time as their on signing check, because of contract delays), for what is sneaking into a lot of contracts lately, which is 1/4 of the remaining advance (and then another fourth on actual publication). So there’s $2,500.

So your total for year one of selling a three book deal for $10k per book is: $17,500.

In year two, you turn in book two, and see the publication of book 1. Total payments: $5000.

In year three, the same, for publishing book 2 and writing book 3: $5,000

In year four, you get your last little “on publication” check: $2,500.

And if you’re lucky, you do earn out right away and get royalties. But you can’t really count on that. And you never know when the earn out’s going to happen. It might happen right away. It might take four years. It might never happen.* So your $30,000 book deal takes four years to pay out.

You can also be lucky and get a compressed publication schedule, where they put all your books out the same year. But that’s pretty much up to the publisher to decide. and if that happens, what will also likely happen is that the publication of your first book is pushed WAY back in the schedule to give you time to write book 2 and 3. Whereas usually you might only have 12 months between D&A and publication, it might be 18 or 24 for book 1, and then only 14 for book 2 and 8 for book 3.

Oh, and you can’t cheat the system and “write quick.” So if your publisher has said that the D&A date for Book 1 is January 1, 2011, and then 1/1/12 for book 2 and 1/1/13 for book three, you can’t turn them all in in 2011 and expect to get paid for all of them. That’s why it’s D *and* A — they have to accept it. And they usually won’t until they are contracted to.

And there are other ways to make up the difference, for instance:

1. write and sell something else to make up the difference.
2. make more money from the things you sell (getting higher advances, selling subsidary rights, charging speaker fees to talk about the work).
3. have an alternate income from old projects (this is where those royalties come in handy, or putting your out of print backlist on kindle).
4. have another job.
5. be of independent means.

Some of these things are easier to control than others. Most writers I know manage by mixing up all of the above. And sometimes you don’t even know they are doing it. That writer you know who has two books out a year? You don’t know if she’s ghost writing on the side, or doing copywriting or other freelance work that her name isn’t attached to.

You don’t know if I’m doing that.

______________

* Please note: If it never happens, you do NOT have to pay the publisher back. That is a myth. Also, it does NOT mean that you will never again get another contract. Also a myth.

The reason I haven’t blogged much this week is that I’m sick. I hate being sick. Hate hate hate. So when I’m sick, on top of feeling like crap, I’m in a pretty poisonous mood. At which point, it’s usually better that I just stay off my blog. Either that or share with you some real ranty mcrant-rants.

Don’t worry, I’ve spared you.

So what have I been up to? I’ve been reading. RITA entries and Golden Heart entries, mostly. I’ve been watching old romantic comedies on DVD. French Kiss is better than I remember it being. Overboard is not. I think it’s possible I’m just much more creeped out by the slavery aspects in the latter than I was when I saw it a long time ago.

I’ve also been reading many fascinating things on the internet. And I’m here to share them with you.

Justine Larbalestier’s blog vacation has made for some truly amazing guest posts. One of my favorites is the fabulous Lauren McLaughlin on how having a baby made her look at her fiction-writing in a totally new way. I really love the way Lauren is always so honest and forthright about her development as an artist. I think there are a lot of writers out there that feed into the myth that they popped out of the box full-formed, but that’s not the case, and reading articles like Lauren’s inspire me to talk more about my development as a writer. It’s also an interesting post because I always read the Cycler character of Ramie as being a person of color. (I see Filipino, actually — anyone else?)

My other favorite Larbalesti-guest post is from my newest object of professional-crushdom, Varian Johnson, on time management. Have I mentioned how Varian, upon hearing that we’d be at the same conference, brought me a bookstore newsletter that had an article about me all the way from Austin? As if I wasn’t already crushing on him because of the awesomeness that was My Life as a Rhombus. To wit: Varian’s books rock, and so does Varian. And so does Varian’s post on how he manages to be a civil engineer and a writing professor AND a writer AND help his (drop-dead gorgeous–I met her at the aforementioned conference) wife pick out granite countertops on the weekend. And here I am with a messy house, a fridge full of chicken soup and jello, and no other job but writing. I feel like such a slacker.

Speaking of the hard-working and prolific, another blog post I liked a lot recently was Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s take on the hated prologue on the Red Room. Lauren writes in half a dozen genres (at last count) and is as big a  fan of the prologue as I am (her prologue count is 10/14, mine is 5/6). The prevailing opinion, however, is that one shouldn’t write prologues. Poppycock. What one should not write, under any circumstances, are bad beginnings, whether it’s labeled prologue, chapter 1, or nothing at all. (My prologues are rarely longer than a page, and are never labeled prologues.) For me, the prologues in my books that have prologues are all about setting a theme for exploration in the book, much like an epigraph of my own design.(Indeed, my only book that doesn’t have a prologue has an epigraph. So there.)

And, speaking of writing advice, a massive depository of such can be found in these two articles in the Guardian. It was interesting to read Elmore Leonard’s, which I either don’t agree with or disregard (perhaps to my detriment), especially given how much I always loved the advice I heard was his of “leave out the parts people skip.” However, apparently he wasn’t saying what I thought he was. I thought, you know, the boring bits. He thought, long paragraphs. Huh. I do like Roddy Doyle’s advice to give your work a name as soon as possible. I always find I work much better once I have a working title. It crystallizes my theme. Also, Geoff Dyer’s:

“Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.”

Which I think is very important for especially genre writers to remember. So often we fall into the trap of doing something because we believe (erroneously) that it’s expected by the readers. Have characters make the unexpected choice, have the unexpected reaction. Surprise the reader.

Richard Ford says, “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.” That was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, so I’m right there with Ford. Sailor Boy has thought I should be a writer from the word go. He bought me tickets to my first writing conference. He’s always been one of my biggest supporters. In fact, I was on the phone with him today about a new direction in my career, and he was really pushing me forward. I’m extremely fortunate.

Hilary Mantel advises: “Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.” So true. I was doing an interview recently, which asked what I’d write if I didn’t have to worry about money. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be offended by that question. Because the answer is the same damn stuff I’m writing now. I write books I want to write, and books I’d like to read, and I always expect that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Yes, I get paid for projects, but I’ve also turned things down that were worth good money because I didn’t want to write them. I think you can feel that sort of thing in the writing. Write for yourself, and the rest will fall in line.

I also love everything Jeannette Winterson says. There’s a lot of good advice in these articles, and a lot I think is ehhhh, but, you know what they say about opinions.

What else have I been reading? Well, there’s this laughable suit going on against JK Rowling. Man, people will do anything for a buck, I think. And PublishAmerica, a vanity publishing house, is now telling their authors that they will submit their supposedly good-as-the-big-guys “published” book to Random House, because (this is my favorite part): “Every writer dreams about becoming a published author. Once they have reached that goal, as you have, many dream of the next step up: to become a Random House author. Random House is one of the most prestigious publishing names. Their extensive operation a few miles from our own headquarters makes them virtual neighbors.”

So apparently every published author’s dream is to become a Random House author? (Disclaimer: I actually am a Random House author, and happy about it.) But I know lots of writers who are perfectly happy not being Random House authors and, when given the choice, chose not to become Random House authors in favor of better contract terms at, say, Penguin or Little, Brown. The whole letter is worth reading for entertainment value though. In passing, last I heard, PA was in Frederick, Maryland. Random House is located on Broadway, in New York City. This “extensive operation a few miles” away the letter is talking about is actually a Random House distribution warehouse in Westminster (yay, Google Maps). Hint: they don’t acquire manuscripts there. I feel sorry for the RH mailroom clerks who are going to have to deal with this influx of bound slush from PA.

And, last but not least, I enjoyed this blog post by author Kate Douglas on the challenges of breaking into a new genre, and how to stay published, even when you’re being published very well.

Okay, off to try some solid food. Wish me luck.

Note: Read this first.

I’m beginning to suspect that there is a new “get into college” book out advising teenagers that one way to stand out on their applications is to publish a book. I can’t imagine what else it is, because I’ve gotten a bunch of emails to this effect in the past few weeks. And I guess it’s not too surprising. I remember one piece of advice I read in one of those books, way back in the mid-nineties when I was applying to college, was to learn to play an unusual instrument, like the hammered dulcimer or the mandolin or the accordion, on the off chance some college admissions committee person would go, “wow, we really need a hammered dulcimer player in the freshman class, how many of those applied?”

Another theory is the “noble cause” theory. Most authors get letters from aspiring writers looking for advice. YA and kidlit authors, because that is their market, get letters from child and teen aspiring writers. There have been lots of articles out recently about how authors are inundated with such requests. Perhaps this whole, “I need to get published now to get into college” thing is an attempt by the aspiring writer to explain why their situation is more urgent and desperate and important than all the other aspiring writers’. I’m not like every other writer who needs all the answers so I can be published nownownow. I’m different. I need to be published nownownow or I won’t get into college.”

Thing the First: I Do Understand.

I know exactly how you feel. Every single day that I wasn’t published, I wanted to be published. I would look at the people who were published, and I would wonder why it wasn’t me. (For many years, it was because I didn’t have a manuscript, for the four years after that, it was because I didn’t have the right book at the right time in the right place.) It’s really, really hard to be patient. I know I don’t have the personality for it. The 27 months I had to wait between selling Rampant and seeing it on the shelves? Y’all, it almost killed me. Especially the last six.

But, looking back at it, I’m glad things happened the way they did. I’m glad I didn’t sell some of those earlier manuscripts, and that they can lie there under my bed on my hard drive, secreted away from the rest of the world. It was really really hard and every day I wanted to sell and every manuscript I wrote I wanted it to be my first sale… but as it turns out, there were more important things at stake.

There are a lot of people who sold back then, during those four years I was trying desperately to sell a book — who aren’t selling books anymore. There are people I know who sold books in bad deals where there book was put out with no support whatsoever and they haven’t been able to sell another book since. They are in a worse position than people with no books out, because they have the bad sales of that last book haunting them. It’s harder for them to sell something new than if they were just starting out, unpublished. The day I sold my first book, my agent called me up and asked me what I wanted out of my career. I said I wanted to write and sell books for a living for the next forty years. I’m in this for the long haul and every sale of every book I make I’m thinking about that goal. The same goal — to make this my career. To do this on a steady schedule and with an eye for growth, like any other business.

You only get one debut. Better make it the best that you can. I’ve talked to a lot of writer friends about this, and they all agree that they’d rather wait more years and come out with a really stunning debut that makes the world sit up and take notice rather than get whatever published, indifferently, and disappear into the morass of books that don’t even make a blip on the radar. It’s really hard to claw your way out of that. Which brings me to

Thing the Second: Getting Published is Not a Publicity Stunt

One does not “get published” as a way to “get into college,” and the more I hear this option being bandied about as a viable, and indeed, desirable path of action, the more I’m reminded of people who “get caught on a sex tape” as a way to “get famous.” Perhaps the association exists in my mind because the one person I ever heard of who chose to “get published” in order to “get into college” (as I talked about in my last post) was Kaavya Viswanathan, and she ended up with an enormous and horrific scandal on her hands. Probably more of a scandal than a sex tape.

Getting published is the start of a career. It’s MY career, And if you want it to be your career, too, you should take it seriously.

Thing the Third: Why “I Need to Get Published So People Know I’m Serious About My Writing” is Wrong

Alongside the “I need to get published now so I can get into college” emails are ones that are similarly phrased. These aspiring writers still feel they need to get published to up their college admission chances. However, they feel that, rather than a straight up publicity stunt, that they won’t be able to convince colleges that they are serious about wanting to be a writer unless they have something published.

No. Those are two different elements. One is something you control; the other is controlled by some people in an office building in New York City. One is the amount of effort you put into something, another is the level of success you have achieved. I am not as successful as other writers in my industry, some who have been working in this field for way longer than I have, and some who haven’t. Does that make me a less serious writer than they are? Nope.

And, as I mentioned in my other post, I was every bit as serious about writing before I was published as I’ve been in the four years since. That’s why I describe it that way: “I wrote seriously for four years before I got published.” I set aside time every day for writing, I sacrificed other things in my life for the sake of writing, and I pursued it in a serious. professional manner. I treated it like a second job, an apprenticeship, or, probably most accurately, as a course of graduate/professional study. I told members of my family who worried I’d never “get there” that it was like spending a few years in grad school. A career as a writer does not happen overnight.

And during all this time, all these years of laboring away on manuscript after manuscript, using nights and weekends and work lunches and commutes and vacation time to work and attend writing conferences, I was incredibly serious about my writing. I kept excellent records of where all that time and money and energy was going (partially because the IRS may have wanted to see it). There was no doubt that I was serious about it, and people in my life either recognized that fact or I wised them up to it super quick.

And I had a lot of writer friends back then, because I was so serious about my writing. Very few of them were already published. But you know what? They were all just as serious about their writing as I was about mine. Published or not, I found myself making close friends with other writers who were serious about their writing. And you know what else? Most of my fellow unpublished friends are now published, because they were serious about it. These people include: Jana DeLeon, Colleen Gleason, Wendy Roberts, C.L. Wilson, Marianne Mancusi, Elissa Wilds, and Marley Gibson. I have other friends, like Carrie Ryan and  Erica Ridley (whose first book is coming out in a few months) who I met when they were unpublished, too, and I expect to see other friends of mine who are unpublished breaking through any day now. And I look back on those days, when we were all struggling so hard, reaching out for that brass ring, getting rejection after rejection and writing new manuscript after new manuscript, and I think it’s amazing. If I’d decided that those other unpublished people weren’t serious about their writing because they weren’t published, I would have missed out on some of the most valuable pieces of friendship and advice I’ve ever gotten.

Were there some people who weren’t taking us seriously because we were unpublished? Sure. Those people were wrong. Here’s how not to be serious about your writing: be so intent on publishing anything, now, so long as you’re “published” that you sell a book that’s not ready to a publisher that’s not right in a deal that doesn’t have the best interests of either the book or your career at heart.

Thing the Fourth: None of this Means I Think You Shouldn’t Try

By all means, keep writing (or not) as a teen and try to get it published (or not). If that’s what you want to do, then absolutely, you should do it. And as doing it takes an enormous amount of time and dedication, it is also by all means something you should let the colleges you’re applying to know that you are doing. (I talk more about this is the first college post.) And if you do get published in high school, fantastic! Congratulations! You are a very hard working, very talented, very dedicated young professional writer.

But please, don’t go about this as a college stunt. You are not trying to get published to get into college. You are not trying to get published to prove you are serious about writing. You are trying to get published because you want to share your stories with the world and/or you are really not good at any kind of stable career such as dermatology or accounting or horse-shoeing. At least, that’s why I am doing it. I have a sneaking suspicion farriers (horse-shoers) make more money than me. I know dermatologists do.

And if you are a teenage aspiring writer (as I was) and you don’t have any interest in seeking publication at this time (as I didn’t), don’t sweat it. Maybe you’re really busy with your volleyball team practices, or being on your prom committee and student council, or building the sets for your church’s yearly Christmas Pageant, or editing your school newspaper, or becoming an eagle scout, or working an after school job so you can afford to go to college in the first place. Colleges really, really, really like this stuff too.

And, because it must be said, you can still be a writer when you grow up. You can still be a writer when you grow up even if you never write a book in high school or college or whether you never go to college or all, or whether you never put a pen to a piece of paper until you’re fifty years old. There is no law against it, I swear.

The sun is shining, the sky is that deep blue it only achieves on cloudless days at the peak of fall, and the forest floor in Rock Creek Park has turned the precise color of Rio’s fur. She’s getting her hike today, but then we are bound inside (well, I am at least. She can play in our leaf-strewn backyard) while I apply myself most diligently to my writing tasks at hand.

Things I learned while writing yesterday:

• I really, really hate chapter titles. No, that’s not true. I love chapter titles. I hate it when I can’t think of them.
• Titles, in general, are not my strong suit. The only title I’ve ever come up with that stuck is RAMPANT. However, a few of my other titles were on my list of “come up with a list of a dozen alternates.”
• I really miss reading. I can’t wait to turn this book in and do some reading!
• When I am in dire straits at getting a point across in a manuscript, I occasionally lapse into omniscient Jane Austen-speak. (see 1st paragraph) Which doesn’t work at all here, as Astrid Llewelyn sounds nothing like Jane. I like to think it’s the ghost of Jane guiding my hand here, for all the good it does me.

Okay, so that’s what I learned with my writing yesterday. How about the rest of you? Have you been reading the NaNo tips of dynamic duo Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld?

Also, a big hello to the folks who stopped by from Meg Cabot’s and Ally Carter’s blogs. Hi there! You know, the topic of college admission might be one I hear about a lot because my books are set in college, and the young people who read them have obviously picked those books up because they are super-excited about college. I know I was in high school. I agonized over those application forms — who I was going to get recs from, what I was going to write my college essays about. (I ended up writing like four different essays and letting my advisor choose one, and he chose the one where I wrote about disgusting things that happen at dinner at my house — which just goes to show you that sometimes you don’t need to tell some tragic or inspiring story in your essay).

I would have killed to read writer blogs when I was in high school. I don’t know if they had them yet. (I think Scalzi’s didn’t even start until 1998). I devoured the few books ON writing I could find, as well as any forewords where the authors talked about their process. Occasionally, authors would come to my school and blow my mind. Which is not to be all “in my day I had to walk uphill in snow both ways to get writer tips” because, well, I lived in Florida and we had neither hills nor snow.

But yeah, things are much cooler now. Yay, internets.

So, to throw my hat into the NaNo tip ring, let me know if you have any questions by leaving them in the post below!

I get this question (or a variation on it) a lot so I decided to do a blog post about it. It’s amazing to see how much things have changed in twelve years, from when I applied to colleges. When I was in high school, the only successful teen writers I knew about were Sylvia Plath and S.E. Hinton, and they weren’t exactly from my generation, or anywhere near it. Now, I think teen writers look at Christopher Paolini, and how a lot of the publicity he got for his books was based around the fact that he was a teen. They look at Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, who has been successfully publishing for over 10 years, since the time she was 14.

Most disturbingly, they look at the (rather poor) example of Kaavya Viswantahan, whose pricey college admissions-consultant decided the best way for her to land admission to the Ivy League of her choice was to get in bed with a book packager and rip off a bunch of YA chick lit writers by collaging/plagiarising herself her own book and book deal.

Guys: publication is not a college admission stunt. If you look at successful writer examples of recent years, Atwater-Rhodes quietly took herself off to UMass, her home state school, where she majored in English and Psychology. She graduated magna cum laude and continues her career. Paolini chose to forego college in favor of concentrating on his book and book promotion.

And yet, people persist in believing that publishing a book is a stunt to be used to get into college, or that if you aren’t published at 14 or 18 or 19, you might as well throw in the towel.

________________________________________

[Note: Identifying details changed.]

Dear Diana,

I wrote you six months ago about getting my book published. thanks so much for your response. I have been sending queries to a lot of the agents that I could find online, but so far that progress hasn’t been too successful. I really want to have my book published for college reasons (I’d really like to pursue further in writing, and I feel that having a book published will show the colleges how serious I am about writing). I am getting a bit desperate and frantic.

Dear College Applicant and Young Writer,

I understand your frustration. This industry moves at a glacial pace and it can be extremely aggravating at times. However, it’s important not to be desperate OR frantic when you’re pursuing publication. Everyone I know who has been desperate go about making huge mistakes, like selling their book to a vanity press that takes their money and gives them a shoddy product (stay FAR AWAY from PublishAmerica and similar outfits) or signs with a scam agent who takes their money and disappears into
Bermuda. That’s no way to go about being serious about your writing.

You contacted me six months ago. Six months is a very short time in the world of publishing. I tried to get published for four years before I found an agent and sold a book. I wrote five books during that time. After one had been rejected everywhere it was appropriate to publish it, I wrote another. It might very well happen way faster for you, but how long it takes is not the most important thing. The most important thing is writing a great book and selling it to a publisher who is going to publish it well, distribute it everywhere, and promote the heck out of it.

You just need to keep plugging away — working on your writing, working on your queries.

Being serious about writing isn’t about racing toward publication. It’s about writing and pursuing publication in a serious and professional manner. The fact that you’ve written a whole book in your teens and are pursuing publication for it is an impressive feat, and one you should definitely mention on your applications (or get one of your teachers — especially an English teacher– who is writing you a college recommendation to mention). But getting published isn’t a college application stunt, it’s the start of a career.

I was very, very serious about my writing for those four years (after college) I wasn’t published. I wrote a lot, I learned a lot about
writing, and I submitted the books I’d written and polished. I was also very serious about writing when I was in high school, and the colleges I applied to knew it. To show colleges you are serious about your writing, the best thing to do is keep doing what you’re doing, and let them know. Let them know you’ve written and polished a novel, Let them know you are pursuing publication. That’s really focused and ambitious and accomplished of you — and whether or not you’ve actually sold the book matters a lot less.

Let them know (ideally through one of your teacher recommendations) that you are acing your English classes and taking all the
opportunities you can to get extra writing in (like writing for your school newspaper or literary journal, taking creative writing electives– I taught writing skills classes to younger kids while I was in high school — entering teen writing contests like the kind they have at libraries/schools/magazines, attending local writing conferences or book festivals). And, above all, write an extraordinary college entrance essay so they can see first hand what a great writer you are.

Good luck and keep writing!

______________________________

This person had written a novel as a teenager, but if you haven’t, does that mean you’re 1) never going to get into college, 2) never going to write a novel, 3) never get published? No, no, and hell no. I had written a dozen starts of novels by the time I got into college. In college, I wrote another dozen starts. I didn’t actually finish a novel until the year after I graduated from college, because I said to myself, “Self, it’s time you put your money where your mouth is. You say you want to be a writer? Well, prove it. Finish a book.” I finished four before I sold anything, at the age of 26.

Guys, that’s still pretty damn young. And it’s so not a race, either. I’ve published five books, but I know authors who have published fewer books than me to far, far greater acclaim, money, sales, fame — and were older when they started.

Write as much as you want, pursue publication in high school… or don’t. It’s not going to leave a black mark on your career if you don’t write a book until you’re say, 30 years old (hello, Stephenie Meyer). And maybe you’ll be like Atwater-Rhodes or Paolini or any of the other folks who publish in high school or college (Jennifer Lyn Barnes is another example.) But don’t plan on publication as a “way” to get into college. These aren’t volunteer hours we’re talking about, and the publishing world is too slow and capricious to conform to the rapidity of the college application carousel.

(UPDATE: Read the follow-up post HERE.)

The writing segments of the internets have been abuzz this week with discussion about screenwriter Josh Olson’s incendiary “No, I Will Not Read Rour F***ing Script” article in the Village Voice. The article, the disgusting, anti-Semitic commentary that followed, the the outrage, the immaturity. A few of my favorites:

David Gerrold, who has decades of writing award-winning and beloved science-fiction for both print and screen (”The Trouble with Tribbles”, Martian Child), shares why it’s dangerous for published writers to accept unsolicited work.

John Scalzi snarks at his best when explaining why he’s sick and tired of “but I don’t live in XYZ media hub” being used as an excuse for why you aren’t a successful writer. I’m with him there. I live in DC. MY agent lives in a small town in Georgia. Two of my publishers are in New York, but a third is in Texas. Geography is nothing. Some of the most successful writers I know live in: Oklahoma, Arizona, Amherst MA, Sarasota FL. Come on, guys. USPS and email are your FRIENDS. The coolest thing about writing is I can do it whereever I want. I don’t need to pay NYC rents to write for a NYC publisher.

And, then, my favorite, from TV and novel writer Lee Goldberg, about the kind of hating you get when you do respond thusly (as Olson has). And it’s REALLY REALLY worth reading the entirety of that second post, which is about when some stranger “Facebook messaged” Lee out of the blue and asked him to read a TV treatment. When Lee declined, the clearly classy, mannered, and well-brought-up aspiring writer proceeded to call Lee names all over the internet, deriding him AND his work. (One wonders why, if Lee was such a hack, this writer wished for his help?) Lee’s response is characteristically brilliant:

I am stunned by the arrogance of these people, telling me that my professional success isn’t the result of talent or hard work, but rather it is some kind of entitlement. And that by not reading their work, or listening to their ideas, or coaching them on pitching, I am an asshole. My time is their time to do with as they please. They also assume that I am not interested in helping anyone else achieve what I have.

These jerks know nothing about me, or the time and effort I devote to sharing my experience with others. They don’t know about the many days I spend each year teaching TV writing, giving seminars, or speaking about writing at high schools, universities, conferences, and libraries locally, nationwide and around the world, mostly for free.

In the last six weeks, for example, I spent seven days at the International Mystery Writers Festivalin Owensboro, Kentucky teaching, speaking, and moderating seminars on tv and mystery writing to the public. At no charge. I taught a three-hour course on TV writing to students at Cal State Northridge. At no charge. And I spent a day giving a seminar on TV writing to a delegation from China Central Television.

But what I didn’t do is drop everything in my life to read some stranger’s treatment, listen to his idea for a TV series, and coach him on how to pitch.

So obviously I am an arrogant, talentless, asshole.

I have committed the unforgiveable sin of deciding how to use my time and how best to give back to others. And not letting some stranger decide for me.

This is a very good point. There ARE channels for these things. You want to get your work read by a pro? Join a class, take a seminar, (they even have them online if you live in Timbuktu), enter a contest, attend a conference (if you don’t live in Timbuktu or don’t mind flying out on Timbuktu Airlines).There are LOTS of opportunities. Some are free, some cost money, some require a certain level of skill to get past the first hurdles (like initial rounds of contests).

When I was an unpublished author, I had my work read by many published authors who had volunteered their time to do so as judges in writing contests or charity critiques or workshops they were running, etc. There’s a distinction here: they’d already said they would! I sought out the opportunities where I could get this happen, and it wasn’t going up to someone at a cocktail party or Facebook messaging total strangers.

My work was also read by published writers who OFFERED to read it, usually after I’d established a nice long relationship with the writer in which I asked for nothing from them. Some authors choose to do this from time to time, but guess what? that’s their choice, not their duty.

Because it’s not an author’s job to read the work of aspiring writers. And, here’s another point: it’s not necessarily much of a help. I’ve read books that went on to be huge bestsellers that I’ve thought were total crap and had I read that author’s work in manuscript form I’d have said go back to the drawing board. No author I’ve ever recommended to my agent has ended up signed with my agent. (It’s almost a joke at this point, since the only writer friend I know who managed to snag my agent did so without telling me she was submitting, that if you want to get my agent, best not try to go through me.) Clearly, my opinion on the matter counts for very little, which is probably why I’m not an agent.

And though it’s not an author’s job to help aspiring writers, it’s amazing how many do it anyway out of the goodness of heir hearts. Look at Lee. My teaching schedule hasn’t been anywhere near as packed as his is lately, but I gave panels at Dragon*Con last week, answered lots of questions for aspiring writers at my booth in between panels, and regularly talk craft and industry here on the blog, on twitter, and at writer’s conferences and RWA meetings. And speaking of that “YA Market” panel at D*C — I think I soaked up more info there than anyplace. After all, sharing panel space with me was Kathleen Duey, who has written over 90 novels (!!!!!!!!) and Richelle Mead, who is selling tens of thousands of copies of her books a week. In fact, the cost of Dragon*Con in its entirety was made worthwhile to me by one comment Kathleen made about critiquing.

Yes, that’s right. You never stop learning. There are no keys to the kingdom, no secret handshake. Man, I wish there was. That would make all of this so much easier, don’t you think?

set piece: (n.) an important dramatic or comedic highpoint in a film or story, particularly those that provide some kind of dramatic payoff, resolution, or transition. (Source: Wikipedia)

set piece: (n.) A situation, activity, or speech planned beforehand and carried out according to a prescribed pattern or formula. (Source: American Heritage Dictionary)

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Last week, I got into an interesting conversation about set pieces with blog book reviewer Angie of Angieville. Well, I was thinking of them as set pieces. I don’t know if that’s how she thinks of them, or if readers tend to think of them at all.

Some writers I know call them tent pole scenes. They are the scenes that you are plotting your story around — the big scenes that keep the story aloft. I’m someone who plots my books in advance. this seems to confuse a lot of writers, who think I literally look at every scene and go “And now she lifts her hand, and now she crosses the room.” I don’t tend to even think of scenes when I’m plotting my books — with the exception of these big tent pole scenes — the scenes that I ABSOLUTELY know that the book will have in order for the plot to proceed as planned. The other scenes are string between the tent pole scenes. I know certain bits of information need to get out from scene to scene, but I’m not sure exactly how that’s going to play out in every single scene in advance.*

What is interesting to me is that the scenes I tend to think of as absolutely vital and pivotal to the story when plotting, though they almost always make it into the book as written, they may not be as vital as I originally thought. They certainly may not be as vital to the reader as some other scene — one that I may not have even planned.

Which is why this Laurel and Hardy still is so illustrative to the way I write (with apologies to Maureen Johnson, who usually has a monopoly on the use of classic film stills to illustrate her writing lessons).

So here we’ve got Hardy, Laurel, and a hapless bystander about to build something.

When I am plotting a book in advance, I’m Hardy. Decisive. Clueless. I think I know exactly what I want and exactly where I think it’s going to go. I’m saying “Right here. Right here is the big scene on the sandbar.”

When I’m writing the book, I’m Laurel. I’m saying, “There, there, Hardy. I do not think you were right about this. Nice try though. It worked in your head. On paper, it’s a certifiable mess.”

And when the book comes out, I’m the dude in the uniform, and the readers are all saying, “Wow, that shower scene was a real humdinger,” and I’m going, “About that scene on the sandbar…” ::THUNK! Boardinface::

Which is fine. Great, in fact. I love it when I’m surprised by a powerful moment or turning point in my books. And I love it when anyone responds to any moment in my books, whether it was something I myself was concentrating intently on or not.

When planning out series, I often find myself imagining scenes years and years in advance of the moment I actually get to write them. I wrote the aforementioned “sandbar scene” in summer of 2007. I first imagined it in summer of 2005. I recently wrote a scene into KU2 that I’d been imagining also since 2005.

There’s a lot of built in pressure to writing these set pieces. Since they’ve been living in my head so long, I worry if they don’t conform to what I’ve been imagining when they finally get down on paper. Sometimes I approach them with genuine excitement and anticipation. “I can’t wait to finally get this down!” Sometimes, I approach them with fear and trepidation. “Uh-oh. I hope this works out as planned.”

But when they do work out, it’s magic. When I sail into a set piece, a piece I’ve pictured, dreamed of, been excited to weave into my story for months or years — and it unfolds as I planned — or even better — it’s fantastic. One of the absolute best parts of my job.

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* This is, I feel the need to point out, the reason I put my plot boards together AFTER writing. It’s a comparative assessment against my synopsis, so I can see how plotlines actually played out on a scene by scene basis.

A few links from around the internets:

• The BookMaven responds to another one of those tiresome genre snobbery posts. I agree with a lot of it, but I’m not sure she goes as far as I would. So, I don’ have a PHD in Literature, just a lowly BA, but I’m baffled by the attitude that books are some different sort of story, that they are somehow required to only exist on a certain level which is not true for television, film, theater, etc. The BookMaven argues for her early genre snobbery by talking about how she liked to read Poe as bed time stories as a child. Um…. So Poe is thumbs up and Stephen King is thumbs down? What’s the difference, aside from a hundred years?

  Poe and Dickens, and Shakespeare, and so many of the writers who are considered the luminaries of the form wrote FOR THE MASSES. In college, I studied Radcliffe and Austen and Behn and Scott and Burney and all those damned scribbling women whose novels were ridiculed by the literary elite of their time. I wrote my college thesis on LOST HORIZON, which Pocket Books likes to fashion “the first paperback.” (It’s not, but it’s a cute marketing ploy.)

• The Guardian is opening their doors for a short story competition. As I just finished my first short story in years and years (and my first ever for publication), I’m in such a short story mood. Would probably enter were I not busy busy busy with KU2.
• Lilith Saintcrow is off on another one of her exquisite rants about the publishing industry in “a good book ain’t all you need.” Check it out!
• An agent points out the lie that’s Bookscan numbers.

And finally, since I’ve been plotboarding, I found this especially amusing:

In the comments thread, Julie Leto (who was instrumental in my own path to publication) pointed out a great blog post up by Jennifer Ashley at the Plotmonkeys.

Ashley’s latest book, The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie, is getting stunning reviews. I just ordered it, myself.

Aspiring and career-focused writers should definitely read her post. Check it out!

C asks:

For the past few years, I have been working on a novel of my mine. Just recently, I have successfully finished it. I was wondering what are the steps to get my novel published. Being a renowned author that you are, I am hoping that you can help me into starting my journey as an author.

LOL! “Renowned author!” {{wipes tears from eyes}} Oh, that’s a good one. C, my dear, flattery will get you everywhere.Here you go:

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS ON FINISHING YOUR FIRST BOOK! Yippee! That’s a huge accomplishment, and you should feel very, very proud of yourself. You know, a lot of people go aorund saying they want to write a book, but very few follow through. I’m in RWA, where the members are supposedly paying $85 a year to be career-focused writers, and you’d be surprised how many members never actually finish a manuscript. C, you are in rare company. Give yourself a round of applause.

Okay. Your book is done. Now what?

Now, you revise the heck out of it. Give your book to somebody else to read — someone who is not going to say, “oh it’s good,” and leave it at that, take their suggestions (if they make sense to you) and make your book better, faster, stronger tighter. You can find critique partners in any number of ways, I found my first critique partners by joining RWA (my local chapter had a critique partner matching service) and by joining eHarlequin.com (which in 2002 — I haven’t been there in years) also had one. There are probably a lot of good critique partner matching lists and forums and etc. out there. I recommend joining one where people are writing the kind of books you are writing. For instance, if you write children’s books or YA, go to Verla Kay’s Blue Boards and try the forum where they want to exchange work for critique. If you are writing romance or women’s fiction, go to eHarlequin, Romance Divas*, or etc.I know a writer who has a group of highly skilled friends who she trusts to read her work (one is an editor, another a playwright, etc.) but we can’t all be that lucky. My husband reads my books, and he’s best at telling me when my jokes fall flat.

There was a lot of trial and error in those days. Getting a good critique partner is pretty much like dating. You go on a lot of crummy first dates in which you exchange chapters only to realize that this person can’t/won’t help you, either becuase they don’t have the skills to or they are more intersted in having their own work read or they are of the “oh, it’s good” variety.

It is important to note that whether or not these critique partners are published is not really the point. The two critique partners I finally ended up with were not, at the time, published. In fact, we all ended up selling our first books around the same time, in 2005/2006 and now one, Marley Gibson, is working on her second series, and the other, C.L. Wilson, is a NYT bestseller. So don’t dismiss someone because they aren’t published.

It’s also nice to get more than one critique partner, because they might focus on different things. One might be a whiz at finding structural problems whereas another might be really good at spotting technical issues or characterization. One of my current critique partners, Carrie Ryan (also not published when I started working with her, now currently taking over the YA world) likes to nail me whenever I slip out of my character’s true voice.

I also know some people who don’t like to show their work to anyone before they submit it, and while this works for them, I think it’s a really hard row to hoe, especially when you are first starting out. If you do have this personality, give it a whirl, but if you find you aren’t getting anywhere with your submissions, it might be time to step back a bit and get a second pair of eyes on the work. For me, I know that very few people are going to be as hard on my work as I am, but when I would send stuff out to CPs and get back a few typos, I generally found a different CP for that project.

Okay, so you’ve got your critique partner, your book is as polished as it can be, and you want to get it published!

Now, you have to put the brakes on and read up on the industry.

I know, I know, that sounds really dry and boring, especially when you want your book out there now now now, but trust me: you need to do this. It will save you a TON of heartache later if you take a stab at understanding the publishing industry first. I recommend setting aside a nice fat weekend afternoon or two, and read everything you can get your hands on. Find out what an agent is, what a publisher is, how books work in bookstores. To get you started, check out my publishing primers, which are a quick and dirty glossary for some of the jargon you’re going to encounter when you start submitting.

There are very few houses left where the publishers will accept material directly from authors. These are mostly smaller houses or niche genre houses (such as Harlequin). In most cases, it’s better to query agents. Writers like to get together in bars and argue this point until the cows come home, but, in my opinion, it’s better to query agents first, unless you are writing in a niche genre market, like Harlequin category romances. The reason agents are useless here is because Harlequin is the ONLY house that publishes category romances, so there’s only one choice if you’ve got a category romance on your hands. (And if you want to know what a category romance is, just google. There are folks that explain it way better than me.) Harlequin can offer you its standard deal (and trust me, with the number of books it publishes per year, they have a very strict hierarchy and ways they like to introduce authors to the market)  your option is pretty much take it or don’t have your category romance published.

The reason I recommend agents over editors is that agents are very wise and know many more editors than you do, so they are more likely to know which editor is going to be perfect for your book. They might even know an editor who has been looking for a book just like yours. And, ifyou submit to editors who are not right for your book and they reject it, and then you get an agent, the agent is just going to say “well, this book is all shopped out” (which means there is no place left to send it).

Great, you say, but how do I know what agent to send to? The best thing to do, again, is research. You need to researcht eh kind of agents that are right for your book. Find the books most like yours in the bookstore and check out the acknowledgements page. Most authors thank their agents. Alternately go online and type in the name of the book/author and “literary agent” into Google. Go to a website like AgentQuery.com and look up agents by genre, then type their name into Google and see if you can find any books they’ve sold that you are familiar with. Google is your friend.

My favorite resource is called Publisher’s Marketplace. I pay 20 bucks a month to be a member, but if you want to you can join for one month, then quit, but during that one month, you can read all these agent profiles where they list books that they’ve sold *and* (this is the best part, so pay attention) you can read through the “deal” archives. Pick a genre to search and you can read all the deals (which are a lot of them) that agents and editors report to find books like yours, and who sold them.

I know you think that researching the agents sounds very dry and boring, but honestly, YOU NEED TO DO THIS. You can’t wake up one morning and say you are going to be a brain surgeon and pick up a scalpel, and you can’t wake up one mroning and say you want to be a writer and then send off a manuscript. This is your bootcamp. Your training period. Go to different agency websites and look up WHAT THEY’VE SOLD.

I’m going to repeat this, just for emphasis. LOOK UP WHAT THEY’VE SOLD.

It’s very in vogue these days to judge an agency based on how detailed their rejection letter are or how pretty their website is or how nice some agent was to you at a conference, but that’s pretty much bull. If the agency cannot report to you any books that they have sold that you can go to the store and find on the bookshelf, then they are a bad agency. Not necessarily a scam, but certainly ineffective. The bottom line of any agent is what books they have on a shelf. Now, a lot of agents don’t have websites, but the ones that do, if they are GOOD agents, have front and center the names of many of their clients and the sales they have made for them

Here are a few examples of what I mean.

You will notice that in most of these cases, whether the agency was a huge one or a tiny one, they listed their clients/books either on their home page or one click away. This is because a mark of a good agent is not how they write rejection letters, it’s how they deal with their ACTUAL clients — selling their books, maintaining their client’s relationship with the publisher, etc.

I cannot stress this enough. I have seen far too many careers stall for YEARS because someone is staying with an ineffectual agent who has made very few or no sales. Agents are usually thrilled to talk about their clients’ books that are on the shelves or in production. It’s their record, their references, their job experience. If they are not willing or able to mention books they have sold, that is a HUGE red flag.

Become familiar with Writer Beware.

Read Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s Slushkiller article.

Keep in mind the following: Money flows “toward” the writer in publishing. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever cut your agent a check for anything. I don’t care what they call it — reading fee, marketing fee, whatever. Don’t give your agent money. When your agent gets money for something of yours that they’ve sold, they take out their portion and give you the rest. (Some agents do what is called split checks, where they have the publisher send you your portion directly.) If they do charge for things like “copying and postage” (and very very very few agents do that in these days of electronic submissions) then it’s somehting they ONLY take money out of the CHECK THEY RECEIVE for selling your work. In addition, your contract with them should stipulate that there is a cap to these fees. Read the AAR rules. Any agent who charges you a reading fee or a marketing fee is an agent from whom you should RUN. If they tell you that this is the way it’s done, they are lying. Find a different agent.

Okay, you’ve researched agents and you now have a list of agents you think are right for you. Great. Now, find out what each agent is looking for in a submission. Some agents like snail mail. Others are okay with email. Some agents want to read the first five pages, or the first 50 pages, off the bat, some agents just want a query letter. DO EXACTLY WHAT EACH AGENT TELLS YOU. Send them EXACTLY WHAT THEY HAVE ASKED FOR, even if it’s different from what all the other agents have asked for, even if you think it would be easier to send all the agents the exact same thing, or that they really do want the first 50 pages, even if they only asked for a query. Don’t resist it. Don’t decide that you know better. Just follow directions. Is it really so hard?

Query lots of agents. It’s more fun that way. It’s also harder to hung up on one rejection if you query lots. For tips on how to write a great query letter, check out this fabulous list of queries that worked from the members of Fangs, Fur, Fey (including my own).

For my money, hte best thing to do is to query each agent with a letter tailored to them. Sinceyou did your research and have picked a list of agents to send to based on their interest, you automatically have soemthing to put in your letter that shows them that you did your homework and know why they’d be a good fit. For instance, if you have a zombie novel. you can query Jim McCarthy of Dystel and Goderich and say:

Dear Mr. McCarthy,

I hear you’re a zombie fan. After all, you represent Carrie Ryan of THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH and Mark Henry of HAPPY HOUR OF THE DAMNED. I have a 60,000 word zombie novel for teenagers entitled MY ZOMBIE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK (AND MY BRAINS), that I think would be a perfect fit on your list.

And so on.

Agents like it when you do this, because they get dozens, if not hundreds of letters every week where it is obvious that the writer didn’t do any homework at all and are sending them something completely inappropriate. So when one comes across their desk where it is clear that the writer actually gave it some thought before typing their name in at the top, they pay more attention.

The rest of the query letter should be you pretending you are writing the back cover copy of your book, were it published and sitting on the shelf. Just a paragraph or two saying what the book is about. make sure to include the title of the book, the approximate genre (e.g., young adult, fantasy, romance, mystery, etc.), and the word count.

If you think that your bio has some kind of very special connection to the book, include that too. For instance, in my query, I pointed out that I went to yale, so am pretty familiar with the whole “girl at Yale” and “secret society” aspects of my book. If I’d been writing about a girl at Ohio State, I probably wouldn’t have said anything about where I went to school.

So, send out a lot of queries, sit back, and say a prayer. And then — this is the most important part of all:

WRITE THE NEXT BOOK.

Good luck!

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* In general, if I throw a name out in this post and you don’t know what it means, Google it. This is all about doing the research. Poke around.