Andi Marquette once wanted to be a seafaring pirate. But she realized that could be a problem, growing up in the Rocky Mountain West and Southwest. So she became an editor, anthropologist, and historian instead. But that, too, didn't satisfy her weird cravings for stories and strange realms. Now, she's a writer ensconced in Colorado and when she wants to go pirate-ing, she just makes something up.
Hey, Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who engage in this American holiday.
I’m not really big on the holidays (as in Thanksgiving-Christmas), as some of you know, but I do enjoy the bit of time off I can take to catch up on my chillaxin’.
So I took yesterday off and basically freebased over half of Season 1 of the X-Files. I’m up to episode 15 (there are 24). It’s been years since I’ve watched the series, and though the costumes, hairstyles (and shut up, but I’m trying to bring back Mulder’s look), cars, and technology are dated (season 1 premiered in 1993), the writing and characters remain strong. Not every episode, mind you. There were some episodes that just didn’t work (like this one; sorry Chris Carter. Just. . .no.), but for the most part, it remains a strong show with episodes that still creep me out. source (re-sized here)
Basically, if you want to write a series — any series — and keep it going for a long time, use the X-Files as a potential model. Not in terms of what actually the show is about, but rather how its infrastructure is put together.
Something cool that you still have a little time to follow is the Thursday Tweet-o-rama session with Sara Megibow, an agent with Nelson Literary Agency out of Denver (yay!). She does this thing on Twitter called 10 Queries in 10 Tweets. She Tweets 10 times about projects from the slushpile, letting followers know if it’s a yes or a no. She states the genre of the project, and a very brief reason as to why she’s rejecting it or accepting it. No identities are revealed in the making of these Tweets. Sara’s Twitter handle is @SaraMegibow and the hashtag is #10queriesin10tweets. Sadly, I think she’s discontinuing it at the end of the December, but you can check out the hashtag regardless and see what it was about. And follow her anyway on Twitter. She’s got lots of cool tips and info.
Otherwise, you might consider signing up for the Nelson Lit Agency newsletter. It’s monthly, and provides info about what projects they’ve acquired and why, and updates you on other projects they successfully placed at publishing houses. They’ll also tell you about some of the super-cool webinars they do for writers.
AND. Here are some examples of successful query letters to agents. I think you can use these as examples, too, of successful queries to publishing houses that don’t require agents. Seeing examples of what works, I think, can be pretty helpful to get your groove for your own queries. Seriously. Go check those out. I guarantee you’ll be wanting to read the full project after reading the query. 😉
Just some tips from the ether from me to you. Happy Saturday, and happy writing!
I was listening to PRI’s “The World” this evening and there was a story called “Engineering Extra Senses” that both creeped me out and added all kinds of thoughts to the ol’ writing fodder files.
A friend of mine sent me a link recently from a…ah…shall we say, more “conservative” website in which there was talk about certain southern states seceding from the U.S. I won’t mention the site or the states. Suffice it to say that if you play on TEH GOOGLE for any amount of time with the word “secession,” you’ll no doubt run across many sites whose visitors spend lots of time grumbling about such.
I don’t want to talk about the historical or political origins of such an argument, nor do I want to get into the larger anti-everything that isn’t conservative context in which such an argument percolates. Instead, let’s look at it through sort of a post-apocalyptic lens. Like, say, The Walking Dead. Also, when I bump into talk of secession, I invariably think of world-building in, say speculative fiction.
Just wanted to alert those of you who are lesfic fans/readers that once again, fellow author Jove Belle and I will be doing a Holiday Hootenanny over at Women and Words this year.
For the uninitiated, the Hootenanny 2010 was a giant conglomeration of awesome-ness in which a whole bunch of lesfic authors put up copies of their books for holiday drawings. And WHOA Nelly did we have drawings! We gave away probably over 50 books over the course of 12 days (12 days of Xmas…get it?) and we’re going to DO IT AGAIN.
Currently, Jove and I are hard at work contacting authors and getting a schedule ready to go. We’ll let you know whose books are up for holiday fun n’ games later on; we’re planning to launch this here cornucopia o’ book-ness around December 12th.
It’s been a rough week for folks in the path of Sandy. I did a post about that at Women and Words. At the bottom of that post are links to organizations involved in relief efforts. If you’re so inclined, help as you can. Thanks.
Like millions of Americans, I watched storm coverage and it broke my heart to see so many houses lost, and to see the friends and families of those who did not survive. I’ve seen aerial photos that testify to what Sandy did to topography and landscape, and to the memories of people who derived part of their identities from familiarity with their surroundings.
I recall one woman in particular, standing near the ruins of what had been her house on Staten Island. It was a just piles of lumber and what looked like stalk after stalk of salt marsh seagrass, layered in geometric patterns among the detritus of a neighborhood. It looked like a vast field of wheat-colored seagrass interrupted with random pieces of furniture, wood, and other items that had once been the signature of a household, and therein, the indicator of an identity.
This woman on Staten Island told the newswoman that she just wanted to go home, and she gestured at the littered field that had been her house, and said, “but I can’t. I don’t know where to go or what to do.” And then she sobbed, and I cried with her. The newswoman gave her a hug, no longer a newswoman but rather a sympathetic shoulder in the midst of overwhelming loss.
I think a lot about “place” and how we pull from it our sense of selves. I’m a Westerner by birth and soul. I was born in New Mexico, grew up in a ranching town in southwestern Colorado, and returned to New Mexico where I spent about fifteen years of my adult life before wandering farther east, only to be pulled back to the West. I still wander, but my heart and sense of self will always be rooted in Western landscapes, particularly the Rocky Mountain West and the high deserts of New Mexico. Chaco wall
Photo by Andi Marquette
I think a lot about “place” when I write fiction, as well. For me, it’s different than “setting,” though setting provides threads in the tapestries of “place.” Where a character is from and where he/she has lived since tell me quite a bit about that character’s background, culture, and approach to the business of living. How a character deals with community, and what are important politically and socially are as much a function of place as they are of family. The longer a family has been in a place, over extended generations, is also an ingredient in the formation of culture and soul, and reflects in a character.
I’m pretty good at maintaining my tech products. I take very good care of the tech in my life, which is why I still have a MacBook (purchased in 2005, just recently upgraded to Snow Leopard OS) that’s working fine, thank you. I also have a PC desktop, purchased in 2004. That was working okay until this past year when it became apparent that I would HAVE to get a different system because Microsoft decided to stop doing upgrades for the OS on that. Which, I’ll have you know, is XP. Otherwise, the security systems I implemented 4 years ago have been working well, but some of the internal stuff on it isn’t working very well. I know it’s time to upgrade that pup and in all likelihood, it’ll be a Mac, though I like the XP platform.
I’m sure by now some of you have heard about evangelical Christian Timothy Kurek. He’s the guy who was homophobic and then decided to live life as gay for a year to find out what it was all about. He realized that his views were wrong, and then documented his year in a book.
Sounds like it was something that seems to have helped him figure a few things out. But on the other hand, he spent a year lying to LGBT people and to his family and friends from his real life. Which perhaps might give him a flavor of what it’s like for LGBT people, some of whom HAVE to lie in order to keep their jobs, their kids, their lives. But Kurek isn’t gay (he says). And he could go back to his heterosexual privilege whenever he wanted (he stuck it out for a year). I’m seeing some critique of what he did along those lines.
And it has to do with privilege and, perhaps, “authenticity.”
Tomorrow, join me and author Michael Chavez over at Women and Words. We’ll be chatting about his work and he’ll also be giving away a copy of his first novel, Creed. Come on by and hang out with us!
And other stuff I’ve found that I’m going to pass on to you:
Writing sidekicks and henchmen, by author Sophie Masson. I love to write strong secondary characters, so I dug this post. Read the comments, too, because there are other examples and tips in there.
Here’s one of my earlier posts on dialogue, for more tips. I think dialogue is super hard to do well, so any time I see a blog about tips for writing it, I’m all over it.
Are you guys familiar with literary agent Sara Megibow? She’s with Nelson Literary in Denver, and does a greatly informative and fun Twitter feed (@SaraMegibow). Every Thursday ’til the end of the year, she does this thing on Thursdays on Twitter at the hashtag #10queriesin10tweets. Check it out. And follow her on Twitter, because she has great tips for approaching literary agents, writing query letters, and writing. Plus, she and the crew over at Nelson Literary are always doing helpful webinars. I highly recommend you get on their newsletter list.
Oh, and I just finished reading Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr, a collection of his first three Bernie Gunther detective novels. I’ll be doing a write-up on it at Goodreads soon, but in the meantime, check it out. This is hard-boiled noir, and it takes place in Nazi-era Berlin. Go have a looksee. If you’ve read it, I’d be interested to get your thoughts on it.
So I’ve been following the series Walking Dead, as some of you know. It’s a zombie apocalypse series, and what I find interesting about it is how interpersonal human drama plays out against a backdrop like this.
In that regard, Walking Dead is what I’d call a mixture of Lord of the Flies, The Road Warrior, and Night of the Living Dead. Because ultimately, what apocalyptic and dystopic scenarios come down to is the people dealing with them, and the power struggles within the groups of survivors.
There’s no story in a zombie apocalypse if there aren’t non-zombies therein having to cope with it. And there’s no story in a dystopic society in which a tyrant rules all unless there’s a segment of the population battling that or thinking about battling it. Stories are all about conflict, whether internal or external.
Andi Marquette 