Cover art!
My editor sent me the cover art for Generation V (out in May 2013)! Check this out!
C’mon, look at that cover. You want to read this book, don’t you? It’s gritty! And cynical!
I am really so thrilled about this cover. My editor really surprised me a few months ago by asking me to put together some information about my preferences for cover art – artists I liked, other covers I could imagine fitting in with the tone of Generation V, and physical descriptions of the characters. I got to see an earlier version of this cover about a month ago, but it was very hush-hush until it got final approval.
But, honestly, it fulfilled all of my major hopes for the cover, in that it:
1: Looks really cool and badass. As my main example of how this could’ve gone wrong, gentle reader, I turn your attention to the awesome book Ariel by Steven R. Boyett:
This is what a badass cover looks like.
Look at that cover. It’s dark, the dude looks all kickass, weaponry is involved, and could New York City look any more apocalyptic? No, short of having Mothra making an entrance on stage left, it could not. This book is the literary version of a guy in a leather jacket leaning against a high school hallway wall and smoking a cigarette. You look at that cover in a bookstore and have to immediately give in to peer pressure and read this book.
Now, here’s what the original cover looked like:
Let us charitably refer to this as “less badass.”
Can you see the difference? For one thing, the guy on that cover looks like he’s about to burst into Disney-levels of song. And while everything on that cover is technically accurate to the book (including the *sigh* happy little dolphins) it’s not entirely stylistically appropriate. For one thing, that unicorn curses like a sailor.
It also fulfilled my cover desires in that it also:
2: Is not something that would make me embarrassed. Namely, it does not feature eroticized shirtlessness. Or the heaving of the bosoms. (not that there isn’t nudity in the book, because there totally is — I’m all about the fan service) An example of this would be like is what happened with the Laurell K. Hamilton Anita Blake books.
Here’s the original cover of the first book in that series, Guilty Pleasures:
Kind of cool, right? Has the heroine holding a gun, apparently threatening a building, plus the head of a dude with fangs. Kind of covers the main themes of the book.
Now here’s what the re-issued cover looks like:
That’s a cover that has implied theme music. And that music goes bow-chica-bow-wow for five minutes before the moaning gets too loud to hear it anymore.
So, that was pretty cool. Also cool? Well-published authors who were sent advanced copies of Generation V have said nice things about it! You can see the Karen Chance comment on the front – here’s the actual full text on it:
“I loved M. L. Brennan’s GENERATION V. Engrossing and endearingly quirky, with a creative and original vampire mythos, it’s a treat for any urban fantasy lover!” –Karen Chance
Suddenly I’m a bit more impressive, aren’t I? Well, brace yourselves, because here’s another one!
“Full of vivid characters and terrific world building, GENERATION V is a fun, fast-paced romp of a story that kept me glued to the pages to the very last word. Loved it! Bravo, M. L. Brennan, bravo!” — National bestselling author Devon Monk
I’m trying to figure out a faux-humble way to put these quotes on my Christmas cards this year. Which also leads me to the interesting etiquette quandary of, does one send thank-yous for good reviews? I was always told that you can’t say “thank you” for a good review, but that you should say “I’m glad you liked it” – apparently that removes any potential whiff of nepotism in action or something. But I’m also not sure how to phrase that email – “We’ve never met, but you liked my book, so thank you. PS: Loved Dead Iron. XOXO – M. L. Brennan”
Hm. Has possibilities.
In last news of the awesome, Generation V now has its own pages on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble! You can even pre-order it! (hint.. hint…)
Multiple copies
I’ve always been a pretty active reader. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to pick up on this habit either. Three rooms in my house have some fairly substantial book shelvage (four if you count my upstairs hallway, where a storage shelf started acquiring a row of books on top), and even in the rooms where there aren’t book shelves, books I’m currently reading usually get left here or there. I try to keep it relatively tidy, and periodically I’ll move through and try to prune out a few books to make room or new stuff. This generally comes after some spousal grumbling. The Honey Badger occasionally objects when a new row of books appears. This leads to a periodic purging of books. There are books that I frankly will not part with, simply because I feel the need to always possess copies. I mean, it’s been years since I opened up Meredith Ann Pierce, but I still have The Darkangel Trilogy. (in my defense – I loved it as a tween, but it is still eerily beautiful as an adult) Then there are the books I swing back through every few years – Christopher Buckley, Brandon Sanderson, Emma Bull, Jon Krakauer. But when I go through my shelves, there are always a few books that I read once, liked to a certain degree, but just don’t feel the need to continue owning, particularly when my shelf real estate is at a premium.
But last week, I was going through another round of purging, and it occurred to me that there are a few books that I actually own two copies of – and, moreso, that I have no intention of downgrading to a single copy. It’s kind of interesting, and I was thinking about why this is.
I have two copies of The Princess Bride.
One is the 1987 edition that was the first one I ever owned. The cover art is different, plus there’s a really pretty fold-out map in the middle that’s in full color. Geography is not precisely complicated in this book, so it’s a perk rather than a requirement. But then I also have a 30th Anniversary edition that has a different forward and a bonus section at the end. It also has a reader’s guide, which for me is actually a strike against it – why is it that reader’s guides always seem to have the most moronic questions? Even glancing at them tends to piss me off.
This time around I was considering ditching my 1987 edition – after all, conceivably the 30th Anniversary is more definitive. The cover art is nicer, plus it’s a trade paperback, so it’s more comfortable to hold and read. But then I reflected that the 1987 had a more amusing description on the back cover. It’s not the “What if the most beautiful woman in the world married a handsome prince and he turned out to be a son of a bitch” line, because they tempered the last down to “…well, not a nice person,” but it makes me think of the original, and that makes me laugh. The 30th Anniversary back cover is just focused on the book’s success, which just doesn’t seem as fun. Plus, I didn’t hugely enjoy the forward on the 30th Anniversary edition, so I would skip over it anyway. And that little 1987 edition, with its crappy and overly medieval art knockoff cover has a certain nostalgia to it. This was the book I first read.
That’s the cover on my older copy.
I kept both. Seriously, why? I haven’t read the book in years, yet I have two copies. Now even after reflection, I have two copies.
That’s the cover art on my 30th Anniversary — definitely the coolest.
I have two copies of Life of Pi as well. And two copies of Ariel (but that’s mostly because I love the new copy, and find the other incredibly amusing in just a “what the hell were they thinking” kind of way).
I also have two copies of books that I teach with. This one actually isn’t that hard to figure out – the books that I teach with get completely trashed. For books that I really only use to teach with, it doesn’t matter that much. This includes every textbook I’ve ever used, plus old workhorses like The Best Essays of the Century or In Fact: Creative Nonfiction. I underline passages, dog-ear pages, draw in loops and stars and write comments in the margins. Post-it notes get stuck in with more notes, then sometimes there’s even the indignity of paper clips so that I can get to certain sections *really* fast. The more times I’ve taught a book, the more mangled the book gets – not just because I’m finding more useful passages to talk about in class, but that book is also getting stuffed in and out of my bag, having folders plopped on it, getting covered in chalk dust, and everything else you can imagine happening.
I don’t do this often, but sometimes I teach books that I love. I don’t do this too much, because there’s nothing more demoralizing than having a class full of bored and grumpy freshmen who are only taking this class to fulfill a graduation requirement absolutely tear apart a book that you honestly feel was special and beautiful. “It’s boring,” they whine. “I didn’t get it,” “I don’t really know much about computers, so I just couldn’t follow it,” (that last one is something I hear a lot about Neuromancer. It drives me nuts.)
“I don’t know much about computers, so I didn’t understand this book” — seriously, WHAT?
But I do teach The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist, and I love the hell out of it. I’ve taught it five times, and I reread it each time, and it still blows my mind. Better yet, I’ve never taught it to a class when it didn’t blow their minds too. It makes them cry, it pisses them off, it does incredible things – every time. I’ve taught it to classes where we were studying dystopian fiction, and I’ve taught it to general writing classes where I was just trying to get them to write a definition essay – works for both. My copy that I teach with is absolutely mauled – so on another shelf, I have another copy that is pristine.
That’s the case for The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down as well, which I have two copies of – one is the one I teach with, and the other is actually my old student copy from Introduction to Anthropology. So both are actually equally marked up (the student copy actually still has the old “used” sticker on it), but one is full of thoughts I had as a student and the other is thoughts on how to teach it.
Then there are the books that I used to have two copies of, but don’t anymore. American Gods is one – I once had both the hardcover and a paperback copy, but I ended up trading away my paperback on Paperbackswap because I just loved the hardcover so much. It was an identical cover, too – I just had so many nice memories of reading the story the first time. I used to have two copies of Busman’s Honeymoon – but one was an old and beat-up copy that I bought second-hand, and I replaced it with a prettier edition that matched the rest of the series.
Then there are the books that I’ve bought in hardcover because it was the only way to get my greedy paws on them as soon as they come out, but I really don’t want to have that book in hardcover, so I buy the paperback when it comes out and get rid of the hardcover. I do this with Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson books, and I used to do it with the Sookie Stackhouse series, but for the last two books I’ve actually just gotten them out of the library and not bought them at all.
But thinking about what books I have two copies of, which ones I used to have two copies of, and all the reasoning and nostalgia and outright affection that goes into book ownership made me curious:
What books do YOU have two copies of?
Generation V and the editing process
Okay, that was a long break between posts. What happened was that my day job of teaching college freshmen started back up again, and I’ve been trying to juggle time between teaching 18-year-olds how to use apostrophes correctly and writing Book Two. That meant that this blog unfortunately fell a bit by the wayside. To my possibly half-dozen readers, mea culpa!
Of course, the hope is that someday, after Generation V is published (May 2013, ya’ll – mark calendars accordingly), there will be hordes of people visiting this website! And to you, readers of the future, I apologize. I know that you hang on my every word, and that this blog is a priceless repository of my musing back in the days before I hit it big and (presumably) totally sold out. Future men and women, perusing this on the e-readers that have been surgically implanted in your arms, forgive me.
Reader of the future, you will get why this is really funny in the context of Generation V. Reader of the present: Fortitude Scott likes Doctor Who and works in a coffee shop. Caffeinate!
But in addition to trying to convince college freshmen that it really is the time in their lives to learn how to use a comma correctly, the Generation V manuscript has gone through a major step in the editing process! Woo!
A few interesting numbers – when the fine folks at Roc bought my manuscript, it was 74,600 words. That’s a little on the light side – around 260 pages of a finished manuscript. The book was finished – there weren’t cliffhangers to it, but my editor gave me a few overall comments and notes that were really helpful. I spent a little under a month working on the manuscript after we talked, and when I sent it to her, it was now 84,000 words long. That was a gain of about 10,000 words.
And the amazing thing was that the main story never actually changed.
What changed during the process was actually mostly small things. Things I’d mentioned about my version of vampire nature and physiology were clarified. A few scenes that were already present got longer and more complicated. The motivations and pressures that lead my main character, Fortitude, to go from disillusioned coffee-slinger to badass hero were clarified. I added a few scenes as well that helped the overall feel of the book – there’s a stopover at a pizza place as well as an ammunition store that were completely new. It was a really useful process, and while it took a fair amount of work, I really enjoyed it.
There’s a lot of discussion about the benefit of graduate writing programs. I won’t get into that much on this blog, but I think there are a lot of very valid concerns about these programs – particularly in terms of how much money is being spent by students to get a degree that might have a very minor earning power. But one of the things that I will always say was worthwhile about the years I spent in that program was how much it taught me to be flexible as a writer. I might think I’ve just crafted an incredible work of genius, but if I ask someone for their feedback and they point out a big damn problem, I need to stop and address it. It might be the last thing in the world I want to look at, and sometimes the cuts and changes might be painful to make, but it has to be done.
I had a friend when I was an undergraduate who had written a high fantasy book. She asked me to read it, and I did. Problem was, I stopped reading about sixty pages in and gave the manuscript back to her. And I told her very honestly when I did that I just physically couldn’t read any more, because I hated her hero so damn much that everything after the first ten pages had been a struggle to get through, and I didn’t think that she had meant to create a hero quite that flawed. In fact, looking at the way she had described him, I had the impression that she’d tried to create a perfect hero.
I’m sure that I don’t need to say that she was pretty unhappy with my feedback. She also didn’t change anything about the hero, saying instead that the problem was with me. And in all fairness, writing isn’t like working at a customer service desk at the grocery store – the customer isn’t always right. (I did work that job for about two years in high school – that kind of thinking leads to full refunds for customers who leave bags of shellfish in the front seat of their car for two days in July) There’s no book written that will appeal to every single person. On the other hand, the first people you pick to read a book are usually your first people for a reason – if you respect their opinion, then you need to pay attention if they come back and say that there were problems here, and you need to figure out how to address them.
Fun story about that girl – when she was taking an introductory class to poetry, she had huge fights with the professor. All she wanted to do was craft very Tolkien-y style poetry, and this was a class where they were assigned a lot of different forms. I had other friends in that class, and apparently these fights were EPIC.
Anyway, back to Generation V.
Once I was done with this set of revisions, I sent the now 84,000 word manuscript over to my editor, and now she went through it with a fine-tooth comb. While her earlier comments had been pretty broad, now they were very precise and refined to specific moments in the manuscript, and sometimes right down to word choice. She also had some bigger questions, some of which resulted in completely new scenes. Again, this was a lot of work, but it was hugely fun and rewarding. I feel incredibly lucky that I ended up working with the editor I did, because she was extremely thorough and patient, and was clearly focused on trying to make the manuscript as good as it possibly could be.
Were all these changes ones that were easy to make? Absolutely not. At least three jokes of a highly questionable nature hit the cutting floor, and I was very sad to see them go. There was one suggested adjustment to a denouement element that had me in coils for a few days – the change she was asking me to make did make a ton of sense in the sense that it gave Fortitude a clear action on something in his life, but at the same time that would require the removal of an action from his gal Friday, Suzume. It was tough, and I spent a lot of time working on it. In the end, I think that it worked out, and it did make the book stronger overall.
We went back and forth several times – sometimes it took a while for a scene to be adjusted in a way that was working for both of us. By the time it was done, the manuscript length was at 88,800. Yet the fundamental elements of the story have never changed! Pretty damn cool.
The manuscript is now accepted by Roc, meaning that it’s a big step closer to being published. Right now, Generation V is with the copyeditor. Since this is my first publication experience, I wasn’t entirely certain what’s going on there, so I asked my friend BigRedK, who works at the Harvard University Press. She said this:
As for the copyeditor… Copyeditors exist for one reason: to make you realize that you don’t know the English language like you probably should. 😉
More seriously, they clean up the manuscript so all subjects and their verbs agree and so all pronouns have a clearly identified antecedent. They prune cliches, unmix metaphors, and go on “which” hunts (ie, use “that” with restrictive clauses, “which” with non-restrictive clauses — curiously enough, the Brits habitually ignore this “rule”). Moreover, they edit your manuscript to adhere to “house style”. (Do they use “cancellation” or “cancelation”? Do they use serial commas? etc.)
So this should be an interesting experience!
“Fox Hunt” by Winslow Homer
Favorite Things
This post is going to be on the short side. Yes, there have been many exciting developments with the manuscript, which is being passed over to a copy editor, and, yes, I have been meaning to put up the Anita Blake post for a while. But the manuscript post will have to wait, as will Anita Blake. For one thing, I’ve been researching (okay, that makes it sound like more than what I did, which was look it up on Wikipedia) what has been going on with the Anita Blake series since I stopped reading it, and holy shit! I mean… whoa. It was pretty clear that things were heading in a kind of weird direction, which was why I stopped reading, but… I did not see anything quite like that happening. Those plot summaries have been… interesting.
But, more to come on that later! (…resisting… horrible…. crass… Anita… Blake… joke… must… be… strong… need… distraction…)
Yes, that will do it. Hee hee.
Okay, better now.
What’s mostly happening is that I’m back at work, so that’s taking up a bit of my time. But fear not, there will be more substantial posts to come. In the meantime, I give you delightfully insubstantial fluff with all of the intellectually nutritious value of cotton candy.
Oh, Internet. I just can’t quit you.
Admittedly, my version of Favorite Things comes with a lot less swag than when Oprah would do it (which I know through pop culture osmosis, not because I used to watch it), but it has a kind of “brown paper packages tied up with strings” quality that appeals to me. And, hopefully my reader(s?).
Just imagine if she’d had the Internet. We’d all know what rhymed with “LOLCats”
First favorite thing!
The SummHarry by Lucy Kingsley.
This is definitely number one, because it combines Harry Potter fandom, snark, and actual artistic talent all into one delightful package! If I’m ever rich enough to have my own private office where I don’t have to make decorating compromises (hint: Generation V is due out from Roc in May 2013!), I am totally buying this, framing it, and putting it on the wall.
Second favorite thing!
VlogBrothers by John and Hank Green.
I’m a huge fan of the Vlogbrothers, and if you’ve never heard of them or of Nerdfighteria, why are you still even reading this? Go forth and discover what happens when complete geekery meets video blogging! Plus, they are almost at their 1,000th video upload, and that’s a pretty impressive number. Particularly given how much time they probably spend making and editing those videos. And yet John Green is also the published author of a number of well-reviewed books.
Some people are clearly better at time management than I am.
Third favorite thing!
When I was younger, I would spend every Sunday watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the SciFi channel. Because it was the SCIFI channel back then, not the idiotic Syfy abomination.
But, anyway, I saw a number of truly horrible movies. Manos, Hands of Fate. Hamlet, the crappy German version. The Horror of Spider Island. That weird one where the kids on the beach were threatened by the rubber-suit thing that had hot-dogs in its mouth.
And they were all completely awesome, because of the MST3K jokes.
But then MST3K went off the air, and even though there are a bunch of episodes on DVD (which you should totally rent!), I was really sad.
Then, something magical happened. I found out that the MST3K guys were using the Internet to produce audio commentaries that you could buy and then watch in sequence with the movie! And that because of that, they were now able to put commentaries to NEW movies! They did all six Star Wars movies! And seven of the Harry Potter films! And Thor!
Best of all, they’d even done Twilight. Watching the MST3K “best of” clips is the closest I will ever come to viewing those films, but they. Are. AWESOME.
How I Got An Editor
In my last post about my path to publishing glory, I covered the long process of signing with my agent. Let me take my mind back to those halcyon days, when I was sure that publication and actual cash were right around the corner. It was 2010 and I was 28, still hoping that someone would put me on a 30 Writers Under 30 list, or start a review by writing “Hot Young Writing Talent!”
Okay, it didn’t happen.
What happens once you sign with an agent is that the agent starts doing her job – namely, sell your book. This is an interesting experience, because up until this point, selling my book had been a very one-person job. Like writing itself, selling for me was a very solitary experience. I made lists, I researched a lot, but I wasn’t part of any writing group (and I have a feeling that being part of a writing group focused on getting agents would’ve been like being in the center of a cloud of despair) and I tried to keep my family as much in the dark as possible about the process itself.
So, it’s pretty lonely, and there were a lot of late-night moments of seriously wondering if I was just a talentless hack. But the other side of that was that I was completely in charge of my own destiny. Who I sent something to, whether I entered a manuscript into a contest, whatever, I was the one making the calls. At every point I knew exactly what was going on.
An agent makes that very different. For one thing, now someone with a professional stake in, you know, getting paid, had told me that she wanted to work with me. That’s pretty helpful during those “I’m just a hack!” moments. The other thing was that, for the first time, someone else took stuff on. I had to email Colleen to find out what was going on with the manuscript – that took some getting used to. It was also different to see an ad or something for a press or a contest and think, “Oh, dude, that would be perfect for the manuscript!” but then have to contact my agent about it instead of just going forward with it.
It was an adjustment. But I really feel that getting an agent was incredibly important and worthwhile, and in retrospect I would never have done anything differently. For one thing, I’m saying that from the point I’m at now – late August of 2012, with an accepted book rattling its way toward publication, and I have seen up close exactly how indescribably useful it is to have my agent and how very much she is earning her commission. (hint: I am fairly sure that without Colleen, my contract with Roc could well have included language concerning firstborn children, and I never would’ve known)
Really, combined accounting is the way to go with a series… yes, you can absolutely trust me…
Once my agent and I were working together, she started submitting my manuscript. The benefit of the agent is two-fold here – for one thing, having an agent means that you can side-step the slush pile at the publishing house. Don’t get me wrong – the slush pile has worked for some and will continue to do so. But it’s better to avoid it. Plus, your agent brings with her a career’s worth of contacts – she’ll look at a manuscript and think, “Oh, I’ll send it to this editor I know over here, because I know that this is up her alley.” Are those contacts that fool-proof route to publishing? No, and I’ll talk about that later, but it never hurts to give networking a shot.
The sad truth was, though, that my first book just didn’t get a publisher. It was a pretty hard kick in the ass, but not that uncommon – I knew other people from my writing program who had also acquired agents, and none of them were able to find publishers either. Believe me, trying to get a book published is not for wusses.
Basically, I did the only thing I could – I rolled up my sleeves and wrote something else. This was what would become Generation V, the book that is being published in May 2013 by Roc. (you see how subtle I was there?) It was under a different title at the time, and someday I’ll do a fun post about title evolution, but for now I’m trying to keep on topic. I wrote Generation V in the summer of 2011, revised it, and showed it to Colleen. It wasn’t the kind of book that she normally worked with, but since we were already working together, she decided to represent it. That was a huge plus – I was willing to go through another agent hunt, but believe me, I was really happy to still have Colleen in my corner.
Here’s how it went:
In September of 2011, my agent sent Generation V to the editors at eleven different publishing houses. A few places turned it down fairly fast, but because I was working with an agent, usually I got a paragraph or two of response. Most of the editors used the phrase, “I liked it, but I didn’t fall in love with it.” I cannot properly express how maddening it is to hear that, but it’s actually a valid response. An editor is looking for not only what they think will sell, what will make money, what will do twenty other things, but also something that they can seriously get behind. After all, they’re going to be spending a lot of time on that manuscript. Plus, I’m sure that on most days Generation V was one of about twenty books sitting on their desks, most of which had a lot of similar themes going on.
Plus, there’s my personal theory, which I picked up from years working in short stories. If you have a manuscript (or story) that is good enough to be published, then that just moves up to another category, which is still really really crowded. Generation V is good, and that’s not just my opinion – I have professionals on my side now. But probably it was sitting next to fifteen other manuscripts, all of which were also good. And the editor might have two slots in their publishing calendar to fill. Which two get it? The ones that the editor loves, not just likes.
That’s pretty rational, of course. I believe that, but it doesn’t mean that there weren’t a few days that I didn’t wish that I could put my manuscript in some literary equivalent of a slutty dress and have it bend over in front of editors at lunch.
I’m not sure what that would look like.
Probably kind of like this
Anyway.
Fast forward through autumn (which was notable for the insane Halloween storm that left me without power for nine days) through the fall semester of teaching, and into solid winter. A lot of people passed on it, several with very encouraging notes, and along with one rejection letter from an editor who, and I swear this is true, wrote that he wished that my book had been “more gothic.” I pouted through much of the new year. (I actually had no idea what the hell that was all about until recently, when I was talking to a friend of mine, BigRedK, who works at the Harvard University Press. She told me that apparently gothic themed books are immensely huge overseas. I declared that the next thing I wrote would have Spanish moss hanging over every damn thing in sight)
In the spring, things basically dried up on the manuscript. I sighed, my agent sighed, and I started putting together the basics for a new book, planning to write it over the summer.
Then, in late May, we had an interesting little nibble on our lure. In terms of catching stuff, this wasn’t just a minnow – this was a shark. It was Anne Sowards, an executive editor at Penguin who handled the Roc and Ace imprints. She works with people like Anne Bishop, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, Rob Thurman, and pretty much every other author whose new releases I pine over. She was a judge for the last Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest.
Her name is a killing word.
That’s probably her average Saturday
And she was emailing my agent to let her know that she’d just picked up my manuscript and was wondering if it was still available.
Colleen said, “sure,” in a very casual email, and then immediately let me know in a decidedly less casual email. This led to an exchange between the two of us that revolved around the theme of: “Let’s not get too excited, because this might not happen, but if it does it would be incredibly amazing!” We both managed to avoid using either abbreviations or emoticons in these emails, which I will in the future reference every time someone asks me to give an example of professional behavior.
And, yeah, it happened. There was a little more to it, of course – while Anne was thinking it over, I submitted proposals for two sequels, as well as an outline of overall themes. Anne and I had a phone conversation to talk about the book and possible edits, which was very cool and lasted a little over an hour, and there was about a two-week period that I essentially spent hyperventilating, but it was awesome because Anne and Roc Books made an offer for Generation V and two sequels.
And that was such a fantastic day. Really, really great.
There’s a lot of stuff after that, of course. The contract, which someday will probably get its own post. The editing process. Lots of stuff.
But that’s how I got my editor. Basically, persistence was really important, but so was a lot of flexibility. Luck probably can’t be discounted either.
Next week, back to my slow stroll through every vampire influence I’ve ever encountered.
See? Little girls in movies are creepy.
On Vampires: Anne Rice and the Vampire Chronicles
Anne Rice is the person who made one of the biggest recent changes to the vampire myth. Namely, her work made vampires homoerotic.
Yup. We’re just two dudes. Two tooootally heterosexual dudes. Just bro-ing out here. In a straight way.
Before Rice hit the scene, Dracula bit pretty girls while gal vampires heaved menacingly at human guys. Then the gal vampires were usually staked by those guys, because that was always the trial run before going up against Dracula.
But notice the pattern – Dracula either hung out completely by himself (maybe with the occasional wolfman if this was a mash-up movie), or had kind of a back-up chorus of three or fewer bosomy vampire gal-pals. And the biting always fell along very strict hetero-normative sexual lines. Boys only bite girls! Girls try unsuccessfully to bite guys!
Rice’s first book, though, is about a guy named Louis who is bitten and turned by a vampire named Lestat. Just two guys biting, ya’ll. They then live together for years, biting other people merrily regardless of gender, until one day they adopt a little girl named Claudia, and show everyone that family is about love, not sexual orientation.
You know, it wasn’t until I was actually thinking about the movie to write this blog entry that I started getting all “Claudia Has Two Daddies” about it. This makes sense, since it was also not until YEARS after I’d read it that I realized that The Chronicles Of Narnia has an entire Jesus sub-text to it.
Okay, and maybe that “adopt a little girl” last part was that Lestat makes a bone-headed decision to turn a six-year-old girl into a vampire, which ends badly first when Claudia is, you know, kind of pissed about being forever trapped in the body of a six-year-old when her mind kept developing. She tries to kill Lestat, but six-year-olds can’t do anything right, and he lives. Then there’s some running around in Europe, and the vampires over there are creeped out by Claudia and burn her.
Little girls are always creepy. It’s why horror movies love having little girl ghosts or little girl psychics. But little girl vampires are even creepier, especially when they have hair like that and start trying to totally hit on Brad Pitt.
My first exposure to Rice’s vampires was when I saw the movie. It came out in 1993, but this is another one that I saw on video, so I’m going to hazard a guess that I saw it around 13 or 14. Notable about the film is that this was done back when Brad Pitt was known as a total pretty-boy actor (remember those days?), and that Kirsten Dunst played the six-year-old. And that I think that ¾ of the movie’s budget must’ve been spent on hair-care products, because everyone looks like they are in the middle of a Vidal Sassoon ad. The vampire as played by Fabio had totally just arrived – note that old-school Draculas always have very slickly pomaded hair a la Legosi.
Yeah, no one was taking him seriously as an actor back then. Probably because he looked like Fabio’s understudy.
I read the book Interview With The Vampire a few years later, probably around 16 or 17. The Vampire Chronicles were pretty big in my high school at the time, which is kind of funny now that I look at high schoolers and Twilight. Did my generation’s parents look at us and wonder what the hell was up with all the vampire humpery? Probably. At least our vampires were post-high school Eurotrash, though. And they never sparkled.
True fact: I had a friend in high school who would very seriously tell you that she was a vampire. It was pretty weird. So I shouldn’t claim too much high ground over contemporary high school kids – after all, we were pretty stupid at times too.
Anyway, back to the Vampire Chronicles. After I read the first book, I kind of limped through The Vampire Lestat. Okay, I skimmed it. Truth: Lestat spends so much of that book covering his ass for shit that went down in book one that I seriously wonder whether Anne Rice had any original plans to write a sequel. Plus, Lestat whines. Worse than Louis in book one.
Note this other new addition to the vampire mythos: The vampire as brooding whiner. And Anne Rice completely pioneered this. I mean, sure, Dracula will periodically get chatty, and he spends a lot of time wandering around Castle Dracula in his bathrobe with his hair still in curlers, but the man doesn’t whine. He turns around and says, “Dude, I need to get out of my rut!” Then he buys property in England and starts biting British girls – problem solved! He could write his own self-help book.
This is the face of depression.
Not so with Rice vampires. Pretty fluffy hair, brooding and whining. Interesting to note is that her vampires are pretty damn eroticized, but become basically impotent when they are changed. It’s a neat trick, and probably part of why the Rice vampires were so popular with high school girls.
There’s no staking with Rice vampires. They can be burned with sun or fire, and I sort of remember some beheading chatter at some point (this was a while ago), but that’s it. Fundamentally, Rice also shifted the playing field in her books. Dracula is about when the vampire comes into contact with people, and how they have to drive him back. Rice vampires hang out together, live together, play together, comb their shiny shiny hair together, and get super political. Humans aren’t involved. In fact, when humans do get involved, they are invariably turned into vampires. They don’t say, “Shit! You’re killing people! I need to get my Jonathan Harker on!” They say, “Immortality, increased hotness, and shiny hair? Dude, sign me up.” There isn’t even any brooding about it – the thing that I always found both off-putting and interesting about the Rice universe is that vampirism itself is presented as the natural thing to desire. The vampire state has shifted, then, from the Dracula presentation of The Fate Worse Than Death to The Fate That Will Totally Save Your Life And Clear Up Your Skin. It’s a pretty significant change.
My involvement with Rice was always problematic. I actually never finished The Vampire Lestat, and instead skipped forward to Queen Of The Damned, which I had heard from a friend was better. It totally was, by the way. Queen Of The Damned is absolutely my favorite Rice book, because she starts working on a really large canvas, brings in larger than life characters, and because I was able to completely skip over the Lestat bits and still keep up with the story.
I never read The Tale of the Body Thief, and I skipped around in Memnoch The Devil, which to be honest I only picked up in the first place because I’m Catholic, and no Catholic alive can resist a book that mentions the Veronica’s Veil story.
By this point, Anne Rice was entering a really prolific period, and new books were actually coming out at the same time that I was now old enough to read them, but I did call it quits around then. I did read Pandora when it came out, but that’s notable in that it was a pre-history vampire saga with a lot of emphasis on the days of the Roman Empire. It was a good one, and I think was one of the times when I was really able to appreciate Anne Rice’s writing in a venue where I wasn’t having Lestat-related issues.
But, without a doubt, The Vampire Chronicles really changed the vampire scene. Most importantly, vampires in those books had gone from monsters to heroes – they weren’t something that the characters encountered, they WERE the characters. My next two big influences were ones that really built on the foundation that Rice put down.
Next time, Anita Blake (the early years).
On Vampires: Dracula
My main character in Generation V is a vampire. This is in no way a scientific declaration, but I’d say that vampires are probably the most used fantasy creature, with werewolves sliding into the number two spot. After that are probably witches and, far in the distance, elves.
There are actually a huge amount of vampire myths, and when you go back into the original stuff you’ll notice a fairly massive difference between how we view the classic vampire now and how they were originally conceived. For one thing, they were generally not looked on as particularly sexy, while that is practically the guiding principle now. Bram Stoker’s Dracula changed a lot of stuff (though if you read it, he doesn’t exactly come off as particularly attractive).
But here are the things that is pretty much the dogma for the modern vampire:
• No sunlight.
• Issues with garlic.
• No reflections.
• Nourished solely by blood.
• They were all once human, and had to die to become a vampire.
• Once a human becomes a vampire, they cease aging entirely.
• They can be warded off by crosses, and holy water will burn them.
• A vampire can make a human into a vampire. (this process is permanent)
• The only way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through its heart.
Are those the only things? Definitely not. Here are a few others that are less common, but still pop up:
• Vampires cannot cross running water.
• Vampires are completely OCD, and if you leave a pile of rice, they have to stop and count each grain. (okay, that one doesn’t come up much, but in the classic vampire myths this one came up a lot)
• Decapitation can also work for killing a vampire.
• Vampires like to wear leather (seriously, tell me this isn’t a thing)
Now, every person who either writes a vampire book, TV series, or movie plays around with these things. Take sunlight – sometimes they can go outside in it as long as they wear sunglasses (are there are any Moonlight fans in the house?), but other times they are actually rendered completely helpless and have to hide out in coffins or basements.
So there really isn’t a “right” kind of vampire right now. Everyone who writes vampires ends up putting some kind of different spin on the idea to create “their” vampire. I’m pretty much the same – I took a basic modern vampire idea, then started making adjustments until I ended up with a vampire that was interesting to me. Some things I changed a lot – for instance, my vampires have no problems at all with running water! Okay, that one has pretty much been abandoned. But think about that one for a second – if someone wrote a vampire story where vampires couldn’t cross running water, does this mean that you’d be safe if you hid out in a shower? Characters would be all, “Oh noes, vampires! Quick, get into the shower!
So for the next few entries, I’m going to write about my vampire influences. For kicks, I’ll even try to keep this relatively chronological. Should be fun, and if anyone is reading along, feel free to chime in down in the comments section!
The first vampire influence I can remember is….
Dracula. The 1992 movie.
The one with Keanu Reeves. (yes, the horror!)
I was ten the year that it hit theaters, which means that this actually isn’t really my first vampire influence (I saw it on video). But I really don’t want to spend an entire entry ruminating about Count Chocula cereal commercials and what I remember of Count Duckula cartoons.
If you remember Count Duckula, though, mental high-five.
According to IMDb (because I refuse to watch that movie again, even for the sake of this blog) that also starred Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, and Gary Oldman, which is blowing my mind completely, because I actually do not remember any of those people, who I know I’d seen in other stuff by that age. And apparently Cary Elwes was in this thing! That is amazing that I actually didn’t remember that, given that I should’ve recognized him from The Princess Bride and Robin Hood: Men In Tights. (side fact: I know that I saw Robin Hood: Men In Tights before I saw Dracula, because that movie was the first Mel Brooks film I ever saw, and was basically my personal benchmark for humor for many, many years.) (another side fact: The IMDb photo of Cary Elwes? Dude, I know you couldn’t stay looking like Guilford Dudley or Captain William Boone forever, but, seriously, that just made me sad)
But back to Keanu Reeves. This was maybe not the best casting decision, and it has stuck in my mind for years and years. Basically, at one point Keanu (playing Harker, kind of sucking at it) has been abandoned at Castle Dracula and is imprisoned by the female vampires. Here’s half of my big long-term takeaway from this movie: the female vampires were really, really slutty. They were also interchangeably attractive, but mostly slutty. Also noticeably, they really don’t have characters. While Dracula has lots of dialogue and motivation, the female vampires are mostly there to add heaving cleavage. You could credit part of that to the original book (Bram Stoker clearly had some era-appropriate problems with female sexuality, with the result being that women who show arousal and desire are either evil vampires or on their way to becoming evil vampires.), but Lucy’s transition from modest English rose to heaving, pawing, British man assaulting creature of the night doesn’t stand by itself in the canon.
The other half of my takeaway was Gary Oldman’s hair as Dracula. Seriously, look at this shit:
Yeah, you can tell that he casts no reflection.
Relevant to the book? About 50%. Color and creepy old-man, yeah, but, really, those are Madonna hair tits on top of that! Remember when Leslie Nielsen riffed on that hairdo in Dracula: Dead and Loving It? (which is completely one of my other great influences, which will probably go unexamined, lest I just spend an entire post quoting awesome lines and linking to YouTube videos)
Oh, what the hell. Watch this, and if you don’t laugh, you’re a cylon.
Then, of course, there’s the whole thing where coming to England has returned Dracula to his youth, where we get this:
Now who does this remind me of…
And suddenly I know who Johnny Depp’s personal style icon is. Good grief!
Noticeable both here and in the original text is that the sunlight issue is really flexible. Dracula is strolling around on the streets of London, which at least suggests that foggy days are okay. Also, once he starts looking like Johnny Depp, Gary Oldman’s Dracula does start showing some strut, but this kind of vampire doesn’t have that very blatant sexuality that started happening later. Okay, okay, yes, you can always make the vampire bite = sex comparison, but this is more about presentation.
Vampires weren’t that complicated in this movie. Yeah, there’s the old-to-young thing, and we definitely have that strong establishment that male vampires are of the classy and debonair school of monster-dom (as opposed to wolfman or Frankenstein), but his motivations do basically boil down to: meet pretty girl, bite pretty girl, pretty girl then becomes kind of like a hooker who I no longer pay attention to. The heroes here are the guys trying to save the pretty girl and kill the vampire. My next influence would really change a lot of these basic elements.
Next time, Anne Rice, and the vampire craze of the 1990s.
How I Got An Agent
Everyone who has an agent has a different story of how it happened. So while this is the path that worked for me, this is by no means the only way to acquire representation. Similarly, just because this is what worked for me is no statement that this is the best (or even a particularly good) way to get an agent.
First, a little background. I know that there are authors who choose to go it alone, mailing their manuscript directly to the publisher and taking their chances with the slush pile. Some authors also choose to sidestep the traditional agent and publisher element entirely and go straight to self-publication. Without doubt, that has famously worked for some. For me, though, possibly because of the particular type of writing that I was doing at the time, this wasn’t even an option that I considered.
From about the age of 19 until I had finished my master’s degree, I was working exclusively in the field of short fiction. To get work like that published, you typically make a list of the magazines that will publish the kind of stuff you’re writing, then you just slap on a cover letter and send the work off. Rinse and repeat. You don’t need an agent for most of that. For one thing, very few magazines restrict themselves to agented work only (mainstream book publishers are a very different story), and for another, the contracts that I signed whenever a magazine accepted one of my short stories were about two or three paragraphs of basic laymen’s language.
After I received my master’s, I made the transition from short work to a book of fiction. One of the benefits of working so long with short work was that I got to spend a lot of time on the fine details of writing, like description, characterization, dialogue, motivation, and a compressed story arc. I wasn’t trying to refine those things over the course of a book – if something I was working on was just a train-wreck and had to be trashed, I was out maybe thirty pages. That’s a lot different than learning on a novel, where even something that is abandoned halfway through is a loss of at least a hundred.
So when I sat down to write my first novel, back in 2007, I had spent a long time getting to the point where I felt ready to do that. It took me about a year to write it – I was fairly hampered by the fact that I didn’t have a very clear path of where I was going, and just by the daunting task of doing it. The first time you do something is always going to be hard, simply because you’re working against the unknown. Can I write a whole novel? Well, you don’t really know until you try.
So in mid 2008, I had my first book. I’d done at least one full edit by the point that I thought it was ready to shop around, and I felt pretty good about it, so I decided to start an agent hunt.
Here’s another point to talk about – when do you start looking for an agent? Well, my opinion is that you don’t start fishing until you have good bait. This obviously depends on the field you’re working in (for example, a lot of the non-fiction writers I know were very comfortable looking for both agents and publishing houses with just a proposal), but if you haven’t sold a book before, at least have one in hand before you go looking. Otherwise you could get in a discussion with an agent, and they could be loving your concept and your sample chapter, but when they ask to read the rest of it and you reply, “Well, I haven’t written it, so I’ll get back to you in three months,” well… you’ve lost the chance to keep their interest. When you mail them that big attachment in three months, they’re probably going to have to spend a while trying to remember who you are. Better to hold off looking for agents until you’ve got something complete to show them.
Plus, looking for agents is time consuming and pretty depressing. You don’t want that particular albatross around your neck until you have gotten the first-book monkey off of your back. Rule of writing – don’t mix metaphors or animal-based depression objects.
Back to mid 2008. I made a list of the books that were both successful and fairly similar to the book I’d just completed. This doesn’t mean “both had first-person narrators,” this is mostly regarding audience. Will the person who read and loved this successful book over here be the kind of person I would suggest my book to? Once I had that giant stack, I opened up each book to the Acknowledgements page and looked for the part where Successful!Author thanked their agent. They all do. Even in the cases where it’s just a block of names in the Acknowledgements page, you can always look up that author’s website, and the agent will usually be listed under the Contact section. If all that has failed, just Google “(Author’s Name) Agent.” Because behind every successful author is an agent who put their name on their website.
After I’d ripped through my bookshelves, I had a list of about twenty names. Now came the fun part – I had to look up each and every agent. Is this agent still in business? If they’re in business, are they looking for new authors? If they’re still in business and looking for new authors, are they looking for authors like me? Run through that list of questions, and you’ll probably cut your initial list right in half. Don’t worry, though – if the agent you really wanted isn’t looking for new authors right now, look around on their website. Agents are like quail – they like to travel in coveys. From what I saw during my agent hunt, even the smallest agencies (which were usually headlined by that agent who had worked with the Successful!Author) usually have at least three working agents. Maybe the one you initially wanted isn’t looking for new authors (or new authors who are writing in your genre), but maybe one of the younger and hungrier agents that work with them is. Don’t worry too much about going with a newer agent – if they’re working closely with that older and more experienced agent, they have access to that person’s knowledge and contacts, plus, since they don’t have any big money-making authors in their stable yet, they’re probably more likely to be interested in you.
Important note: agents write up a list of the genres they work in, usually posted pretty clearly on their websites. Pay attention to that list. If you’re writing, say, historical romance, and you contact an agent whose bio clearly states that they are only interested in steampunk? You just wasted thirty minutes that you could’ve spent on an agent who might’ve read your stuff. Instead, all that happened was the agent read the first two lines of your email, deleted it because it was outside of the genre they work in, and then they felt annoyed and bitchy for the next few emails they read. Great job, troll. You probably screwed the writing dreams of the next two people in line.
Back to 2008. Write up a standardized query. This should be a short description of your book, a little biographical information, and an emphasis on how long the book is (wordcount) and the fact that it is done. You should adjust the query slightly for each agent (ie – salutation with their name, a line or two about why specifically you are querying them out of the thousands of agents out there), but to write up a fresh query for every agent is to invite Lovecraftian madness upon yourself. Always check the agent’s bio for what they want in a submission – some want just a query. Some want a query plus the first chapter. Some want a query plus the first hundred pages. Some want the query, but it has to be physically mailed to them. Some want a query submitted only through their website. Follow whatever instructions you’re being provided, because agents deal with a LOT of queries, and most aren’t going to spend much time with something that doesn’t meet their clearly expressed parameters.
There are two typically accepted approaches to an agent hunt – the Goldilocks approach and the carpetbombing approach. Goldilocks is where you send out one query, then wait anxiously (is this the perfect porridge?) for the reply before you send out another query. The pro on this is that it is typically viewed as more genteel and polite. The con is that you can sometimes wait six months for a form letter rejection. Carpetbombing is exactly what it sounds like – you make up a big list of agents and you send each and every one of them a letter at once. The pro on this is that you don’t waste all that downtime between rejections, and the con is that it’s generally viewed as rude and unseemly.
I’ll be honest. I prefer carpetbombing.
Well, within reason. When I was looking for an agent, I made sure that I had ten active queries at all times. Whenever I got a rejection, I’d just send another query out to the next name on my list. Also, even when carpetbombing it is considered good form to only query a single agent in an agency at a time. Not only is it mannerly, but it makes your carpetbombing chicanery somewhat less obvious. (and, really, emailing identical queries to ten people who work in the same offices and probably have lunch together all the time? Even I have to admit that that is a little crass. And stupid.)
Back in late 2008, I queried a total of about twenty agents. I was rejected by all of them over the course of about five to six months, but a few of them did read selections (or, in a few cases, the whole thing) before they turned it down, and some were extremely generous and offered me some constructive criticism. These were professionals in their field offering me their opinions, and you can bet that I paid attention.
With those things in mind, I took a break on querying and went back to the manuscript. It took another year, but I did a thorough revision of it, coming out with a new and polished manuscript in late summer of 2010. The first thing I did was send it through my original list of twenty who had rejected it the first time around (remember, this was my wish list of agents – they worked with bestselling authors), being clear in my query that they’d seen this thing before. They all turned it down again, this time in about six weeks.
But this time I knew that my manuscript was a lot stronger than last time, so I expanded my list of agents. There are some really good websites you can use to make a list, and I also suggest looking into the yearly Writer’s Market publications. Check out large genre organizations like the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (or whatever your genre is), and pay attention to any sections titled “Writer Beware” which are usually devoted to the kind of charlatans and users who love nothing better than an aspiring writer desperate to be published.
All of those places offer good warnings, but here’s the guiding principle I held to when I was looking for an agent: if they asked for a single penny of money up front, I looked elsewhere. No reputable agent is going to ask you for fees before something is sold. An agent for an author is a lot like the agent you get when you buy or sell real estate. Basically: they don’t get paid until you do. This has a lot of good benefits to it – namely, they are as committed to seeing you published as you are, since that’s the day that all the hours they’ve spent on you finally come with a paycheck attached. If you ever even think of handing your money over to anyone in the process of getting published, remember: you’ve just taken away any incentive they had to try to get you published. If they can make you pay for nothing once, they are going to figure out a way to make that happen again. Don’t become someone’s cash cow.
Also, you’re never going to write a check out to reputable publishers and agents. You earn for them, you don’t pay them. In the case of the agent, her pay will be a percentage of the advances and (hopefully) the royalties that the publishing house agrees to when they purchase your book. That’s also a good incentive for your agent to negotiate the best deal possible for your work.
But back to getting that person.
It was a lot of work, and it was very frustrating. It took a long time. There were a lot of times when I thought it would never ever happen. There were several close calls, where the agent read the entire book and “liked it, but didn’t love it.” If the devil had walked up to me at some point and offered to be my agent, it would’ve been really hard to say no.
But here’s the thing about anything regarding getting your book published. You can have thousands of people say no to you, but all it takes is one person who will say yes.
In October of 2010, I sent a package of materials to Colleen Mohyde, who worked out of the Doe Coover Agency. Now, I’d looked into this agency before, and I’d really liked the sound of Colleen’s bio, but I hadn’t queried her before this simply because she was asking for something that I really didn’t want to write – a synopsis. Oh, I really didn’t want to write that thing. But what happened is that another agent who was looking at my stuff had asked me for a synopsis, and since I was already in the front door with him (so to speak – I never in all of this process actually called or spoke to an agent face-to-face), I wrote the damn thing. Oh, I hated every minute of writing that god-forsaken document. I don’t think I hate any one thing more than having to write a summary of something I’ve written. You know Gollum reacts in the second Lord of the Rings movie to the elf bread? That’s what I do.
The agent who I’d written the synopsis for ended up passing on my manuscript, but now I had that horrid thing in hand, and once you’ve got it, why not use it? So I sent my query, the synopsis (hates it, precious! hates it!), and the first fifty pages of my book to Colleen, as per her submission guidelines. She emailed me back the next day, asking for the full manuscript on an exclusive 10-day basis. I agreed to that so fast that I probably looked like that cartoon roadrunner. Ten days later, she told me she wanted to represent my book, and we signed a contract.
After that, it was smooth sailing to publication!
……hah!
Seriously, no. Getting an agent is difficult and important. When I was trying to get my agent, I couldn’t imagine anything harder or more frustrating. Then we actually started trying to get the manuscript a publisher. This has been a massive post, so I’ll cover the hunt for a publisher (now with extra spearholders!) next week, but here are two basics to consider:
- Colleen Mohyde accepted me as her client in October of 2010.
- Roc Books bought an entirely different book in a completely different genre than the one Colleen originally agreed to represent in June of 2012. I hadn’t even written Generation V at the time that I signed a contract with Colleen.
After all of that, I hope that no one is discouraged about finding an agent. Believe me, it can happen. But when you start looking, keep in mind that it’s going to be tough, and you need to be prepared for a long haul. That way, if the best happens and you get an agent immediately, fantastic! But if the best doesn’t happen, then you won’t get completely discouraged and give up too early. Because if you keep trying, it could happen.
Brand-new site!
So here’s my new site! If it looks extremely standardized, that’s because it completely is. Hopefully there will be bigger and better things in the future, but for now I had exactly $26 set aside for marketing myself, and I just blew it all.
BUT, I do plan to be making good use of this over the next few months. I’ve got big plans for the blog part of this page, which I hope to post to weekly (at least, in this stage). Most of the early posts are going to be background, but I actually do have fun stuff to talk about, notably the publication of my first book, courtesy of the fine folks over at ROC. It’s scheduled for May 2013, so I’ll have good stuff to post about, from the basics like how I got an agent, how the manuscript was bought (because when I was working on those things, I spent far too much time scouring the internet, hoping that I would find directions for that “secret handshake” that I was partially convinced was what I really needed), plus the process of what getting a book published is like. I’m currently elbow-deep in the guts of Book Two at the moment, so I might talk about that a little.
Other stuff that I plan to do – FAQs are important, there’s an About section to fill up, plus the critical Contact portion. The Fortitude Scott portion is set aside for specific book stuff, which I’m sure I’ll fill up more once I have marketing info. I may do a Links section eventually, but that would probably just devolve into a long list of authors who I have a writer’s crush on. It would be nice to figure out how to put up a Forum section, but that can wait until I have, you know, people reading this other than my agent.
M. L. Brennan 