A couple of days ago my wonderful editor, Jim Frenkel, invited me to enter the inner sanctum, aka the offices of Tor Books located in the Flatiron building, for a visit.
The place is a tangled warren of offices filled with books, books everywhere, and cover art in various stages of completion. And did I mention books? Shelves of books, ARCs, and first editions line the walls everywhere. How could I not love this place?
This is where the hidden magic of book production happens. The books on the shelves in your local bookstore would not exist without the labors of these editors, cover artists, publicists, interns, and marketeers. I tried my best to stay calm and collected, but I had to resist the urge to thank everybody I met for everything they did, not just for my book but for BOOKS.
I know, I am so, so uncool. But I hope I never lose my childish love of everything to do with stories, books, and the people who also love such things.
It was a day filled with New York goodness (with a walk through the 6th avenue wholesale flower district as an unrelated plus). Thank you, everyone at Tor, for all the bibliophilic magic that you work!
Last night, I got together with the fabulous Bianca D’Arc and Jen McAndrews to give a talk at the Harborfields Library in Huntington/Greenlawn, NY. Our topic: how to get published. Here are some of the highlights from the meeting:
*Getting published is part of a larger writer’s journey that is different for everybody. There is no one way to “get published,” and publication is simply one (very important) feature in a writer’s life. As I put it, getting published is like finding your way to Oz — all the cool stuff keeps happening after you arrive.
*A lot of romance authors made their initial breakthrough in the e-pub market. And there is a new generation of SFF writers who are making a name for themselves in the online short story market these days. We talked a great deal about how to vet potential markets online, and how important it is for a writer to learn everything they can about how to sell their fiction effectively, the industry in general, and the other writers who are traveling the same terrain.
*I found Heinlein’s rules for writers over at Dean Wesley Smith’s place. In case you have not seen them before, here they are:
1) You must write.
2) You must finish what you write.
3) You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.
4) You must mail your work to someone who can buy it.
5) You must keep the work in the mail until someone buys it.
(whups…I see that I combined rules 4 and 5 in our discussion. Argh — well, I got the gist pretty well )
We talked about all of these rules at length. I got a question about frequency of writing and rule 1. Writing every day is the goal, and I know plenty of writers who walk that walk. With little kids running especially rampant through my life right now, this is something I can only aspire to for the moment. I used to beat myself up about this reality, but I have learned that I can obey this rule by maintaining my intimacy with my writing. As long as writing and I are more like lovers separated by fate than casual acquaintainces meeting for coffee once in awhile, it’s okay if I don’t actually get pages every day. But by summer, I’m getting my daily pages back…mark my words.
I had a total blast on this panel — it was wonderful to see Jen and Bianca again, and Myra and Robin of LIRW too. And I really enjoyed meeting with everybody who came out to hear us speak!
Doesn’t the site look great? As I mentioned in an earlier post, the breathtaking new artwork is by the wonderful Anne Cain, and the site work was done by web genius Frauke of CrocoDesigns. Kudos to you, ladies, and welcome one and all
~Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
MILAN KUNDERA, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
When I first started out writing, I was the queen of the thirty page dead novel – I’d start writing, and then the story would lose its spark and die on me. After one too many of these, I read up on story structure, but though my drafts got longer, they stayed incoherent.
Happily, once I learned the trick of what I describe in my post at The Magic District, I started completing what I wrote, and selling it soon after. I want to save you the time it took me to learn what I describe, so head over there and check it out! Here’s the link:
If you are like me, you’ve been watching and reading about the Haiti earthquake and wondering what any of us could possibly do to help those caught up in that disaster.
Amazingly, a Marine named Jake Wood was also watching TV footage of the earthquake when it first happened, asked himself the same question – and came up with a brilliant, inspiring answer.
This guy started a rapid response self-deploying team of individuals with combat, military, search and rescue, and medical training, and got into Haiti by landing first in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and moving overland to the Haitian border, thereby bypassing the bottleneck at Port Au Prince airport. Since then, they’ve been profiled on the BBC, CNN, NPR, ABC and other news outlets.
These brave souls have been liveblogging their efforts since they embedded with a Jesuit mission based in PaP. The amount they have been able to do is, frankly, incredible. If you write adventure fiction, or romance, your heroes will be put to shame by these awesome warriors! I guarantee these folks will inspire you.
Check them out and consider donating to their efforts — I sent them a donation and it’s been gratifying to see how much good they’ve done so far.
As you can see, the place is starting to look classy! The gorgeous artwork you see is by the brilliant artist Anne Cain, and the website design is by the fabulous Frauke at CrocoDesigns. I will give you the heads up once I’m done sprucing up the place, and then we will have a massive party to celebrate all the new happenings around here
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