Author Archives: Julie Sondra

Completed New Short Story: “After She Comes Along”

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I actually wrote this story on a plane on June 27, but I’d left out a couple details because I needed to research them, so it wasn’t “complete” until now. It was inspired by my book of choice on the plane–Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. His weird collection of short stories made a little whirlpool in my brain, and I ended up coming up with something that probably feels a little bit like one of his stories.

I’ve decided to call it “After She Comes Along.” It’s just a contemporary fiction that takes place in the woods, and even though it’s not fantasy, it kind of has a fantastical feel.

It’s only about 550 words, making it my shortest story ever written in my adult life. Woo-hoo!

Pitch Wars: The Feedbackening

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So it’s done. After having chosen a mentee and an alternate, I gave my feedback to 103 people who entered the contest, in individual e-mails, with around a page to a page and a half of personalized commentary.

It came to about 60,000 words, and some people are like YOU BASICALLY WROTE A YA NOVEL WITH YOUR FEEDBACK. (Well, an awfully critical, disjointed YA novel, but yes, word-wise, it was a lot.) And honestly, this is one of my favorite things about the contest: giving people who didn’t get picked a ladder to climb so they can leave with bright prospects.

Though please let me state and reiterate that MENTORS WERE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE ANY FEEDBACK AT ALL and most of the mentors could not spare time to draft more than a form letter or some abbreviated feedback. The fact of the matter is that qualifying as a mentor means you basically have a writing-related or editing-related career, even if you’re not full time, and many of us are working multiple jobs, parenting multiple kids, and juggling multiple responsibilities. For most of the mentors in this contest, their own deadlines and other responsibilities just had to take precedence. I really, really don’t want the fact that I happened to have time to draft this feedback to make anyone in this contest resent that other mentors didn’t or couldn’t do the same.

And you folks who received feedback from me: Wow, everyone’s been so gracious about it. Even for the people I was really hard on, I mostly received effusive thank-yous and appreciation, with a few requests for clarification mixed in (which I generally don’t mind, though if you see this, please don’t ask me to read a new version of your query unless I’ve volunteered explicitly to look at it; I think I’m burned out on queries!).

“But Julie,” say some people who didn’t submit to me, “what was this glorious feedback like? What did you tell them that has them cheering for you and screaming your name on Twitter?”

Most of my “pass” mails focused on the query letter. I yelled at people for lack of trajectory or too much/too little detail, mostly. I gave specifics in each case and a push in the direction I’d like to see it go. For some, I suggested picking up a couple paperbacks in their genre and modeling a query synopsis after the back-of-the-book description. And when I commented on pages, I would talk about whether I connected to the character, why I thought their language was too passive or inundated with unnecessary speech tags or adverbs, and how I’d like to see them reconceive their opening if I thought it didn’t work. If I didn’t read the whole first chapter, I sometimes told people so and explained where/why I disconnected.

And, of course, I screamed about grammar. Dashes, mostly, and curly quotes/straight quotes. (This is not what kills you, though. Obviously. Since I said that kind of thing to my mentee.) If you didn’t know there are differences between hyphens (-), en dashes (–), and em dashes (—), you may have gotten yelled at by me. If you didn’t know that some quotation marks and apostrophes get “curled” by certain programs and others are left straight (and you used more than one program to show me your document, including Scrivener), you may have gotten yelled at by me.

But getting yelled at by me isn’t always bad, and it’s not terrifying. I tend to be kind of informal and even occasionally funny when I offer critique. I constructed my feedback as I read each submission (which is why it took me so long to get through them), and I reread them before sending to make sure a) I hadn’t been too mean, and b) to adjust where appropriate when I wanted to tell someone how close I’d come to picking them or comment on if they got chosen as mentee or alternate by someone else. In rereading the stuff I wrote in these slap-happy late-night editing sessions, I found the following silly, creative, and plain weird pieces of advice or commentary. My apologies if these were said to you. I have to do something to keep myself entertained.

You need to set off an adverb repellent in this manuscript and start killing some of these suckers. Don’t make it such a sprawling metaphor, or we start to think you’re going to wander away from us into this guy’s head and forget you’re supposed to be pitching a book.

You want this ending to punch, and it’s just too sprawled out all over the bed right now. With a bunch of pillows and stuffed animals.

I suggest times a hundred that you wait wait wait to tell us how things work.

That’s pretty long for one sentence, despite the cunningly used dashes. (I’m very fond of dashes.)

You write likable sentences; I’d sit with your sentences in the lunchroom.

I’m going with something that hits me in my sweet spot and your subject matter is slightly behind and over to the right of my sweet spot.

I like present tense (though it’s terrible in the wrong hands). Fortunately, yours seem like pretty good hands.

I felt it was mostly spent setting the scene instead of getting me invested. Like the props were still being put on stage at the start of the play. Tell us what the person loses, not just “control.” I want it to be a lot tighter and really smash us in the face.

Word-count-wise it sounds a little on the short side? But I guess that’s because I’m used to hulking fantasy books.

I really love this beginning and it’s honestly a relief to read something that knows how to give exposition I can hang my hat on.

Dialogue tags should tell us things we can’t tell by what is being said (like volume, as in whispered, or like tone, as in sarcasm if we couldn’t detect it from context). When you switch them up so often, they become very noticeable instead of invisible, and those are not the parts of your writing you want us to notice. They’re road signs, not attractions.

It’s like you went from microscope to binoculars with nothing in between.

The answer to “Can X do Y?” is almost always yes, and if we’re reading because we want to know the answer to that question, we’ve already answered it. “X must do Y or else Z” is much better than “Can X do Y?” Even though it’s actually quite a well-written query, it lacks meat. I just want to eat the meal, not be told what it tastes like and what its ingredients are.

This sentence and others like it should be banished forever from your querying vocabulary. I’m only yelling at you for this because you have so little else to scream about and I want you to be perfect.

Some people will probably tell you that starting with prologue-like italics is a bad idea and I will tell them to go sit on it.

Most really good queries hint at complexity while displaying simplicity.

Our protagonist is doing her thing, acting in the midst of the stuff we need to understand, getting on with her life rather than posing for a Chapter One Centerfold.

And I’ve got to admit that the sudden random boner at the end of the chapter threw me off.

So there you have it, folks. The kind of advice Julie Sondra Decker gives to people.

::bows::

My mentee and alternate are in for some wacky comments. I can feel it.

Pitch Wars Contest: Team Chosen

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After receiving over 100 applications from prospective mentees in Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest, I have chosen my team of one mentee and one alternate. I wrote nearly 60,000 words of feedback and critiqued every query letter and set of sample pages that came into my inbox, but when all was said and done, there could be only one.

Congratulations to Megan Paasch, whose New Adult fantasy CHARLOTTE ELEMENTAL impressed me with its premise and melted me with its heart. I will be reading her entire book, shining up her query letter, and helping her craft a short pitch for the agent round of the contest.

Congratulations also to Natalka Burian for becoming my alternate. Natalka is the author of EVERYTHING IS FLOWING, a rather strange and beautiful literary novel with speculative aspects, and its evocative prose has already moved me to tears twice. I will be helping her with her short pitch and first chapter for the alternate showcase.

You can see all the mentors, mentees, and alternates here.

Hopefully, like last year, I will be able to post with agenting news for my team before long! But for now, it’s back to work.

Pitch Wars 2014: The Aftermath

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THE PITCH WARS ARE OVER.

And there were battles, I assure you.
But I’m not here to tell you about those. First, I’d like you to meet my fresh new team:
MENTEE: Megan Paasch, with her incredible New Adult fantasy Charlotte Elemental.
ALTERNATE: Natalka Burian, with her heart-rending/mind-blowing Adult Literary/Speculative Fiction Everything Is Flowing.

Check out Brenda’s full list of mentees, alternates, and mentor matches here:
And now, what you all want to know . . . why them? Why not someone else? Maybe why not you?
I’m going to tell you about how this went down for me. Let’s look at the beginning.
I got 100 eligible submissions. (103 total, technically, but two were from a category I was not mentoring–YA mistakenly sent to an Adult mentor–and one was a book of short stories, which generally isn’t something agents are considering from authors without book-length fiction already published.) So, nice round number. Easy to work with. I wrote feedback as I went along, and am going to send it to the authors little by little shortly after I finish blogging about this. Most applicants got somewhere between 600 and 1500 words of feedback. Don’t like math? That’s okay. I’ll do it for you.
All told, I have written just under 60,000 words of feedback for the Pitch Wars applicants.
And before you say I’m dedicated, etc., it’s mostly because I just can’t shut up when I get into trying to help someone.
I “ranked” each person according to a numerical score generated through a rubric. The extended version of this analytical process was described in a previous blog post. Essentially, I had this rubric:

Query:

Writing Quality Errors Trajectory Detail Personal Total
5 5 5 5 5 25

Writing Sample:

Writing Quality Errors Character Effective Intro Personal Total
5 5 5 5 5 25

You can look at the previous blog post for an explanation of what I mean by those categories.

Nobody got a perfect score, by the way. The highest I had was 23/23, total of 46.
I’m kind of merciless.
Everybody from #50 and above scored at least 30 points. Only eight people got 40 or above. And–strangely enough–two of my favorites didn’t make that top eight.
I ended up with a shortlist of SEVEN potential mentees, all of whom I requested extra chapters from. I made my choices from those folks based on the query and three chapters. If you got a request from me, you were one of seven out of one hundred submissions, and I honestly considered each of you for the top spot at some point in the process. Congratulations.
BUT. Choosing these seven wasn’t as simple as I’d thought it would be. I’d assumed it would be as easy as just grabbing the top picks on my easy little list, but it wasn’t. My mentee was not #1 on the list. My #2 on the list didn’t end up as my mentee or alternate. I didn’t even ask for more pages from my #6, #7, or #8, but did so for my #9 and my #12.

I had scored them using this rubric to get a more objective idea of how much I liked them, but then I realized two important things about the scores. One: I didn’t consider marketability in my rubric, and that ended up being vital. And two: Some of the ones that scored higher than others were manuscripts I knew I could not take for personal reasons. Let’s be honest: This contest isn’t “fair.” You enter for free. If you win, you get critiques for free and guidance for free. If you don’t get picked, you might get feedback and you might not. We try to make it balanced as to what mentees and alternates get as a minimum, but we are volunteers giving our time to help writers, and ultimately, that gives us a little bit of freedom to be selfish if we want. Sometimes, we just picked what we wanted to work with, not what was “good.”

The problems I encountered were about the same as last year: Queries without direction, queries that lacked trajectory and just listed what happens, queries with too much or not enough detail, pages loaded down with backstory or unnatural dialogue, query bios that were full of irrelevant details or sounded like bragging. My individual feedback will make it clear if one of these was your problem. But as for my top seven who inspired me to ask for more:

  • One, a New Adult Fantasy, became my mentee, and that’s because her modern-setting story featuring Fae and elemental influences captured my imagination and contained believable dialogue/no unnatural backstory.
  • One, an Adult Literary, became my alternate, and her creative premise and perfectly executed characters drenched in lyrical prose pulled me in and established an emotional connection. Its premise is very weird so I don’t know about marketability, but we’ll see what we can do.
  • One, an Adult Contemporary, came really close to getting selected as my mentee, but I pulled away after reading additional chapters because the exposition felt heavy filtering in and I wasn’t sure how I could guide it to become more natural. I was in love with its beginning but didn’t maintain that throughout the rest. Gosh, I love this one, though.
  • One, an Adult Fantasy, was mesmerizing with its story of a brilliant protagonist forced to play a game he doesn’t understand, but I passed partly because the beginning felt a little slow and I wasn’t quite as taken with the characters as I wanted to be. I’m still so curious about how it develops and messes with my head!
  • One, an Adult Experimental Fiction, personified an idea and let us watch as the idea poisons people’s lives. It’s just so innovative and compelling, but the weirdness of it and wandering between focus characters made me think I just wouldn’t be able to sell it in the agent round. I still want to devour it.
  • One, a New Adult Science Fiction, bowled me over with its talented protagonist, alien cultural examination, and character writing, but honestly the query made me think the story would go in a dramatic direction I would personally find hard to read. But I became so invested in the characters right away and really want to know what happens to them.
  • And one, an Adult Fantasy, had a hero-champion-is-chosen-to-literally-save-the-world plot, but its execution really won me over. I was personally quite impressed with it, but elected to go with something less traditional, because pitching another savior-of-mankind story would be daunting considering what you need to stand out in that crowd.

What else scored high for me but didn’t make it to page requests? An Adult Science Fiction about a clone situation; great idea and good execution, but I felt like it wasn’t my thing. She got picked up as someone else’s alternate. An Adult Fantasy about a djinni. Fantastic query with pages I didn’t connect to like I wanted to, but I was surprised this one didn’t get picked up. An Adult Thriller in a sort of dystopian future surprised me with how much I liked it because thrillers really aren’t my thing (and that whole detective vibe is why I decided against asking for more). An Adult Science Fiction with a female warrior with alien heritage whose query was super and pages didn’t quite work for me, but really wow. And a peculiar Adult Historical–another thing I almost never connect to–with a premise I loved but an atypical storytelling style and confusing sentence in the query that made me think I should choose something closer to my heart.

Some surprises for me:

I got a handful of straight-up romance novels or people labeling their work romance (but the query blended it with thriller). I wouldn’t absolutely refuse to take a romance if everything about it was amazing, but to be honest it’s a hard sell for me to work with romance–not only because I don’t like it, but because I don’t read it and wouldn’t know how to mentor someone who does read it. I’d probably be giving bad advice and trying to turn it into something it isn’t. I like stories with incidental romance if it’s there at all, and I truly don’t mind if a romance is important in a character’s life, but it can’t be the plot or else it’s just not my thing. I must not have made that very clear in my wish list post because I got more romances than I understood the reason for.

I had a lot of queries with typos. Typos, y’all. Please, we aren’t agents but this contest at least pretends it’s held in a professional capacity for purposes of turning you into professional authors. Maybe I’m weird but I did actually expect perfect proofreading on the queries and near-perfect proofreading on the chapters. A typo wouldn’t absolutely kill you, but for me, it indicated lack of polish. Please watch these.

I was amazed by how engaging some of your stories were. Most of you really knew how to pull me in at the beginning, though a lot of you then turned around and started heaping on the backstory and that ruined it. I was just impressed by some of those first lines, some of those abilities to evoke emotion and establish setting. And how different the voices were, how fresh some of those ideas are, how much fun it was to enter each of your worlds for a few minutes and be glad that I did.

My specific feedback for each of you will go out soon. Please comment if you were one of my submissions and you have something, anything, to say, or even if you weren’t but you have words for me or my audience.

I had a blast writing out my feedback this year and I found that I truly enjoyed picking through the massive flood in my inbox, searching for those gems, and finding some polish and a rag to hand to those whose weren’t quite shiny enough yet.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SUBMITTING TO ME AND PUTTING YOURSELF OUT THERE. I FREAKING LOVE YOU GUYS!

Published Book: The Invisible Orientation

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Well, I did it, folks. The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality is published.

BookCoverIt is now possible to buy it anywhere you want to; I’ve made a list of places I’ve found selling it on my Purchase Page.

Are you interested in seeing its reviews so far? Check it out on Goodreads and Amazon, or look at some of the featured reviews on its page here.

AND if you want to, you can get an autograph for your copy. I am making bookplates available to buy online and have me sign for you, or you can do Authorgraph if you want a signature for your eBook.

I would love for folks to order it to their libraries or check into whether their schools can get it for sexuality and psychology resources. If you’d like an easy-to-print flier to give to someone who can order books for your library or institution, I have the DOC or the PDF available for you!

I hope everyone likes it as much as I liked writing it. 🙂

 

Interview: Why/Why Not, SL Huang

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Today an interview-like blog post I prepared with SL Huang has gone live. They’re really thought-provoking questions and I really enjoyed responding!

[A]sexual people and their loved ones go to the bookstore, look for books about this topic, find a whole lot of nothing, and conclude that they’re alone or asexuality isn’t real. There’s a ton of power in a book being there for those people. I wanted it to exist, so I wrote it.

Read the interview:

Why/Why Not: “The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality”

Review (Sciatrix): The Invisible Orientation

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Sciatrix reviewed my book for The Asexual Agenda, arguably the most popular asexual-themed 201-and-up blog out there. Several of The Asexual Agenda‘s contributors have quotes in my book and were involved in helping me prepare the content of the book.

Overall, this is an excellent resource and introduction to asexuality. I’m really excited about seeing it used in the future, and I would recommend it to anyone who finds they want to introduce people to asexuality without having to personally do 101 for them.

Read the full review by Sciatrix on The Asexual Agenda!

Review (Queenie): The Invisible Orientation

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Asexual community superstar, early reader and contributor, and awesome blogger Queenie has laid down a really comprehensive, mostly glowing, and occasionally critical review for me at Concept Awesome.

Overall, this book is excellent.  It is pretty much everything you could want from a 101 asexuality book.  It’s easy to read, it’s well-organized, it has so much information, and it would be equally appropriate to hand to your professor, your partner, your parent, and your questioning best friend.

Read the full review here!