Category Archives: Blog

Pitch Wars feedback is out!

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Just a short one today to say I spent part of the weekend sending out all my feedback to everyone who applied to me in Pitch Wars. I think I wrote around 600 to 800 words for each Pitch Wars participant, with a little more sent to the people whose additional chapters I sampled.

Many of them have replied to the feedback, and I’m amazed (though not surprised) that everyone’s being so gracious about it.

It’s hard to take feedback. Especially on the heels of disappointment if you didn’t get into this particular contest. Even if the feedback comes with some praise, every piece of feedback that would seem pretty tame to most people will feel like a pick-axe on your heart sometimes–especially if you’re not used to it, haven’t had much critique, or thought you were really close only to hear that someone thinks you have a lot of work to do.

And yet everyone’s being so nice about how I beat them up.

I would honestly expect people who are seeking agents to be professionals here. That’s why I’m not surprised it’s like this. And many of them have been very understanding about the fact that the Pitch Wars mentors are usually pretty busy people who have volunteered for the contest and should be prioritizing edits with their mentees. They’ve made it clear to me that they saw my feedback as above and beyond the call of duty, and they’ve expressed so much gratefulness and appreciation.

I don’t need them to lick my butt or praise me for paddling their babies. But it’s just so affirming to hear that I made the right choice in offering feedback to everyone. I don’t do it for the praise or to get followers on Twitter. I do it because every time I see someone reaching this level of expertise, feeling they’re ready to make that step into the professional world, I know that person must be serious. So I take them seriously. And I treat each one–for the minutes I can spare–like it’s the only story in the world, knowing they’ll probably put my words to good use in fertilizing their gardens.

If they weren’t willing to do that, they probably wouldn’t be willing to do research on publishing or enter contests like this anyway.

So this is my thank-you to everyone who’s expressed thanks to me, and I hope you all continue your quests and reach the destinations you desire.

Pitch Wars Analysis: My Submissions

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It’s time for me to commit more nerdery upon you!

Pitch Wars was lovely. I got pretty much exactly what I wanted: lots to choose from, but fewer submissions than last year. Since I love giving feedback on everything I receive, it’s much harder to do a good job on it if you get over a hundred (like I did last year), so this year’s 92 was okay with me. (I got 90 that were eligible; two were marked for categories I was not accepting.)

I selected Lynn Forrest, author of urban fantasy THE MEASURE OF A MONSTER, for my mentee. We don’t have alternates this year, and I was not one of the mentors who volunteered for a second mentee. 

So Julie, what was in your inbox, anyway?
 
For those who do not want to review my Pitch Wars 2015 Nerdy Analysis of my submissions, I received 60% Adult, 40% New Adult. Of my 90 eligible submissions, I got 45 fantasy, 25 science fiction, 6 paranormal, 5 speculative fiction, 3 contemporary, 2 magical realism, 2 women’s fiction, 1 historical, and 1 thriller. I had two manuscripts below 50,000 words and one over 150,000 words, but most were between 80,000 and 100,000 words. And the mentor I had the most submissions in common with was K.T. Hanna.

Hey Julie, what kind of feedback can we expect?

I will be sending out my feedback soonish to everyone who submitted to me, but my day job and my social life have been more demanding than usual this week, so I’ll be rolling it out as soon as I can. I composed 55,646 words of feedback during the consideration window. None of it is “form letter” stuff–though I think form letters with a little bit of feedback are also a good way to handle feedback for the mentors who are not able to offer lots of individualized feedback for various reasons. I had the luxury of working a job that doesn’t take up much of my life and I don’t have to take care of any children and I wasn’t on deadline, so I probably have more opportunity to devote time to this when compared to some of the other mentors. I hope nobody uses my feedback offerings to shame anyone else if they are not able to do the same. Giving feedback is optional in this contest. I hope those of you who submitted to me will be able to benefit from mine!

I am giving specific advice about what to change in query letters, and there are quite a few places where I started line editing. I tended to give more feedback to people who had better submissions, because they were almost there. If I didn’t give much feedback, it’s because I felt like there was too much to fix and stampeding in to micro-manage might not be a good idea for a developing voice. My feedback is fairly irreverent and sometimes extremely goofy. Hopefully it is not going to be interpreted as mean if I joke around with you a little. And there are a few of you who might get personal notes or questions from me. I like to make friends during the contest too. 🙂

Yo, Julie, didn’t you say you give some kind of “score” to submissions?

If you weren’t aware of my nifty Pitch Wars report card, you may be interested to know I gave a rating to every submission I considered, with 25 points possible for the query and 25 points possible for the writing sample. No one got 50 points. The highest score I gave was 22 on the query, 23 on the pages, 45 total. And that score was given to someone who was not my mentee. My mentee was the #2 spot, not the #1. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

Weirdly enough, the person who received the highest score from me isn’t even one of the writers I asked for more pages from. She doesn’t even know she was one of my favorites. (I’ll tell her in the feedback.) I didn’t ask for more pages because I had a personal reason I knew I could not take her manuscript, and it’s frustrating to get someone’s hopes up if you know you won’t end up taking them. Everyone I requested more pages from was someone I honestly considered for the mentee spot.

It just goes to show you how much that “subjective” thing really is true. Everyone does it, all the way up the ladder. Right now I have a manuscript on submission to editors that today got a “not my thing” rejection, you know? I dunno, I think it’s kinda like dating. Some mixture of attraction, common interests, mutual availability, and shared goals results in good matches, and someone who wants to be a good match with you can’t just barge in and say Excuse me, I fulfill what I have determined to be your requirements; you are now required to give me a chance! (Well, they can do that, and sometimes they do. While insisting that they’re quite eligible mates and deserve your attention. Which makes them even less attractive, right?) Oh dear, I have digressed again. Silly me.

How many writers did you request more pages from? 

I only asked for more pages from six writers. I’m not going to reveal who they are here, but I will say I requested four adult urban fantasy books, one adult science fiction book, and one new adult fantasy. Three authors got the same “score” as my mentee did. The one in my group of six with the lowest score–41 points–was the one I came closest to picking for my mentee before I decided to go with Lynn. So I guess my scorecard helps me figure out which individual aspects of writing my applicants are good at, but doesn’t necessarily help me make a decision.

Initially I thought I ought to ask for more pages from everyone who got 40 points or above. That would have been 17 authors! Maybe I should have. If I do Pitch Wars again next year, maybe I will do that.

Julie, did you go to battle over your mentee? Did you lose any battles?

Two of the authors I was considering had at least one other mentor either considering them or choosing them as a mentee. I am a pacifist in most senses and declared that I would not fight any other mentors over mentees. I had enough stuff I liked that I would have simply chosen someone else if it came down to it. So no, no battles for me.

You’ve been doing Pitch Wars for three years, Julie. Did you get any submissions from authors you recognized from previous years?

Yes! One author who’d submitted to me last year submitted to me again this year with a new manuscript. And one author who’d submitted to me last year submitted to me again this year with the same manuscript. Both got high scores from me but neither was my selection.

How many authors who submitted to you had really good submissions? How many just weren’t ready?

This is a hairy question and a sometimes-subjective one. I did sort my submissions into the following categories:

  • Ineligible–wrong category
  • Not ready
  • Ready, but not for me
  • Low maybe
  • High maybe

The high maybes were reserved for folks I requested pages from. If I hadn’t connected with any of the additional chapters in my high maybes, I would have started requesting from my low maybes, but it didn’t happen.

Of my 92 submissions, I had 2 ineligible books, 42 not-ready books, 34 ready-but-not-for-me books, 8 low maybes, and 6 high maybes.

Sometimes stuff I determined to be not ready was enjoyed by other mentors, so I can absolutely say it was subjective. I also put perhaps unfair emphasis on the query letter. Many of the other mentors say the pages matter more than the query, and they’re right, but I also know agents use the query to decide what they want to read, and I did that too. Sometimes if the query was way off, I still put it in the “not ready” pile even if the pages were okay, because it made me feel like the person did not do basic research on what a query is supposed to be, and that indicates lack of readiness in a different way. There were a couple even in my high maybes who had queries that needed some serious work, but they weren’t way off. You definitely need to pay attention to what query letters are if you’re entering a query-letter-centric contest.

What were the biggest problems in the query letters? What were the biggest problems in people’s writing samples?

More or less exactly like last year, in the queries I yelled at people for lack of trajectory or too much/too little detail. 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. 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.

The most common problem I saw was lack of trajectory. The one comment I found myself typing over and over was a request for firming up the straightforward direction of the query. This means when evaluators look at queries, they’re generally looking for you to tell them what happens and who it happens to/who makes it happen. We want to see your character(s) defined; we want to see the problem in your story; we want to see how your character(s) might approach solving said problem; and we want to know the stakes (what will happen if they don’t succeed).

This won’t do for every query, because obviously not every story is so straightforward, and some have more than one problem. But remember, this isn’t an attempt to sum up your book in two paragraphs. This is an attempt to pull us into your story enough to start reading it. You don’t have to tell us everything. You don’t even have to tell us about every plot if your book has several. This is a document that is designed to do nothing more than get us to open your book and read page one.

A list of common issues I saw in the synopsis bits:

  • Too much detail (we need broad brush, not explanations of each plot point)
  • Attempts to insert storytelling into the query (we need story, but not “and her heart soared when he kissed her in the rain”)
  • Presenting final stakes as a question (“Can she save her mother in time?”–yes, probably; now we don’t have to read it)
  • Vague stakes (“or he will lose everything”–nah, tell us what he will lose specifically)
  • Cursing (snark is okay, but I recommend against actually using swear words in the query)
  • Giving too many character names (main characters and villain okay; every member of expedition team, not)
  • Telling the ending (yes, you tell the ending in a “synopsis” attachment; you do not tell the ending in a pitch blurb)
  • Message and themes (show us what your story illustrates, but don’t tell us it’s deep or unique or that it examines human nature)
  • Too much setup (you need to bounce right into the plot, not spend a paragraph on who the character was before the plot happened)
  • Lists of what happens in what order (pitches are not a stark outline of your book’s plot points)

Your Query’s Personal Section:
The most common problem I saw in the bios was irrelevant information. Most people did pretty well giving me just a little taste of their writing background and pub credits (where applicable), but I did get a fair amount that went into loads of detail about their other projects–especially when said projects were unpublished, reviewed by nobodies, or published by nobodies. Queries are for agents who want to get you a mainstream publishing deal. They care about your publication credits and writing affiliations, but they don’t need to know about them if yours aren’t impressive or indicative of a building career.

You should personalize your queries and by all means tell an agent a little something about why you think their website, blog, or Twitter presence suggests you have something reasonably professional in common. But you should not deviate into rambles about your personal life or shift focus onto other projects.

A list of common issues I saw in personal sections:

  • Authors telling me who they think they write like
  • Authors comparing their work to established work and giving me long-winded explanations of why it’s similar
  • Authors telling me this is their first book (and I say don’t do this because this is like going into an interview saying “Hello, I’ve never done this before, but hire me!”)
  • Authors claiming their self-published books or small-press books got good reviews on Amazon (please focus on THIS project, and only quote professional reviews for other projects)
  • Authors telling me they’ve been rejected by others
  • Authors sharing details about why they wrote the book
  • Authors launching into in-depth explanations of special rules in their fantasy books and explaining their cool concepts, divorced from story
  • Authors discussing their writing or publishing process (do not say how long it took to write, how many agents you’ve queried, how long you’ve been looking for representation, how many revisions you’ve done, or who you hired to edit it–notifying me that it’s been proofread as a guarantee of quality is a mistake, because we expect professional quality)

I hear that agents also often get promises from authors that the book is going to sell well and/or transform the genre and life as we know it, but I didn’t actually see any like that. If you were considering making promises about the sales and success, don’t.

Your Sample Pages

By far, the most common problem (and the most fatal problem) in people’s sample pages for me was unnatural backstory. If you are already launching into history and context and setting up your world while your characters stand still and it’s in the first five pages, I know you haven’t quite figured out how to tell this story. You’ve figured out your stuff, you’ve realized it needs to be in the story, and then you’ve . . . dumped it on us at the beginning. I tune out. Because I’m not invested yet. I have to care first. If you begin a novel by expecting me to sit for a lecture first, you’ve mistaken your book for a class I have to take. I don’t have to be here. I can put the book down anytime I want. Remember that and get us hooked immediately.


Marry background details to character perspectives, natural revelations through story, or dialogue. And you can probably leave out more than you think. We’re pretty observant–we’ll figure it out.A list of other common issues I saw in sample pages:

  • Telling (narration tells me a protagonist is good, or has been a doctor for 10 years, or has three children, instead of letting me just see it come up)
  • Characters have an awkward conversation about things they both/all know so I can learn about it
  • Setting and situational backstory relayed through narration and divorced from character
  • Spelling and grammar errors (!!!)
  • Disconnected storytelling (I passively watched the character do things without understanding what they wanted or why they were doing it)
  • Opening with something exciting, then backing up halfway down the page to tell me how we got here and slowing the momentum considerably
  • A feeling that I would have to be patient to get to the good part (I shouldn’t feel like I’m humoring an author by reading their stuff; they need to make me want to read it!)

I was excited that I really got very few clichés, though. I didn’t see a lot of authors writing the opening that describes the sky or the weather. I didn’t see the protagonists waking up on a normal day and trying to decide what to do next. I don’t think I had anyone describe their protagonists by having them look in the mirror.

Anything else cool to tell us? 

Well, you tell me what you want to know! Here’s just one more cool factoid: Protagonist names!

I’m a name nerd and I love paying attention to naming trends. There was no one Most Popular Name in my submissions, but I went through to see if I could find any patterns, and the most I could find was I had two Alexes, two Ambers, two Claires, and two Victorias. (I only counted one protagonist for each book, and if it had multiple perspectives, I just picked the character whose name was mentioned first.) Here’s the list of protagonist names in my 92 submissions, for all you other name nerds!

  • Abigail
  • Addie
  • Addisyn
  • Adela
  • Adele
  • Alby
  • Aldonza
  • Aleks
  • Alex (2)
  • Alistair
  • Allison
  • Alyssira
  • Amber (2)
  • Ami
  • Ana
  • Anna
  • Arietta
  • Blake
  • Brandy
  • Cami
  • Carrie
  • Cassandra
  • Charlotte
  • Christine
  • Ciro
  • Claire (2)
  • Cole
  • Daphne
  • Dhel
  • Dillard *
  • Dinah
  • Edison
  • Eithne
  • Emma
  • Enzo
  • Erissa
  • Erling
  • Evelyn
  • Freya
  • Greg
  • Hadley
  • Hope
  • Horatio
  • Ian
  • Inga
  • Jack
  • Jamie
  • Jay
  • Jem
  • Jeremiah
  • Jim
  • John
  • Katherine
  • Keegan
  • Kerry
  • Kharis
  • Kitty
  • Lavie
  • Letty
  • Linus
  • Luke
  • Maggie
  • Marietta
  • Marla
  • Mike
  • Natalie
  • Nathan
  • Nora
  • Nyra
  • Peet
  • Reilly
  • Rhiannon
  • Riam
  • Robert (R.J.)
  • Rose
  • Sam
  • Santos
  • Sara
  • Silen
  • Simon
  • Suzanne
  • Theo
  • Tilly
  • Tiny
  • Verity
  • Victoria (2)
  • Vivian
  • Zayria

* (“Dillard” was listed as a protagonist’s last name, but no first names of protagonists appeared to be listed in the query.)

My Mentee for Pitch Wars 2015

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Last night, Brenda Drake surprised all the Pitch Wars participants by announcing the mentors’ picks early, and it was so much fun watching my new mentee celebrating on Twitter and getting so excited!

Er, oh yeah . . . everyone meet my new Pitch Wars mentee for 2015, Lynn Forrest!

Lynn is the author of a nifty urban fantasy entitled THE MEASURE OF A MONSTER. It is a very odd pick for me because it includes both vampiric creatures and a sort of detective story, neither of which is generally my bag at all. But there are a ton of reasons I picked it . . . and I’ll be able to discuss these more coherently after I’ve had some time to settle into editing the book. 😉

I’m quite happy to be working with Lynn. And it really is a great feeling to make someone’s day (even though it meant I had to disappoint 91 other people), and because I think Lynn and I are really going to get along well. Before I knew if I was going to pick her, I definitely wanted to be pals based on her values and her interaction style. Making a new friend is always something to get excited about. (At least, if you’re me!)

Pitch Wars Contest: Mentee Chosen

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After receiving more than 90 applications from prospective mentees in my third year participating in Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest, I have chosen my mentee. (We did not get to have alternates this year.) I wrote over 55,000 words of feedback and critiqued every query letter and set of sample pages that came into my inbox.

Congratulations to Lynn Forrest, whose Adult urban fantasy THE MEASURE OF A MONSTER actually made me like a story about bloodsuckers and detectives, featuring queer characters and absolutely beautiful writing. 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.

You can see all the mentors and mentees here.

Hopefully, I will be able to post with agenting news for Lynn before long! But for now, as always, it’s back to work.

Me as a Mentor

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Well, the time is drawing near: Pitch Wars mentors are finalizing their picks, and entrants are biting their nails (or, er, anxiously awaiting the announcement, as the case may be). Backstage, we’re discussing our intentions–are we going to offer edit letters for those whose work we sampled beyond the initial chapter? Are we going to send feedback? Are we going to tell our backup picks how close they were and offer to help them later? Are we going to put our mentees through hell?

That last is the intention of quite a few mentors, by the way. If by “hell” I mean Really Big Revisions over the course of two months. I think the ability to issue requests for huge developmental editing changes is really amazing, because I don’t think I’ve ever done it. I’ve never read someone’s work and said “cut this perspective” or “switch to third person” or “add a character who does X” or “make it end like this.” And I’ve known authors whose mentors or critique partners have said things like that and made their books way better, and they’re grateful for it, and they successfully get signed or sold under that advice.

But I’ve never been comfortable doing stuff like that. If I find a book that doesn’t work for me, I usually don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what it “needs” most of the time, though I might be able to identify what I don’t like about it, where it falls apart for me, what isn’t satisfying, or what aspect causes disconnect on my end. I’m better with little changes (especially grammar and sentence structure), and I can be pretty excellent with helping develop characters. But I worry that injecting specific direction on a really big scale might, in my case, interrupt the author’s ability to develop the story or the authenticity of their storytelling voice, so I find myself unable to “finish their sentences” for them, so to speak. The most I can do is point out if their sentence isn’t finished or contradicts itself somehow. Then I leave them to figure out how to fix it.

So what can my mentee expect from me when the choices are announced?

  • I’ll be offering a ton of line editing. Grammar, punctuation, the works.
  • I’ll give honest opinions about what I think is working well and what I think is lacking.
  • I will probably yell at the characters in the margins, make ridiculous jokes, talk back to people, type sarcastic comments, and give a play-by-play of what I’m thinking as I read.
  • I will definitely provide guidance on the query, top to bottom; I think I’m pretty good with queries, and letters that come through me generally do result in requests.
  • I will give honest, though not necessarily nice, realistic thoughts on my mentee’s chances of getting published.
  • I will be there to bounce ideas off of, to come to with questions about querying or specific agents or basic writing insecurities.
  • I will be more than willing to listen to both doom-and-gloom raving and over-the-top squeeing as we ride the publishing train together.
  • I will be a friend if my mentee wants one.

I don’t want to be the hard-ass who insists you take my advice or fail, and I don’t want to create a situation where you feel intimidated and pressured to do what I want. I’m okay with a little “please help, Obi-Wan!” because I understand we in Pitch Wars Land have cultivated this understanding that mentors theoretically know what they’re talking about, and if you look up to me that’s fine and dandy–I guess you’re supposed to. But I want you to understand I don’t intend to put myself on a pedestal or Tough Love your manuscript to the point that you don’t recognize it. I will indeed murder unnecessary commas and squawk indignantly at every misused homophone, but I do not want to compromise the soul of your book, and I want us to have the kind of relationship where you’ll tell me if you think I’m wrong about something.

That said, I do of course want respect for my time and realistic expectations of my literary magic. I do take some responsibility for how well we do in this contest together, but I cannot guarantee that an agent will nibble on you or sign you, and I don’t want to get singularly blamed or crap-talked if the stars don’t align for glorious victory. You’ll have my support and my advice and hours and hours of my time, and I like to think most people who submitted to me would be happy with the level of attention I will devote to polishing their work and getting it ready for the world.

In Pitch Wars 2013, I chose Whitney Fletcher as my mentee. I had an issue with one of his early scenes feeling too crowded with character cameos, and when I gave him direction he came up with a solution far more elegant than anything I could have suggested. He took direction awesomely throughout. He got an offer of representation two days after the contest closed and is currently represented by Lana Popovic. We are still in touch regularly, chatting by phone, Skype, and Twitter DMs.

My alternate team for Pitch Wars 2013 consisted of Ryan Glover and Jessica Gunn. We don’t have alternates this year, but it was pretty cool to have them in previous years. Jessica ended up selling her book without an agent to Curiosity Quills. Ryan completed edits with me and continued seeking representation, and he got to listen to me praise his work in person when he took me out for sandwiches when I was in his neighborhood lecturing at Princeton.

Last year I picked Megan Paasch and Natalka Burian as my mentee team, with Megan as my mentee and Natalka as my alternate. Megan did a bang-up job polishing the heck out of her book and tweaking her query, leading to multiple requests during the agent round. I haven’t managed to play witness to her happy pairing with an agent yet, but we’ll see! And Natalka, the author of the weirdest book I read in 2014, mostly just got line editing from me until I told her what I didn’t like about the ending, and she rewrote it in a phenomenal way that wham-bammed me. When I was in New York for the Lambda Awards Natalka bought me a nice Italian lunch.

So it’s pretty much a rule now that if I come to your city you have to buy me food if I mentored you.

Thanks, future mentee, you’re too kind!

I look forward to working with you, whoever you are, as I pretend not to know who I’m picking. Can’t wait to spill the beans and find out what I can do for you–what your book needs, what your publishing journey will hold, and what we can be to each other as writers and crit partners. (This is your warning that I have been known to hit up past mentees for beta reading.)

::quietly slips onto the Pitch Wars train and rides away::

Nerdy Pitch Wars Analysis 2015

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So it’s time for me to commit some nerdery around here.

Pitch Wars! The submissions window is closed! Which means I’ve received all the submissions I’m going to receive and I can now start narrowing it down. How would you like a peek inside my inbox?

No, I’m not going to tell you which entries I’m liking or any hints about how many authors I’ve requested additional pages from. I’m just going to tell you some stuff about what people sent me. 😉

Last year was pretty overwhelming. I had over 100 submissions (AND MY BOOK WAS RELEASING THE SAME WEEK). I tried to be a little more restrictive in my bio this year and make it clear that I honestly want to focus on SF/Fantasy/SpecFic, and really don’t want submissions featuring romance-centric stories or stories grounded entirely in reality. That seems to have worked a little; I did get fewer submissions this year than I got last year.

How many eligible submissions did I receive, you ask?

90.

90 people would actually want goofy old me to mentor them. Hahaha.

Now I’m going to show you some graphs, so please get out of here if that frightens you. (Or if the photo of me wearing Hello Kitty earmuffs frightens you.) (Or if I frighten you in general.)

Just go. I mean it. I’m gonna graph.

You were warned.

First up: CATEGORY.

I received 2 manuscripts that were not Adult or New Adult, so I’ll have to disqualify those. Of the remaining 90: How many were Adult and how many were New Adult?

I was surprised by how many New Adult submissions I got! At first I thought there must have been a mistake because my first five submissions were all New Adult, and last year only 17% of my inbox was New Adult. It’s really growing as a category! And I have consistently chosen a mixture of Adult and New Adult manuscripts for my team in the past, so I would say the New Adult has just as much of a chance.

Now let’s try something more complicated: Genre.

Last year we had drop-down boxes with predefined genres. This year we had fill-in-the-blank. I’m not a huge fan of that because people are notorious for making up their own genres or handing us four or five in one to make this weird fusion genre, and that makes it just that much harder to pitch. So first I’m going to show you a version of my genre breakdown with simplified genres (which you can click for a better view if it runs into the sidebar or doesn’t show up properly for you):

Now here’s what it looks like according to the authors’ interpretation of their genres:

I think I prefer having it identified as a more easily categorized, mainstream genre first, then having “X with Y elements” or whatever just mentioned in the query somewhere. That helps agents understand how you think the book should be handled marketing-wise.

So, anyway. Clearly I got a ton of science fiction and fantasy! I’m excited that I got some with LGBT elements and some unconventional takes on the genres. Can’t wait to be dazzled by all the strange worlds (or weirdness lurking in our own world!).

So what else nerdy can I show you? How about some word count graphs?

Here is a representation of how long the books in my submission pile are.

As you’d expect, the sweet spot is 80,000 words to 100,000 words, with mostly New Adult manuscripts taking the lower end and big fat fantasy novels spiking up to 150,000 words. My one submission that was over 150,000 was also over 200,000. Ahh, I remember those days. One of my novels was 255,000 words. It became a trilogy. Wheee! I was also puzzled by one submission claiming to be 4,900 words. Even if they meant 49,000, that’s still pretty short for a New Adult book, but we’ll see.

And just when you thought I must be done . . . NOPE.

Pitch Wars twins! Since submitting authors could choose five mentors, some of us were especially popular in certain genres. Which mentors did I share the MOST submissions with?

 


By far, the mentor with the most submissions in common with me is K.T. Hanna. We shared 50 submissions, which is more than half of my entire haul! Sounds like we must like a lot of the same things! Hayley Stone, J.C. Nelson, and Lynnette Labelle shared a large number with me as well, and I wasn’t surprised to see quite a few in common with Emmie Mears, Samantha Joyce, and Charlie N. Holmberg. A few of the folks listed above with submissions in common with me actually shouldn’t have been there, because occasionally someone would send a submission to a mentor who does not take that category (but some of the mentors on their list DO take the category).

I’m going through my submissions slowly and writing feedback as I go, just like the last couple years. We aren’t announcing our picks until September, so I’ve got some time, and I want to make sure to do a really nice thorough job. So far I’ve had a great time chugging through the submissions, and I can’t wait to find out which ones I’ll fall in love with.

Okay, so that’s enough of my splashing geekery all over you. Let me know if there’s another aspect of my submissions you want me to analyze for you, and we’ll see about getting some more graphs going! (You know I just want to be distracted, right?)

Hope you enjoyed that. 🙂

Video: What Goes In My Bio?

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In anticipation of Pitch Wars giving me a whole new crop of query letters to leaf through, I decided to make this video about what authors should put in their query letter bios, with some tips about what to consider.

The takeaway:

  1. Be brief
  2. Be relevant
  3. Be humble
  4. Be recent
  5. Make it tailored

Avoiding the Red Pen of Doom

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Hey!

So you Pitch Wars folks may have heard I’m a grumpy editor and that I will be grading your papers–excuse me, your manuscripts–extra hard on silly things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, and word use.

Well, you heard right.

I don’t really want to spend this post rambling about the importance of a polished manuscript, so if you want to read my philosophy on the topic–which could be summed up as “please don’t make me be your literary janitor”–I have already written a post on that. But one major reason you want your manuscript to avoid certain common errors is that doing so makes us feel like we’re in good hands.

Ahh, we think when our internal editor can go to sleep and just enjoy the story. Finally. Someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s it, really. I want to feel that sense of confidence, like I’m dealing with a professional. For that reason–and because I would love to work with a mentee in Pitch Wars who will allow me to give my red pen a rest–I am now going to lay out the most common glitches I find myself yelling at people about over and over again during editing.

You may be surprised what you don’t know. Trust me here.

1. Extra spaces.

The standard now is ONE space after terminal punctuation. If you currently have a manuscript featuring two spaces after sentences, you’ll need to globally replace every set of two spaces with one space. You don’t want to look outdated/old-fashioned. I also often find two spaces between regular words, or even more than two spaces, so I recommend a good old automatic search-and-replace.

2. Mixture of straight quotes and curly quotes.

Nearly every manuscript I’ve edited has this problem and I don’t know why, but this formatting inconsistency is usually a consequence of editing in more than one program. (I’ve heard conversion to Word from Scrivener sometimes causes this if you then start editing inside Word after the conversion, for instance.) You should do a final once-over to make sure your quotes are all curly or all straight. Inconsistency looks sloppy and we can see what parts you’ve been messing with. You need to be especially careful about apostrophes; sometimes they flip the wrong way if they’re curly, and apostrophes should look like a tiny nine, not a tiny six.

3. Inappropriate use of single quotes.

US standards and UK/Australian standards are sometimes different on punctuation, and this is one of those times. But since I am US-based, I am explaining the US rule. Dialogue should be in double quotation marks. Quotations should be in double quotation marks. Scare quotes are also double quotation marks. Single quotation marks rarely make an appearance except inside doubles (to indicate something quoted inside something else that’s being quoted). I’m not sure why it’s so common for authors to use single quotes like my example above, but you shouldn’t.

4. Inappropriate dialogue rendering.

Dialogue appears to be one of the world’s last great mysteries to some folks. I see quoted text blending into stage direction that’s handled like a speech tag; I see commas used after question marks and exclamation marks; I even see people forgetting their commas before speech tags or using the wrong capitalization/punctuation for attaching speech tags. Bottom line is that you should end your dialogue with terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks unless the sentence continues outside the quotation marks to attach a dialogue tag, and if what follows after the comma is NOT a dialogue tag, it needs to be converted to the proper verb form before you add it on there. (For instance, in the first example in the graphic above, you’d write “Just don’t,” she said, walking away scowling, or “Just don’t.” She walked away scowling, or “Just don’t,” she said as she walked away scowling.

5. Improper rendering of ellipses.

Ellipses baffle many. That’s probably partly because three dots looks right and four looks like too many, and partly because there is a special character to create ellipses that converts automatically in some programs. Well, the Chicago Manual of Style is a common style guide for many editors and publishers, and these days it recommends spaces before, between, and after a set of three periods to indicate a pause–unless it is at the end of a sentence, in which case you get a fourth period that ends the sentence (flush against the sentence it ends, just like a regular period), followed by the spaced-out periods. It’s also not three periods followed by one space, which I also see a lot.

6. Improper rendering of dashes.

Dashes! Ask anyone who’s ever received editing from me: I harass people mercilessly over dashes. Turns out people don’t know there are different punctuation marks for different types of pauses, and many authors don’t know the difference between the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash.

The key:

( – ) Hyphen (shortest!): Used for connecting related words, like short-haired and dust-covered. Or for number words like forty-two. It is not used for a pause in a sentence. Created using the hyphen key on the keyboard.

( – ) En dash (medium!): Used for certain rare, peculiar hyphenations that involve connecting a two-or-more-word phrase to another word, like Michael Jackson–themed or yellow jasmine–scented. It is also used for ranges, like scores (“they beat us 27–6!”) or in substitution of the word “to” (“the Canada–United States border”). Created using alt-0150 on the keypad.

( — ) Em dash (longest!): Used to indicate interruption or pause in a sentence. You can use it to indicate that someone’s dialogue is getting cut off (“But you said I could if I—”) or to set off separate phrases or asides inside a sentence (The clown—still wearing his red nose—sighed deeply) or to add another idea to an existing one (Sometimes I think about dropping out—it’d be a relief, really). Created using alt-0151 on the keyboard.

The em dash is also sometimes indicated by two hyphens next to each other ( — ). If you are formatting your manuscript without the special dash character (which sometimes is converted automatically to a special dash character if you type two hyphens), you should not include spaces before, between, or after the dashes.

Please don’t make me yell at you over your dashes.

7. Comma splices.

Ever heard of comma splices? I used to have all kinds of comma splices in my writing until I found out they were a no-no. Comma splices can be hard to explain–both what they are and why they’re unacceptable–but once you get the idea of what they are, they start to jump out at you everywhere. Comma splices are essentially when a comma is used to join two parts of a sentence that should be more independent from each other. They usually need a stronger separation–such as a period, a dash, or a semicolon. The example above could be fixed with a semicolon or a period, just depending on stylistic preference. I tend to see comma splices more often in sentences that are already quite long, with several of them in a row. Look up comma splices online to figure out what they look like if it’s not clear to you already, and then kill them all.

8. Unnecessary, “creative,” or adverb-infested dialogue tags.

Dialogue tags are one of the most frequently decorated parts of an amateur writer’s manuscript. One good rule of thumb is to avoid telling us how someone said something if what they said already made it clear. You don’t need to find a flashy word like roared or expectorated if the tone is already obvious just from reading the quote, and if someone says something pleasant and well-mannered, you don’t have to add “she said politely.” Give us adverbs or clarifying permutations for the word “said” or “asked” if something about it is not clear from the dialogue itself, like if the phrase is whispered and we wouldn’t otherwise know, or if it’s said sarcastically (provided we can’t tell already from context).

I think the main reason people think these gaudy tricks are good writing is that they imagine variation makes their sentences more attractive and innovative, but all it really shows is that they don’t know the purpose of dialogue tags. Think of your writing as a road and your plot as a series of tourist attractions. Your job as you lay out the road is to guide your drivers to the attractions; the storytelling is the highway, and the stage directions and dialogue tags are instructions for traveling it correctly. You want the roadside signs to guide the drivers, not become pretty enough that they’re mistaken for attractions themselves. Their job is to guide the driver and get out of the way–to be as invisible as they can be while still being understood.

9. Inconsistent usage.

Inconsistent usage is tough to nail down because every writer has different problem spots, but I see it often in stuff like “toward” and “towards” both being used in the same manuscript (you should pick one and use it consistently, “toward” being more commonly accepted, and the only exception is dialogue). Usually I’ll see this with authors sometimes capitalizing a person’s title and sometimes not; or spelling, hyphenating, or capitalizing special terms made up for the story differently each time.

10. Extraneous phrases and words.

Extraneous words are clutter. They jumble your sentences, make them more awkward to read, and can even slow down your pacing. “She wondered if she’d ever see another thunderstorm” is way more effective than “She found herself beginning to wonder whether or not there was ever going to be another thunderstorm.” Not only is the former around half the length of the latter, but it’s so much more readable and effective.

Watch for unnecessary words and phrases like started to, began to, and in order to. Avoid phrases that are redundant, like whether or not (just whether works) or thought to herself (unless the character’s speaking telepathically, they are most likely always going to be thinking “to themselves”). Cut unnecessary uses of the word that. Avoid using really, quite, and very if they’re not necessary (and this is where creative word swaps do come in handy; I’d rather see “enormous” than “very big”). And try to avoid the word thing (except in dialogue) if you can think of a more specific word that describes what thing.

I can deal with a few writing quirks and mistakes here and there. I’m good at helping authors identify their language problems, and I’m sure whoever I choose for my mentee will have a couple glitches I can help them with. (For the record, ending sentences with prepositions is accepted usage in informal writing, and starting sentences with coordinating conjunctions is similarly fine. These are not the types of petty problems I scream about.) However, I would prefer to work with someone who won’t make me feel like I’m grading an English paper or watching out for mistakes all the time. Learn these common problems, excise them from your book, and help keep all of my hair in my head.

And for those of you who will still insist on committing these sins . . . be prepared to feel the sting of my mighty red pen.

Video: “Strong Female Characters”

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The “Strong Female Characters” title is in quotation marks because I mean it a little differently than people might think I do.

In this video, I explain how a “strong” female character is actually one that has agency and is an active participant in her own storyline. Often, these days, in a well-meaning attempt to diversify female characters and teach equality, writers and publishers are pushing an image of traditional femininity as weakness, and consequently presents girls and women in media who reject femininity and embrace more traditionally masculine attitudes, clothes, language, and roles as a way to show their strength. My video explains why this is not the only way to make a female character strong, and why we need other images of strength too.

 

Completed New Novel: Bad Fairy Trilogy, Book 2

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Finished writing the second book of Bad Fairy!

Genre: Fantasy (fairy tale retelling).

Length: 26 chapters/320 pages/~97,000 words.

Tag line: “What happened before Sleeping Beauty slept?”

Keywords: FANTASY: Fairy tale retelling, medieval period fantasy, Sleeping Beauty, fairies, magic, magick, dark fantasy, reincarnation, elemental magic, identity issues, quirky narrators, epistolary, autobiography (character).

Protagonist: Delia Morningstar.

POV: First person, past tense.

About:

Delia Morningstar, fresh out of fairy school, has to find a way to make a living now that everyone thinks her life’s work is spooky and off-putting.  Her last desperate attempts to change the minds of those in power do not yield the desired results, so Delia’s off on her own . . . investigating the land of the dead.  Because that’s what dark fairies do for fun.

Because of Delia’s life and death connections, she’s able to help the king and queen of her kingdom conceive the baby girl they’ve always wanted.  But she didn’t count on the connection she would have with that princess, and a few sloppy decisions lead Delia to get blamed for cursing the baby.  Faced with the wrath of her old enemies the three good fairies, Delia may have to undertake extreme measures to stay alive long enough to save the princess from death. . . .

Next up: Editing begins. Eeeeeep.