For those set-upon (and blessed) folks who organize writers’ conferences, Miss Snark has a most excellent post detailing the care and feeding of guest agents.
Miss Snark’s must-haves give a peek into the world of agents.
Next time you’re at a conference, take an agent to lunch or buy one a drink, just because. You may never use their services but your karma will be polished.
News from Internet Resources for Writers:
Checked and updated all links on Business/Submissions.
The page includes subsections:
I also added a separate header for our Miss Snark’s blog.
Occurs to me that at some point I need to port all the content over to a CSS-driven revamped site.
sigh
Not today.
Christopher Lockhart, Executive Story Editor at ICM has a blog called THE INSIDE PITCH: a Hollywood Executive answers questions from screenwriters.
What applies to screenwriters can also apply to writers.
Take a look-see, if screenwriting or fiction writing be your smack.
Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction
Brian Garfield
[Editor's note: In 1994, John Grisham revealed to NEWSWEEK that he credited the following article by Brian Garfield with giving him the tools to create his ground-breaking thriller, THE FIRM , as well as subsequent books. Garfield himself is a noted bestselling novelist, as well as a screenwriter, producer, and nonfiction writer. He won the Edgar Award for HOPSCOTCH, which was made into the prize-winning movie of the same name, starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. For more of this renowned author's credits, please see his bio at the end of this article.]
The English call them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of suspense.
They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don’t fall into restrictive categories. And they’re not circumscribed by artificial systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance.
The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury, Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake. (Now there’s a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was a first novel.
The game’s object: To perch the reader on edge — to keep him flipping pages to find out what’s going to happen next.
The game’s rules are harder to define; they are few, and these are elastic. The seasoned professional learns the rules mainly in order to know how to break them to good effect.
But such as they are, the rules can be defined as follows.
Seranella wrote a New Year’s op-ed for the LA Times to clue us in on how she’s doing since July 2005, when she had two liver transplants, followed by a month-long coma.
I HAVE DEDICATED every shooting star, broken wishbone and blown-out birthday candle to the same thing during the last year: I want my health back.
We want the same for you too, Barbara.
(Seranella’s ninth Munch Mancini murder mystery, DEADMAN’S SWITCH, is due out in April from St. Martins/Minotaur.)
[Thanks for the heads-up on the article, Miss Snark.]
Agent Kristin Nelson has a post up on PubRants giving her “year in statistics.”
Heading up the list:
20,800 (Estimated number of queries read and responded to in 2006)
54 (Number of full manuscripts requested and read)
8 (Number of new clients taken on this year)
21 (Number of books sold this year—not counting subsidiary rights stuff)
6 (Number of projects currently under submission)
The numbers are daunting, aren’t they? But when the nights are long and the wind is howling ’round your door and your spirits are low, remember, the fine words of Wendy Chatley Green:
The odds are against you, but they are less against you if you actually write and submit something.
Or, as Miss Snark says, it doesn’t really matter what the acceptance/rejection rate is for a given agent or publisher when you’re submitting your work. What matters is your work. She signed a client who had had eighty-one rejection letters before she signed him. It only takes one agent to say yes, Miss Snark reminds us.
Ever wonder what it takes to get a cartoon published in the New Yorker? Wonder no more. …
A post at Drawn! contains links to a three-part series over at the Huffington Post in which Matthew Diffee interviews Bob Mankoff.
There’s a very interesting read over at the Huffington Post. New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee has posted a 3-part discussion with Bob Mankoff, the magazine’s infamous cartoon editor. The two discuss the nature of humour, what makes a good cartoon, and I think, more importantly, what defines a New Yorker cartoon and sets it apart from the rest.
[...]
Clicks to the three parts of Diffee’s interview are contained in the blog entry.
Added bonus (for those who read all about the above in m.w and are saying, “So. What.”):
A 2001 Bob Staake interview with Mankoff at PlanetCartoonist.
Man, I mean. How hard can it be to draw one of those little cartoons and think up some caption for it?
People Are Nearly Getting Hit by Beer Bottles Every Day
An Interview with the New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman
BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Nov. 2005
I’m sure you get asked this every time you do an interview, but how does it work? How do you choose the stories you choose?
There are six people in the fiction department. Most of us do nonfiction as well, so we don’t have as much time as it sounds. But basically stories come in, whether they come in through slush or to one of the editors or to me, and they get read and whatever we’re taking seriously gets circulated to all of the editors and we have a meeting once a week where we sit around and argue. Everyone writes a short opinion of the story and those get attached to the manuscript as it makes its way around. And sometimes it happens that all six of us think a story is great—that’s maybe one in 10 of the stories that get to this level. What most often happens is three people like something and three people don’t, or four people versus two. It’s a funny mix and there’s lots of argument—you know, arguments that can be very frustrating because you’re never going to convince the other person, but that is probably what the response is among the readership as well. You just hope that, in general, the majority is going to be affected by what you publish.
Laura Lippman’s updated her self-help essay filled with advice to the writer on selling that first novel.
Step #1?
Finish the damn book.
The essay is short and to the point. Here’s hoping that those who need to read it (hands raised!) will.
[Snitched Repurposed from Miss Snark]
David Louis Edelman posts on book promotion: what worked, what didn’t, what is worth doing, what not.
File this one away for later use, if you can’t use it today.
[Snatched from Bella Stander’s blog. Thank ye, ma’am.]
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