Quick Update

Joe was kind enough to work with me on producing a tighter query letter (Thank you, again) and I've started the process all over again with a new sheet of potential agents. I did find this tool that I thought you would be interested in:

Querytracker.net

The free version allows you to search for and contact agents that specialize in your particular genre of writing - before this I was sitting there with a copy of Writer's Marketplace and a highlighter, noting potential agents and putting them into a Google doc.

This is a laborious process as you can imagine, since Writer's Marketplace is published every year and contact information can change quickly. I was still having to Google each agent for more information after reading through WM and I found it exhausting. So we'll see where this goes - I'll keep you posted.

Still...

I describe myself as a 'successful writer' in that, I've written something and sometimes people care to read it. As Mr. Quirk points out in other blog posts - most writers also have day jobs and I'm no exception. As it stands, I work in a fairly large and unnamed corporation as a contract IT resource - I'm the guy that you don't think of as very important and ironically, I've seen all of your emails and personal files. Weird.

More Quirky Love

Joe Quirk over at SFGate gave me some more love yesterday - I feel all fuzzy inside.

"Starting Over" - Published on Hackwriters.com

(Just Like) Starting Over was re-published on Hackwriters. It was first published on Indiebloggers.org (now dead) and I'm happy to see it get some life again.

Some More News...

Again - major apologies for not keeping you posted. Things have been looking up - at least I'm moving in the right direction. Here's a recap of what has been happening with the novel:

• In the past 6 months, I've sent ~60 queries to different agents as referenced in the Writer's Marketplace. 60 queries, 30 rejections and one request for more of the novel that later turned into a rejection.
• I started talking to Joe Quirk over at SFGate.com's City Brights. We had a conversation that later turned into this blog post about getting published.
• Later conversations with Joe turned into this conversation - I'll just quote it:

"If your first 15 pages is killer, your goal is to get them to turn over the letter and read page one. They will decide to turn you down by the bottom of page one. If they are hooked, they make keep
reading, then call you and ask for the rest. Despite their
frustration with the "slush pile," agents long to find the next new
writer."

and my response was:
Joe - I have no way to tell whether my novel is a slow opener, other than to simply give you the first two or three pages and see what you think. All I really need is 'slow-opener' or not - or "this sucks" or not No other work required. Thanks and apologies in advance
...and then I sent the first 3 pages of the novel to him. Joe's response was:

Holy s***, dude, the answer is Yes.
You passed this test: I said, "Uh-oh, another writer wants me to read his chapter. Will I have to tell him it's bad? Let me just glance at the first sentence and look at it later. Hey, I just read a whole paragraph. Hey this is ... "
Then my mind turned off and I just read. That's a sign of a good story. I say, just a mention of who you published with, an opening paragraph, and then this chapter with an SASE, and you're good to go. Send to 25 agents at once.

And so I have a best-selling author telling me that he loves what I wrote. If that's not the definition of 'awesome', I don't know what is.

New Stuff

My tremendous apologies for lack of updates - here's what has been happening:

I've been trying to get published. This is a tedious process with no clear, proven path and even less so for someone who hasn't been published before. There have been some bright spots and I wanted to share one of them with you:

Joe Quirk over at SFGate was sympathetic to my plight and had some interesting insights that became this blog post. If you're also starting out in the game, you are usually free to ask for help and if you do it often enough you'll find the mentorship and assistance you're seeking. Be sure to say thank you.

There's more to say but I'll update you in a post later today - this is something I wanted to have written on its own. Cheers.

Doing It All - A Short Story I forgot I wrote

Found this going through files; forgot I had it and I actually kind of enjoy it. See what you think...

This thing in my gut is killing me.

The cheap Chinese food gave me gutrot just when I needed to be my most focused. I’m in the middle of Afternoon Drive. I have to read the news in a few seconds. Huey Lewis and the News are winding down on “Doing it All For My Baby” and it’s time for news on the quarter.

One of the tenets of pop hits in the seventies and eighties is, no cold endings. Take the last line of the song, repeat two or three times and start fading out on the fourth through the whatever. Somehow I guess it implies that the group would continue the song forever and ever.

Doing it (Doing it) DOING IT DOING IT DOING IT, YEAH…(rinse, repeat…)

I tap my mic open and pot up. “Ninety-two-five Kay Cee OOOH ARRRR!” I’ve been doing this for so long that I can back-announce a song in my sleep. Shoot straight into the news, a live-read commercial for aluminum siding and a PSA featuring Hollywood Schmuck #47 telling us all not to drink and drive before we’re right back into a 7-song super set featuring all your favorites from the seventies, eighties, nineties and today!

I guess I should be grateful. Unlike a lot of studios, this one actually has a window with a decent view. I glance up between carted commercials at the mammoth gray storm clouds piling up on the horizon. Flood Advisories have been issued; I might need a raft to float out of my apartment in the morning.

The studio smells like electronics; that dusty, tangy smell. Electronics, plastic, sweat and Chinese food. It’s about the size of a walk-in closet. There’s a space on the other side of the studio, behind glass, for a board op, if I had one. I remember back when I had one…times are different now.

Four hours in a hot little studio. Three or four hours of show prep…a staff meeting about some live remote that I really don’t want to go to. The gutrot is getting worse – those really painful cramps. The program manager was fired last week and we’re all discussing the very real possibility that we’ll be fired as of this time next week. Rory the Janitor has more job security than we do. Rory helps me remember that I could always have it worse.

I hate the radio now.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of it. The two wacky-morning-DJs of my town seemed so cool and awesome that I knew what I wanted to do. Out of high school and into the state university to get a communications degree. Intern during the summer working the 95 Fun Booth at the county fair, the car show, the art and wine festivals. I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming – I was so in love with the idea of being on the radio, having a show and being Person X of the “X & Y…Mornings on KPUTZ!” format.

No one ever tells you what you should do when your dream not only sucks, it’s over, and your college degree doesn’t translate well into another line of work. I feel like I want to punch every career advisor in the face who, when I told them I wanted to work in radio and they give you the air fart response of “well…have a backup plan” and didn’t reach across the desk and take me by both ears and go “RADIO SUCKS!”

I wish I could go back in time and do that for me.

I wish I’d made different choices and now I have a really difficult one in front of me. I’m not sure I’m ready for it. Chuck the job, admit I was wrong and go get some schooling for a different career. Spend the next 20 years trying to pretend that I don’t hate my job with a passion.

I was cruising home as the rain began to fall. No more take-out for me. I’m still driving the old Dodge 4X4 that my Dad gave me when I left the state. We had a fight last week, over the phone, about why I haven’t found a better job yet. Four years and sixty grand in student loans he co-signed…he’s still looking for a return on his investment.

Not everything is an investment, Dad, I told him. He started to respond but I hung up, I’m sick of hearing it. He left a voicemail the other day, asking me to call – I’m letting him dangle. The Dodge’s fading yellow paint job was making me think about that last visit home and there’s no need for me to call him with that going on.

Dad’s claim to fame – other than being an insurance claim adjuster – is his “Life is a cabernet!” column that gets published once a week in the local paper. I guess I couldn’t equate success with being a wine snob for a cut rate paper. It murders him when old ladies recognize him in the supermarket. There’s a winery in California that has the same tagline – I secretly hope they’ll sue him.

I arrive home with a plastic bag from the market. A bagged salad and a bottle of the pink stuff. I slipped an older Chow Yun Fat movie into the player and watched it with the sound off. The dialogue is about as necessary to the movie as my grade-point average to this job. I think I unconsciously picked out my apartment for its cave-like qualities. Bottom floor of a squeaky-floored ex-motel. There’s a bright orange light that glares into my apartment all night. Until I bought heavy curtains for the place – the evil thing was giving me a tan in my sleep.

My brother – the younger one – is a famous rock star…another irony. He was the slacker kid, smoking pot and skating 8 hours a day. Picked up a guitar and found he had some talent. Turned his aspirations from skater to rock god. Almost made it – I was hearing his first single on the rock top 40 for a few minutes. As far as music goes, my tastes are so far away from what actually sells that it’s not even worth looking at the back page of Rolling Stone anymore.

I don’t talk to him either. My on-air name is different from my real one, but since my real name is about as common as “Johnson” I’ve never had anyone come up to me and go “Hey, are you related to…?” Puke that he is, he never calls anyway. I guess we both arrived at music through different avenues. I never got out of the garage-band/coffee-house scene, myself.

I slipped some Chow Yun Fat movie into the player with the sound off. Salad and half of a bottle of the pink stuff later, I’m semi-comatose on the sofa. My buddy Chad called and we commiserated about the job situation at the station. He’s already got check tapes out to all the other stations in our market and he wanted to know what I had done about it. When I told him ‘nothing’, he about hit the roof.

“Dude, what are you gonna do then?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I hadn’t thought of it.” The silence from his end meant that I was making a huge mistake in his book. He’s my friend because even when he thinks I’m being a retard, he won’t call me on it.

“Well, good luck with that, bro,” he said. That’s about as close to a rebuke as he gets. He hung up and the phone rang again a few minutes later. I picked it up thinking that it was Chad again.

“Hello, son,” my dad said. I grimaced…I am definitely not up for this.

“Hi, Dad. What’s up?”

“Your brother.”

“What? Did he OD?” Dad was being very terse – it wasn’t good news. The drug issue was legitimate – my brother had been in rehab twice. I’m sure you read about it in a few glam rags.

“No…bus crash.”

“Hold on.” I held the phone to my ear and fired up my old laptop. “Is he okay?”

He sighed. “No, Don.”

“So is he…” I began.

“Jake’s dead, Don!” Dad shouted - his voice breaking. “He died an hour ago.” I wish I could say that I experienced a shock of some kind. Aren’t you supposed to feel that when your brother dies?

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said after a moment.

“Just come home, Don,” he said and hung up.


* * *

“I’m sorry, I just can’t spare you,” John the program director said. Picture a twin of John Candy, only fatter and wearing a red cabana shirt. The smell of old greasy hamburgers is making me nauseous – I don’t want my resignation to come in the form of puke.

“My brother just died, John,” I said, trying not to whine.

“I know…can we mention that he’s your brother?” he asked. “We’d get some great coverage.” I was outraged, but not surprised. John the weasel…he’ll never pass up a chance to pimp his little bump in the FM fuzz.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said, massaging the bridge of my nose. It was a monstrous suggestion and I’m ashamed to say I took a couple of seconds to consider it. My brother’s ‘career’ and my ‘career’ were always something I kept separate. I didn’t want him to think I was riding his tails. A moment of silence passed between us.

“Well,” he said finally, “there went the single reason I might not be firing you right now.”

“You’re firing me because my brother died?” I shouted.

“No, I’m firing you because you won’t be here to do your job,” he shot back. “What, I gotta deal with your dead weight and then hold the job open because you ask me to?” He waved in the general direction of the main office. “I can replace you with 5 different kids just out of radio school and each of them cost half as much!”

Tactical error on his part, I thought. The whole office could hear our conversation. Maybe he was right or maybe he was wrong but just didn’t care. Either answer didn’t change the outcome.

“Go on, get out of here,” he said, his attention suddenly on his half-eaten Whopper. Listening to him chew was like hearing a dog munch it’s way through a bowl of raw meat…sickening.

“I’d say it was great knowing you,” I said, standing.

“The misery was all mine, chump.” He stood and slammed the door in my face just as I left. 2 years on the dial and that was all I could expect.

I should have left months ago.

The night receptionist, a nice kid just out of high school, was staring at me with wide eyes. I guess it must be nice to be 18, still living at home and have all this drama be your greatest source of entertainment. My face was burning…without a word, I turned and left the office.

I was on the road for home about an hour after that.

Ugh...bad news from the publishing world. Still...

They're complaining about getting published over at the Chron - more bad news that seems to suggest when you're a first-time novelist that the sanest thing you can do with your project is burn it and bury the ashes because no one - NO ONE - is accepting submissions from new comers.

This is actually a good thing.

Most of the bad news I've heard from other published authors falls under the category of "It's so hard - you gotta do X, Y and Z and there's still no guarantee that it'll work." I'm fine with that, although the feedback seems to suggest that, rather than spending the time and energy working with a system that is failing (the standard publishing biz) that I should be looking to figure out what works within whatever system is coming together.

As the above article points out, people are getting creative with ways to market their own projects and manuscripts. Some are even going the self-publishing route but I'll be skipping that for reasons I've already discussed. Some people are trying to manufacture a viral marketing campaign and it'll be interesting to see how that works (or if I can do the same). But the point is - nothing is a wrong answer. You cannot afford to be snooty about the book world and getting published anymore, not when Harper Collins and Random House are losing cash and laying off people.

Still Plugging Away...

Like other projects in my life, I found that I need to start organizing the work and then committing myself to doing some of it every day. So to that end - here's what I'm doing every day to get this novel published:

• Updating the 'universe blog' - Pac-fish-D with deleted scenes that help tell the story a little better. Some of it contains snippets of the novel but I don't want to blow the story for you or anyone else. I'd rather use up some of the stuff that never made it into the first draft.
• Locating and putting together a list of agents to contact - working on some information from a writer here in the area, I'm skipping agents located in places besides New York. Sorry folks, nothing personal.
• Contacting said agents - I can't just blitz the same cover letter every time - every publisher and agent has their own rules for submittal and nothing gets you ignored faster than spamming people with a form letter.

All that being said - it's a process and I'm not looking for a quick fix. As President Obama said yesterday regarding A-Rod and the steroid thing, "There are no shortcuts." Well, that's fine. I still have a day job, a family and friends. This other thing will come together soon enough.

The Answer to the Question...

So I asked a couple of people the same question I asked the audience yesterday: Should I plan on publishing this novel myself? One of my advisors is a marketing exec down in LA and another is a successful SF writer with 15 titles of his own. What was their answer?

NO.

That's the short version. Here's the longer one, in the author's own words:

"Self-publishing is a bad idea. It's received a lot of hype lately because so many people are doing it, but what the various news stories -- like the one that was in *Time* a couple of weeks ago -- don't tell you is that the drawbacks far outweigh the benefits.

First, because few people buy self-published books, most bookstores refuse to carry them. I know a bookstore owner who put up a separate shelf and displaying self-published novels and collections (including some SF) by local authors. No copies were sold ... none ... and the owner took a bath on those copies he bought. Said it was one of the worst mistakes he ever made.

Second, once your book has been self-published (or put online) it pretty much takes it out of consideration so far as mainstream publishers are concerned. Their editors want to know that the books they buy haven't already been seen elsewhere, and the knowledge that your book has already seen print will give them reason to reject it outright. Yes, I know there have been exceptions -- John Scalzi's *Old Man's War*, for example -- but those are one-in-a-million.

Third, because so many people are doing this, the market for self-published books is glutted. Which leads us back to my first point.

The process of submitting a book to a publisher (or finding an agent first) is long and require patience. It's been made worse lately by the economic downturn; publishers are cutting down on new acquisitions. But you'll be wasting your time and money -- and your book -- if you go the self-publishing route. So I strongly advise against it."

I can't argue with people who know what they're doing. So, I won't be self-publishing "Flotilla". Continuing down the path of sending query letters and folding my feedback from the first draft into the second. Next phase of the project starts tomorrow!

The World of Flotilla - Now Online

Greetings -
You'll be interested to know that I'm carrying the world of Flotilla forward into this space which may help grow the story in the future. Please feel free to check it out:

http://pac-fish-d.blogspot.com/

This is Jim's blog - the protag of my story - and this is his space to talk about what's been happening both before, during and after the events recorded in my novel. As developments occur, he'll talk about them. He will also interact with you through the comments section and email. I can't speak for what he'll say so don't bug at me if you get upset...as you'll find out, Jim is his own guy.

Asked this question already ... but what do you think?

"Saw this contest and wanted to enter "Flotilla"...is this just another Tate Publishing dodge? Tate's got a weird rep, if you don't know. They get all these weird books together and want you to spend the money to publish which they assure you 'you'll make so much more!' Buncha crap...anyhoo - about getting this published - Createspace is an option and I wanted to know what you thought about it.

Here's some info:
https://www.createspace.com/Products/BooksPrices.jsp
https://www.createspace.com/Index.jsp

Ultimately, I want the REAL experience of publishing this thing and if it means I need to wait for it to happen - I'm okay with it. Conversely, would this help that process by being entered - would it help my chances to publish say, 20 of these, and then take it to a local bookstore and see how long it takes to sell them?"

Thoughts?

So this was cool...

...was bumming around this place looking for an agent/publisher for "Flotilla" and came across this test, which helps you decide whether or not your protagonist is worth reading about. Click here for the test and get comfy as it takes a few minutes.

I'm happy to say that they had the following to say about the protagonist of 'Flotilla' - Jim:

"Jim is only a little like you. He is not at all cool; in fact, he thinks cool is a temperature reading, and when he says "Oh, I just put on whatever old thing's lying around," he means "on the floor, where I threw it last night - but I turned the underwear inside out first." There's never been anything special about him that he could see; boy, is he in for a surprise. He's got no emotional scars to speak of. And he's gotten no slack from you.

In general, you care deeply about Jim, but you're smart enough to let him stand on his own, without burdening him with your personal fantasies or propping him up with idealization and over-dramatization. Jim is a healthy character with a promising career ahead of him."