The Writer’s Voice entry #185 – SUBHUMAN, Adrien-Luc Sanders

(Hey guys, I’m participating in The Writer’s Voice blogfest, and one of the requirements is that I post my query/plot summary and first 250 words here. So wish me luck!)

Plot Summary: SUBHUMAN (YA, SF, post-apocalyptic)
17-year-old Kensington Randall has always felt invisible – until she becomes a moving target, and the prize in a devastating global war between mankind and their alien progenitors. When arctic drilling unearths an alien ship, the discovery sets off a chain of events that leaves the Earth scorched and twisted, and steals six years of Ken’s life in an instant. Six years in which her family, her friends, and her world move on without her.

Six years that leave her broken, wounded…and transformed into something that isn’t quite human.

As the military hunts her, her family rejects her, and her friends betray her, Ken has nowhere left to go save into the arms of Roman McKinley, another altered human and a confusing enigma who may damage Ken more than the aliens ever could. Together they discover the darker purpose behind their transformation – a purpose that makes them enemies to their own species, and living weapons who will, one way or another, bring the war to a shattering end.

First 250 words:
Kensington Randall would always remember the first time she saw Earth from space—and the last time she saw Brian smile.

He leaned against the railing on the outer observation deck of Hancomb International Lunar Station, smiling that strange, inward-turning smile that always made him seem so far away. Far from the world around them. Far from her. Unreachable, even when he stood so close their hands touched.

Below, the Earth was a disk of color and shadow rising past the ashen gray horizon of lunar craters. Darkness cupped the outer curve of the planet. Sunlight gilt the illuminated edge, until she could have plucked the red-gold ring from space and slid it onto her finger. A dense storm system unfurled its arms to grip the northern hemisphere, and she caught her breath as lightness filled her.

Brian took her hand, and his fingers curled cool and pale against her dusky skin. He’d held her hand so many times, over the years. Years of petty worries and family fights and high school squabbling. Years that would never look the same. Not now. Not ever.

When she looked back on that moment—a memory forever colored by the chill taste of recycled air, and the haunting blue of artificial light—she would always wonder if she could have changed things. If she’d left with Brian, or convinced him to stay. If she’d reached him sooner. If she’d died. If so many other things had been different.

Always if.

Submissions Status, Interns, and Where the Heck Have I Been?

So as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been MIA for a bit. Normally when I do that, I’m buried in work. This time the situation was a little more dire, but I do want to apologize for my absence, explain what happened, and give some projections on where submissions and the like stand. Plus: interns!

So. Short version of the story:

A minor toothache blew up into a massive, blindingly painful abscess overnight. The infection had ballooned my face up to twice its size and was spreading down my throat and closing my airways. An emergency visit to the dentist ended in the tooth being extracted, the abscess drained, and me hyperventilating from shock after the dentist told me a few more hours and they’d have been shipping me off to the emergency room for resuscitation. I went home with antibiotics and enough Vicodin to leave me having heartfelt conversations with the yellow monoceros on my ceiling. The infection faded, the swelling went down, and I thought I was okay after only being out of commission for a little under a week. Then the antibiotics ran out and I found out there were a few sneaky bacteria hiding in my respiratory system. Cue a nasty bronchial tube infection, a prolonged hospital stay, and a period of heavily medicated enforced bed rest in which I could lose three days in a thirty minute nap and I’m fairly certain that yellow monoceros proposed marriage. There were a few scary emergency room visits in there.

My lungs are still not happy campers, but I’m getting better, out of bed, and back to work. Right now I’m in the process of sorting through what’s accumulated while I’ve been out, and getting caught up.

Submissions
The Flirt and Ever After slush pile is fairly heavily backlogged, and I’m very sorry for any delay in responding. Over the next few weeks, Entangled editor Kerri-Leigh Grady and I will be working together to completely clean out the slush box and make sure everyone gets a response (hopefully a good one!). One of our associate editors had been reviewing the slush in my absence, so we’ll be sorting through to see who has or has not received a response. If you don’t hear anything by April 15th at the latest, please nudge me at adrien-luc(at)entangledpublishing(dot)com so I can make sure your query didn’t get overlooked and it gets the proper attention.

Requested Manuscripts / Pitches
If you directly submitted anything to me from a request or a pitch session, I’ll be getting back to you by April 15th as well. I’ve already set those manuscripts aside for special attention in my to-be-read pile.

Contest Winners / Crits
If you won a full or partial crit in any of my contests, give me until April 20th to get that back to you.

Now the part you probably skipped past everything else to get to:

Interns!
I’ll be hiring two interns: one to help with the slush pile, and one to help with some internal marketing materials and scheduling. No experience required, though it would be helpful. Requirements:

Slush Intern
The slush intern should have a strong understanding of commercial short fiction in the romance market, and should be able to evaluate manuscripts for quality of writing, voice, commercial potential, applicable tropes, etc., as well as the individual tastes of the acquiring editors. You will:

• -Read incoming queries for the Flirt and Ever After lines.
• -Write clear, concise reader reports for promising queries and manuscripts.
• -Provide accept, reject, or R&R recommendations for each query.
• -Post approved manuscripts to the internal acquisitions loop.

This position will require approximately 5-10 hours of time per week.

To apply for the slush intern position, please submit your resume, a brief cover letter with your qualifications, and a list of the last ten books you’ve read to adrien-luc(at)entangledpublishing(dot)com.

Marketing Intern
The marketing intern will be responsible for writing rough-draft book blurb copy and identifying tropes and other marketable concepts in acquired manuscripts. You will:

• -Read galley files of completed manuscripts.
• -Compile applicable information on key marketing and selling points.
• -Research author platforms, related titles, and sales numbers as necessary, with the help of a senior managing editor.
• -Write draft book blurbs for jacket copy and the website, for editing and approval by a senior managing editor.
• -Properly file marketing and author paperwork in the shared document pool.

This position will require approximately 2-3 hours of time per week.

To apply for the marketing intern position, please submit your resume, a brief cover letter with your qualifications, and a 500 word writing sample to adrien-luc(at)entangledpublishing(dot)com.

Applications will remain open until May 1st, or until the positions are filled. Both positions are unpaid, but may be eligible for college credit if the role complies with your school’s requirements for internships.

Thanks again for your patience – and for the love of yellow monoceroses (monocerii?), please go brush and floss your teeth.

Want To Be A Book Character?

If you’re staring at the naked guy to the right, that’s Tobias from my upcoming superhero novella From the Ashes (Entangled, August 2012).

Last night I was playing with my new graphics tablet, and whipped out a quick sketch that I really need to refine (especially the clothed version). What I also need to refine, though, is Tobias’s personal history and the secondary characters around him, so as I work on edits assigned by the Great Editorial Goddess K.L. Grady, I’m introducing two new named characters.

And that’s where you come in.

If you’d like to have a character named after you, just comment and tell me why you should be in my book. When the contest is over, I’ll pick one female and one male winner, and name the new characters after them. I may even have the chance to work in a few physical similarities, so if you win I’ll ask you for a couple of traits like hair color, height, etc. Nothing too creepy or stalkerish. A few details:

1. Contest entries close on January 15th, 2012. If I take any longer to finish my edits, K.L. may kill me.

2. Because From the Ashes does involve a m/m relationship and the new characters are involved in the main character’s backstory, the two new characters will likely be in some way involved in the LGBT community, even if they aren’t gay themselves. If that bothers you, don’t enter. (Then again, if you follow me on Twitter and got here from there, I sincerely doubt anything LGBT bothers you after dealing with me…)

3. Only one entry per person.

4. If you’d rather not use your real name, we can create a variant. It does still need to be a normal name a normal person would have, though, and if you use a completely fictional name it rather removes the point of naming a book character after you.

5. If you’re female but would like a male character named after you, or male and would like a female character named after you, let me know in the comments. We can always gender-reverse your first name.

6. Winners will be mentioned in the acknowledgements in the back of the book, just so people who aren’t aware of the original contest will know of your awesomeness.

7. If you’re uncomfortable posting your real name in the public comments, don’t. I can always ask you for the proper name to use via email if you’re selected as a winner. Just make sure you leave a way for me to contact you.

8. Because the characters are part of Tobias’s history, they won’t be taking a prominent role in the main storyline, though they’ll still be very important in demonstrating his character and establishing the base from which he grows. Your comment will have a strong role in determining how I choose to integrate the new characters into Tobias’s past, but I reserve the right to decide what works best for the story and make the necessary adjustments.

A little about From the Ashes:
25-year-old Tobias Rutherford is a villain in a world without heroes, born to a race of superpowered beings known as aberrants, whose mutant evolution gave rise to neurological disorders that labeled them as psychopaths, sociopaths, freaks – and Tobias’s father is the worst of them all. Plotting the demise of mankind from within an empire built on conquered nations, the supervillain known as Blaze uses his son as a weapon, a tool, an extension of himself with no free will and no future other than the one his despotic father has planned. A graduate-level researcher by day, the villainous Spark by night, Tobias does what he must to further his father’s goals – until one night with Dr. Sean Archer makes him question everything he thought he knew about aberrants, his own humanity, and the power he has to shape his own destiny.

P.S. Akismet is still being crazy aggressive, so if your comment doesn’t show up initially, don’t double-post. It’s in there, and I’ll fish it out of the spam filter ASAP.

Winners: Worst Writing Habit Contest

Thanks to everyone who participated in the “What’s Your Worst Writing Habit?” contest. The response was phenomenal; over 100 entries, and every last one of them absolutely awesome. A little humbling, too, as I recognized a lot of my own bad habits in your entries. ~coughs~

But you’re waiting to find out who won, right? The random number generator gods are hard at work, and they’ve landed on…

Winner: Rebecca Enzor
Rebecca posted about her floating-head syndrome, and her love of dialogue. I guess I’ll be seeing both when I crit her full. ;P

And let’s not forget second-place:

Runner-Up: Julie Weathers
Julie will be receiving a three-chapter critique, and maybe a little help working on that habit of writing things out of order.

I’ll be emailing the winners tomorrow to request your manuscripts, or you can email me at adrien-luc(at)entangledpublishing(dot)com if you don’t want to wait.

As promised, here’s the top 5 comments, and my response:

1. Liana Brooks
My worst writing habit is TWITTER.

I turn it on to check the news in the morning and it’s open all day. I’ll write a few paragraphs, and then go chat with other authors. Write a little more, and then check out someone’s new book they tweeted about. At this point I’m almost positive I have a serious Twitter addiction.

You’d think the answer to this would be to close Twitter – Tweetdeck, your browser, whatever. But they’re still right there, waiting to be opened again. Drives me out of my mind, because I do this too. All the time. There’s only one thing that really works for me: writing in TextRoom. TextRoom is a full-screen text editor that blocks out everything else and cuts down to the minimum needed to write. There are other full-screen editors, like Q10 and DarkRoom, but I prefer TextRoom because it allows rich text formatting instead of NotePad-style plain text, making it easier to deal with when I copy to Word to save in .doc format. It also makes sure I can’t see those windows in my taskbar, or the damn Twhirl notifications – and it helps keep me on track with daily wordcount goals, percentage trackers, etc.

Or, you know, you could try this thing called self-discipline. I don’t advocate it. It’s terribly dull and annoying. God knows I don’t have any. Oh hey, someone just tweeted at me…

2. L.S. Murphy
Besides checking my email every thirty seconds or so, I overuse the heart as an emotional cue. You would think my characters should see a cardiologist as much as their hearts beat, drop, slam, or dissolve in the pits of their stomachs. *Sigh* The heart wants what the heart wants…

This is a problem I see rather often, actually, and it’s hard not to fall back on the heart as an indicator of emotion. We’re ruled by our hearts, and everyone understands what it means when the heart stops, stumbles, races. We know the feeling. We share it. So it’s not always bad to use the heart as a way to convey emotion – but you also have a great opportunity here to really strike your readers with something unique, something they’ve often felt but never been quite aware of it. In one story I read, a nervous character curled her toes up inside her shoes–but she didn’t focus on the cliched toes curling. Instead she focused on how uncomfortable it was when the knuckles of her toes pushed against the insides of her shoes, and the fabric on the insoles bunched up in the creases. It made it more real for me, because when I scrunch my toes up nervously, I feel the same thing, but never really think about it.

When you’re conveying emotion in a scene through physical cues, stop and close your eyes. Put yourself in the scene, and try to picture everything. Maybe the taste of the air, breathed in through the mouth instead of the nose because the character’s panting with fright. If they’re blushing, maybe their neck is burning instead of their face, because they’re blushing just that hard. Angry? Forget clenching fists or tension in the shoulders. What about that hard pull of sinew in the solar plexus as the body prepares for action? The point is, we don’t just feel emotion with our hearts. We feel it with our entire bodies. We react from the tips of our eyelashes to the tips of our toes. It’s not something we normally think about, but if you’re going to write convincing emotional responses, you have to.

If you’re having trouble imagining from your perspective, watch emotionally charged movies. They can’t always rely on the beating heart unless they use special sound effects; what they have to rely on is body language and visual cues. Look for those cues, and how the actors convey emotion. Imagine what those cues must feel like – the sensations involved, etc. Use that for a frame of reference when trying to break out of the typical heart-shaped box. (Go ahead. Groan. I know you want to.)

3. Tamara Gill
My worst writing habit would have to be the use of adverb tags with dialogue. And I’m a really lazy writer…punctuation, what’s that?

Okay, the laziness I can’t help you with. Punctuate your sentences, dammit. Unless you like watching my head explode.

…

Don’t answer that.

Anyway, on the adverbs: don’t beat yourself up over it too much. One or two here and there? Actually not that bad…as long as it’s only one or two. When every dialogue tag is “he said softly” and “she said loudly,” it’s a problem. The fun thing about the English language is that it’s ridiculously full of nuance and has about fifty different words for everything, many with different inflections and subtle variations. There’s probably a verb out there for that “said + adverb” combo.

Obviously these two are easy: saying something softly can be murmuring or whispering, while saying something loudly can be shouting or yelling or even screeching, depending on the tone you want. Choosing the right verb can go a long way towards defining tone and even characterization, more so than tacking on any adverb. Just think about the difference between shouting and screeching. Both involve saying something loudly, urgently, but one is aggressive and almost imperative, while the other is high-pitched and can seem angry, bitchy, hysterical, or even panicked, depending on context.

The right verb is out there. You just have to look for it.

4. Sarah Robinson
I tend to overwrite. My manuscript as it sits is at 100,000 words. Young adult Contemporary. I know I need to get it below 80,000 to make it acceptable to agents, but I can’t seem to part with much more. I need fresh eyes.

…my first YA novel (which will never see the light of day) was 135k. Yeah. I know. That’s frightening.

Two tips on how to get around this. One, plan for it to be 75k. If you’re not a planner, that may be hard, but if you have that goal in the back of your mind, it forces you to consider what’s really necessary as you write. It gives you a little leeway for that 80k limit, too.

Another way, though, is to refuse to allow yourself any internal monologue as you write. None. Every time you catch yourself doing it, delete it. Write only the action and dialogue, as straightforward as possible. Don’t even tell us if your MC is wondering what another character is doing. In your next draft, you can go in and add that where it’s necessary – but only where it’s necessary. Most of the time it’s internal monologue and exposition bogging us down, but we tend to write less of it if we’re adding it in after the fact and trying to figure out the best place to fit it into seamless action.

5. Kathryn Sheridan Kupanoff
My worst writing habit? Ugh. I could give you a million, but since you asked for one, I’ll settle for long-ass sentences when I’m on a roll, and just can’t seem to find that period, and how could I stop this train of thought when the character’s mind seems to be going here and there, and what did the beginning of the sentence have to do with this? That’s why it’s always good to reread, kids. Periods are your friends (also told me by my health teacher in high school, but I don’t think it was relevant to this question).

…I admit I picked this one not because I had anything useful to say, but because it made me laugh until I choked. You know how to fix this one. Okay. Well. Maybe you don’t. If you don’t? One action per sentence. Seriously. Go back to baby steps, and write very simple subject-verb-object sentences. Don’t let yourself do anything else, no matter what. In edits, you can combine into more complex sentence structures. The point isn’t to write in a simplistic fashion; it’s to train yourself to break your thoughts up and present them in an organized fashion, so that the more you practice, the more you’ll be able to write concisely and oh hey this sentence is getting a little long here and…

…yeah. Maybe I need to take my own advice.

And that’s it for now. Keep an eye out for two new contests soon: one that’ll show you how to tighten your story’s hook, and one that’ll give you a chance to be a secondary character in my upcoming book, From the Ashes.

In the meantime, I’ll be hanging out at the Romance Author Hotspot 2011 holiday bash from 12.24.11 to 1.1.12, giving away free books and just chatting, so feel free to drop by – especially since RAH is giving away a free Kindle!

Guest Post: Ros Clarke on the inspiration for ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

From Adri: When I first read ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS, which released December 7th from the Entangled Publishing Flirt line, I found it deeply touching and uplifting in a way that’s rather personal to me as someone with a parent who’s suffering the early stages of Alzheimer’s. So even before we started edits, I wondered what prompted Ros to write this story and infuse it with such depth and realism – and here she is to tell us why.

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Guest Post: Ros Clarke, Author of ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS (Entangled Publishing, December 2011)

When I started writing All I Want For Christmas, all I knew was that I wanted to write a Christmas-themed short story. Anna appeared on the page with the hangover from hell, the morning after the office Christmas party. She’d obviously drunk too much and embarrassed herself somehow.

Enter Hugh Munro, the sexy advertising director who works on the second floor and the focus of Anna’s embarrassment. Anna fancies Hugh. Hugh fancies Anna. They’re both adults. Why not just get together?

And that’s when the star of my story made herself known. Anna’s mother, Irene, has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Anna lives with her mother and cares for her when she’s not at work because Irene isn’t safe to be left alone. She forgets the stupidest things and conversations tend to be repetitive in the extreme. But she is the sweetest woman, who loves her daughter so much and is so proud of her.

My grandfather suffered from Alzheimer’s in the last few years of his life. I know how heartbreaking it is to see someone you love forgetting who you are and that you love them. The best portrayal of Alzheimer’s I’ve ever seen was in the wonderful film of Iris Murdoch’s life with Judi Dench. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it – but make sure you have a box of tissues handy! There is no cure for Alzheimer’s and it is both degenerative and terminal.

All I Want For Christmas is a romance novella with a happy ending for all three characters, Anna, Hugh, and Irene. It’s the sort of happy ending you get in real life, where you know there are going to be some tough times ahead, but you know that you will be able to face them better together.

I don’t know what you want this Christmas, but I hope that you will all have the happiness of being together with the people whom you love.

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS can be purchased at Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble, or Books on Board. You can also read reviews and ratings on GoodReads, or find Ros on Twitter as @Ros_Clarke.