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.

Hello, world! I’m going to eat your face, world!

I just wanted to get rid of that “Hello, world!” post that comes with a new WordPress install. I’m in the process of finishing the last touches on migrating this blog to a new web host. My old web host pulled some ugly moves with my data, so I wasn’t able to pull all of my info over; just some of it. I’m going to be pretty ticked if they refuse to let me snag the XML file for a friend’s WordPress blog that I’ve been hosting, too. They’re basically holding the data hostage and being jerks about it. This is why I keep regular backup files of my data, but I’m worried the friend didn’t export regular XML files of her posts. If she loses all of that, I’m going to feel like a pretty crappy human being, as it’s my web host that screwed her over.

I’m having to manually recreate a lot of sidebar widgets from locally stored files, and I have to manually re-enter all of my links from my blogroll and my writers’ resources list. If we’d exchanged blog links before, I’ll get your link back up shortly. Reciprocation, fair play, all that.

Unsurprisingly, this process is making me a wee bit cranky.

But at least it got me to finally update my blog?

I should come up with something more worthwhile to say.

Um…hi?

Okay, okay, a little publishing/writing/etc. related news: I did cover art for an MLR Press book, Z. Allora’s The Dark Angels: With Wings. It’s the first time I’ve had someone request a manga-style illustration for a book cover, but it was a lot of fun to work on and experiment with as far as art styles, especially since I’m used to shading dark-skinned people. Experimenting with various layered painting techniques to create Caucasian skin that didn’t look sickly or sunburned was a learning experience, I’ll say that. I’m currently working on roughs for the sequel.

Yep, that’s about all I’ve got.

I guess I’ve been absent for a while, but…well, life decided to eat my face, between some work-related and life-related stress combined with taking my grandmother’s death a lot harder than I realized. I had some things to deal with, and they were best dealt with out of the public eye. Long story short, life bit me and kept biting until I got tired of it and bit back.

So, like I said…hi.

One Last Time.

I don’t talk about personal things on this blog very much. This is a blog for the professional side of my life, generally involving writing and editing; there’s always that level of just personal enough to be personable and relatable without delving too deep. A professional blogger, a professional anything tries not to cross that line…and in truth, I’m not one for putting my grief on display. One post on Twitter felt like too much. Beyond daily gripes about minor irritations, I like keeping my personal life to myself.

But I want to talk about something personal today – not to showcase my grief, but to remember someone with love. Elnora Sanders died this morning, in the early hours before dawn. She had stage 3B breast cancer; she’d beaten it back twice before, but this time it was too much for her to handle. It had seeded throughout her entire body, and her organs just…gave up. She died in terrible pain. Just as bad, probably, was the pain my mother had to go through, sitting there and holding her hand helplessly.

But my mother said when the pain stopped, and Elnora slipped away…she smiled.

That’s so like her. I’m not surprised.

Elnora Sanders was my grandmother, and my friend. When I didn’t speak to any of my relatives for five years, she was the one person I still called at least once a month. But more, she was the linchpin of my family. I have a diverse and enormous family that on my mother’s side alone is a confusing cultural and ethnic mélange; I won’t even try to explain my father’s side. My great-grandmother had twenty-four children. My grandmother had eight children by multiple husbands, and those eight children went on to have many more children of their own, some of whom have already started raising their own families.

There are hundreds of us in one generation alone. We have different family names – in fact, only a few of us carry on the Sanders name, and it’s only by a strange set of circumstances that I have that name rather than my mother’s married name or my father’s family name. And I’ll be honest: most of us hate each other. We’re wildly different, have different morals and ideals, were raised in different generations and different areas of the country. My branch of the family might think another branch is country, ghetto, and ill-behaved; that same branch might think we’re stuck-up, snotty, and don’t value real down-to-earth people or respect our roots. Putting any one family module in an enclosed space with another is likely to result in bodily harm. If we get away with just a few nasty words exchanged, we’re lucky.

Unless Elnora was in the room.

She was our matriarch, our dictator…and we would do anything for her. We called her “Ma Dear,” though we said it so quickly it became “M’Deah” over the years. Anything she asked, we did. Anything she wanted, we gave. When she spoke, we listened. Every holiday we came together under her roof, and even when quibbling over whose dessert was better or trying to pry the butcher knives from the hands of the more certifiably insane cousins, it was her love, her Southern cooking, and her strength that brought us together. She fought to bring this family into the world, and every last one of us knew it. More often than not she was a single parent in an age when that was unheard of, especially for a woman – but she worked her ass off to put food in her children’s mouths. Often the older siblings were left to look after the younger ones because Elnora was at work. Even after she had a stroke that left her unable to say “onions” as anything other than “nunyuns,” she gave up so much to keep them safe, to give them opportunities to grow strong, to get an education, to make something out of themselves.

And she let them be themselves, which is probably why they’re all so wildly different and argumentative now.

Never in my life have I known her to live anywhere but on that same plot of Louisiana property. Even when my mother, aunts, and uncles chipped in to build her a new house, it was a new house bumped up shoulder to shoulder with the sagging, grey-washed boards of the old one. It’s a place that will be forever fixed in my mind as hers. I will always remember coming down the gravel driveway on Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas…and feeling her influence wrap around me. My family may have all hated each other at any other time, but when we came into M’Deah’s domain…we did our best to love each other. Not out of obligation, not under duress…but because she made us want to, by loving us all.

She always told me I was her favorite grandchild, too, and I could do no wrong in her eyes. When I was younger, I believed it. It tickled me just pink, and I’d take every chance I could to spend a summer, a week, even just a weekend at her house. I’d catch dragonflies on the clothes lines and pick clover flowers in the field to one side of the house. She never brushed me off when I brought her wreaths of interlaced flowers, and always laughed and waved when I’d catch a dragonfly and turn back to shout in exultation while she watched from her rocking chair on the porch.

I still remember the summer when I was…eleven, I think. My younger cousin and I were spending a week at M’Deah’s; we’d planned and plotted all through the beginning of the summer, working out how to ambush and bully our parents into it (little knowing that they were glad to see the hind end of us for a week or so). Well, despite both of us being labeled as “gifted” children, we were a little short in the common sense department, which led to an air conditioning window unit falling out of the house and into the grass outside because we just didn’t think “Hey, open the window, AC falls out.” I don’t even remember why we thought it was necessary to open the window; I do remember sitting on the front step in a panic, both of us sobbing because we thought our grandmother (then a police dispatcher who didn’t carry a weapon, but we didn’t know that) would come home from work and shoot us.

She came home. She didn’t shoot us. She took one look at the AC lying there with grass poking up through its vents and burst into laughter – then hugged us and asked us how it happened. While we apologized and sniffled and scrubbed at our snotty noses, she just kept laughing and said it was all right, she wasn’t angry…because we were her favorite grandchildren. Any time the story came up, years later, she’d still laugh – much to my and my cousin’s amused mortification.

When I was older, I realized she was lying about her favorite grandchildren – but at the same time, she wasn’t. She loved all her grandchildren so much she couldn’t choose a favorite. So she treated us as if we were all her favorites, first in her eyes. She treated everyone that way, with such love and respect that one couldn’t help but return it.

You don’t find that kind of love in everyone – especially not in someone who’s had such a hard life. With how hard she had to fight for everything she had, everything her children had, you wouldn’t think she’d be so willing to give. That’s not to say she wasn’t a hard woman; she was tough as nails, fierce and proud, and wasn’t afraid to smack any one of her brood upside the head and tell us to stop being idiots. Yet though she was stubborn and flawed and madder than a wet cat when you pushed her buttons the wrong way…she would always give all the love she could to anyone who needed it.

She lived a long life. Long enough to see her oldest son to his grave; long enough to see her grandchildren bring forth her great-grandchildren. What’s more, she lived a good life. Without her, my family will fall apart. We are a tangled viper’s nest of grudges, pettiness, cruelty, snobbishness, very bad decisions, and in some cases pure insanity; I won’t pretend we aren’t. We hate each other, plain and simple. That won’t change. We don’t forget old wounds, and we never let them heal; it’s a failing in our family, and probably the one thing we all share. Without Elnora, without our M’Deah, we won’t have any reason to even try to stop.

Yet I know that for one more day, in a quiet church in the town where my family began, we’ll come together again. If not out of love for each other, then out of love for an amazing woman who gave us her strength, her love, her humor, her life. She was what made us a family, rather than people reluctantly bound by blood ties. I don’t know what we’ll be after this – after her funeral, after she’s well and truly gone.

But because of her, for just one more day…we’ll be a family again, one last time.

Is there such a thing as a revenge award?

So yesterday a silly tweet or two (or three…or twenty…) turned into an entire day of wombat snarkiness on Twitter, with Allison, LaTessa, Kerry, Janelle, Jeffe, and Kristine all getting their wombat on up in dis place. (Yes, wombats. Don’t ask. FYI, Thursdays are now Wombat Day. Ffft ffft.) Of course Allison, in all her goofy glory, had to take it a step further. And thus this was born:

When I finished laughing (and that took a while), I promised revenge. Revenge in the form of…BACON. For never was there a nuttier bacon nut, and one day I shall bribe her for ARCs with entire pans full of greasy goodness. (Because really, what else is a pig good for?*)

Oh, and this:

(Click for the larger version.)

Yes, I know, it’s a crappy-looking PNG and the circle’s a cop-out. Bacon does not smooth out to clean edges as one might hope. Bacon is rough. Bacon is crispy. Bacon is secretly…CHUCK NORRIS.

Hush. It’s early and I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. Too bad there’s no bacon around.

Maybe I should work on a Valkyrie badge next…

*For the love of god, don’t answer that question. And why am I using so many bloody parentheses in this post?

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

I’m not dead! …I think I see a little light past this pile of manuscripts and resumes…

Anyway – I may be quiet here, but I’ve been quite noisy elsewhere. Namely over at Fresh Voices Friday, where Sue London interviews me as an unpublished writer / aspiring author (what? I still write in between editing? Gasp!):

http://cmdrsue.blogspot.com/2010/05/fresh-voices-interview-with-adrien-luc.html

Drop by, say hi, and be nice.

Also, if you’ve got cash to spare, there’s an auction going on over at http://dothewritethingfornashville.blogspot.com/ – run by several authors and agents, trying to raise money to help flood victims in Nashville. You can bid on everything from signed books to ARCs to swag to agent chats, with all proceeds going to charity.

Guest blogs!

Hey, guys, just a quick little bit of pimpage: I’m guest-blogging over at the Lyrical Press blog today, talking about author fatigue and how to write past it.

Good lord, I’m a wordy bugger.

Also: not too long ago one of my authors, Jason Beymer (author of the upcoming humorous fantasy ROGUE’S CURSE), did a great post on character development and how he finds inspiration for his characters. You should go check it out. (And be nice to him. He’s funny.)

Watch this space for some other guest blogs soon, as I cajole my authors and my fellow Lyrical editors into speaking up. (Cynthia, I’m lookin’ at you.)

I keep meaning to update with photos of my nifty new Sony Reader Touch Edition and faff on about how awesome it is, but every time I talk about the thing I sound like a product shill. Bleargh. Well, here, a couple of blurry photos snapped off on my G1 phone, with the thing on my messy, disorganized coffee table:

Man, do we need to vacuum.

That’s the Pixie skin from DecalGirl.com*, crap about my student loans underneath the reader, and Elizabeth Darvill’s BOUND BY BLOOD on the reader’s screen. Liz and Jason have been great sports about not killing me yet despite the volumes of edit notes I’ve dropped on them. Ashley has yet to find out what she’s in for, but she will. [insert innocent smile here]

What else, what else…OH! One other thing: The latest book in Diane Duane’s YOUNG WIZARDS series, A WIZARD OF MARS, released this week. It wasn’t due out until early April, so imagine my surprise when my preorder showed up on my doorstep on the 23rd.

If you love Diane Duane as much as I do, get the damn book. Seriously. YOUNG WIZARDS has always held a firm position as my favorite YA series of all time, and A WIZARD OF MARS is a great addition to the collection.

……

…oi, that’s a lot of tags on this post.

 

 
*Random aside: DecalGirl has the best customer service. My original order was shipped incorrectly; they sent me a skin for the Pocket reader, rather than the Touch edition. I e-mailed asking how to do an exchange, and they apologized and shipped a priority mail replacement the same day. It’s sad that it’s rare to see good, polite customer service, but it’s always nice when you run across it.