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.

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!

Contest: What’s Your Worst Writing Habit?

CONTEST OFFICIALLY CLOSED.
Thanks to everyone who participated; we got over 100 entries! Winners will be posted shortly.
—————————

Want to win a full critique of your manuscript? Tell us about your worst writing habit – that nasty little flaw you’re trying to shake but just can’t.

Mine? I can’t seem to let a line of dialogue go by without adding some kind of little action to it, until my characters are lowering their eyes and looking up and walking around and fidgeting like they’re shaking off a bad round of PCP. In edits, cutting that out tends to get rid of a few thousand words on its own. I know I shouldn’t do it, but it keeps creeping in anyway, so I just let it happen and keep a sharp eye out for it when ripping the finished draft into bloody little pieces.

So what’s yours?

The rules:

1. You have to comment to win. Share your worst writing habit. Make sure to leave a valid email in the email field so that, if you win, I can contact you. Email addresses are not displayed publicly.

2. I’ll critique both literary and genre fiction manuscripts anywhere from 30k to 100k in length, but not non-fiction. It’s not that I don’t like it; I’m just not qualified to critique it.

3. Entries will remain open until December 20th, 2011. At that point I’ll choose one first-prize winner and one runner-up at random, and contact them for their manuscripts. The first-prize winner’s manuscript will be read in full and marked up in Word with editorial commentary, accompanied by an email discussing overall impressions and critique points. The critique will remain private between me and the author. The runner-up will receive a critique and markup of their first three chapters only.

4. The winners will, however, be announced in a blog post. The top five comments will also be posted to the blog, with my responses on how to help kick that habit.

5. This is not an official submissions call. Do not email any materials for the contest unless officially requested. (Well, if you want to query, go ahead, but it’s not related to the contest.) The contest is in no way affiliated with my work at Entangled Publishing, and neither participating nor winning constitutes any form of endorsement for publication. Any queries for publication are considered separately, and contest participants are welcome to submit their stories outside of the contest provided they comply with Entangled Publishing’s submission guidelines.

Get it? Got it? Good. Get to commenting!

P.S. If your comment doesn’t show up immediately, Akismet probably caught it. I check the spam filter regularly and will fish it out in short order, so no need to repost.

So, yeah. I’m dancing.

I might as well get right on out and say it:

My novella, From the Ashes, just sold to Entangled Publishing as part of their 2012 superhero anthology. Not only that, but I’ve been recruited as Senior Editor for Entangled’s Flirt and Ever After lines.

So, yeah. I’m dancing like a fool.

It’s kind of funny how things happen, really. Back in January, Savvy Authors ran their EditPalooza writers’ workshop; back then I was working as an editor for Lyrical Press, and when Liz Pelletier asked for participating editors from various publishers, I joined in. EditPalooza was a lot of fun; I got to meet some really cool authors, and got to work with Liz, who turned out to be pretty awesome.

Then life went back to normal. I took a break from editing for a while; I needed to simplify my life and destress, as I’d managed to work myself to the edge of a nervous breakdown fueled by the fact that I wasn’t coping with my grandmother’s death as well as I thought. Things calmed down, I settled back into my daily routine in the day job as a freelance business writer, and got back into the habit of writing fiction on the side. I’m not sure what chain of links led me to Entangled’s website, though I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Twitter. It always has something to do with Twitter. Twitter will be responsible for the downfall of the western world.

Well, no. But it’s pretty much destroyed my attention span.

Anyway. I ran across the Entangled website, recognized the folks from Savvy Authors, and thought what they were doing was pretty cool. I also noticed the submissions call for their superhero anthology.

A week before the final submission date.

Meaning I had four days to churn out a 30k story if I wanted time to let a few beta readers hack it apart.

I don’t know how I did it. I do know I didn’t sleep, but that’s not news. Somehow From the Ashes made it out the door in time, and so help me but I’d have embarrassed myself if not for my friend Amanda, who is just about the best editor in the world and who caught my more cringe-worthy mistakes. I wasn’t expecting to hear anything for a few weeks, so when I saw an email from Liz the very next day, I think I died a little inside. Wow, I thought. That was fast. My story must’ve been really bad.

But it wasn’t a rejection. It was a note from Liz asking if I remembered her from Editpalooza, and asking if I was interested in joining the Entangled Publishing editing team.

So. After I picked myself up off the floor, I sent back the coolest, most composed email ever, stating my interest. Yeah. Stop laughing. You know I was shrieking and squealing and grinning like an idiot even in text, but let me have my illusions. Liz said great, and I took the editing test to see if my editing style and skill level were a good match for Entangled’s needs.

Let me tell you something: everything you know about the agony of waiting for a response to a submission is compounded exponentially when you’re waiting for a response not only to a submission, but a job application – with the same people. I bit my nails down to the quick. I refreshed my email obsessively. I think I sprouted a few more grey hairs. I drove my husband out of his mind, constantly asking if he thought I should have made the story hetero instead of LGBT, if they’d hate the story but love my editing, hate my editing but love the story, or absolutely despise both and wonder how I ever ended up involved in publishing the first place.

It was more a “none of the above” situation. I’m pretty sure I deafened an entire city block when the email came. I had to reread it six or seven times to convince myself it was real, and yes, they wanted the story and wanted me. I’m 99.9% certain I made a rambly, awkward jackass out of myself on introductory phone calls with Liz, the inestimable Heather Howland, and K.L. Grady, the walking epitome of awesomeness who’ll be my editor on From the Ashes.

But jackass or not, there it is. I’m happy. I think “happy” may be the biggest understatement of the year, actually, but it’s a start. I’m really looking forward to working with the Entangled team, both as an editor and as an author, and I think 2012 promises to be an amazing year all around.

But right now, well…

…I have a slush box to clean out. ~flees~

No, it’s really not a choice.

It’s been a while. I’ve been busy — working, beta reading, writing. The latest project I’ve been working on is a 30k novella submission for an anthology call. In fact, I just sent in my query and submission a few minutes ago. I almost didn’t. I almost told myself it would get rejected right off the bat and I shouldn’t bother, because my hero is gay.

Don’t be silly, I told myself. This is a progressive new e-publisher that accepts LGBT submissions, and they didn’t specify no LGBT for this anthology. But I couldn’t help being paranoid. It was the same paranoia that haunted me throughout the story, that told me maybe I should turn Tobias into Tabatha, or Sean into Sarah, and make it a heterosexual relationship. My paranoia said that even though they accept LGBT, they won’t consider my story for the anthology because it won’t match the tone of the other stories, and might turn off potential buyers who only want to read heterosexual stories. I nearly talked myself out of submitting because I was convinced my submission would be judged not on the merit (or lack thereof) of my writing, but just because the characters are gay.

That paranoia isn’t without foundation. For decades stories of open homosexuality have been either rejected, or “straight-washed” before acceptance; Publisher’s Weekly posted a great blog about the topic, and the outpouring of vocal support from editors and agents who actively want LGBT submissions was phenomenal. Read the comments; there are some amazing and very well-known people speaking up to say “send me your stories. Send me your characters as they are.” They don’t care if they’re gay, straight, bisexual, or transgendered. They want good storytelling regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, and it’s the writing that matters. Some of the comments there will really brighten your day.

It wasn’t always that way, though. As I said, there’s been a stigma against stories with open homosexuals as anything more than secondary and tertiary characters, and even as acceptance grows that stigma lingers. It haunts writers, makes us cautious, makes us edgy, makes us paranoid. We can’t stop thinking about it. I thought about it while I was writing From the Ashes, and while struggling with the dilemma of my gay protagonist. I thought about how despite the acceptance and support shown in that one blog post, despite the personal support I’ve received from friends, we still don’t see that much LGBT fiction being published in the mainstream, rather than as niche fiction or through smaller e-publishers alone. It happens, but very rarely. It’s easy to put the blame on the publishers, and say we aren’t seeing it because they aren’t accepting it.

I can’t help but think, though, that we aren’t seeing it because we aren’t submitting it.

I think, out of fear of rejection, we’re straight-washing ourselves. Just as people in the LGBT community stay in the closet out of fear of homophobic and transphobic reactions, we straighten out our stories even though they’re not really the stories we want to tell. And sometimes, our books suffer for it. We don’t invest ourselves fully because we aren’t wholly behind the new, sexuality-switched or gender-reversed identities we’ve given these characters, and it feels like a lie–so we don’t give our all to writing it.

So many of us do it for different reasons. Maybe we’ve heard horror stories about agents and publishers rejecting stories based on the sexuality of the characters alone. Maybe we’ve had our own experiences with those rejections, or with being asked to straight-wash our stories. Either way, that fear hovers over us and affects the choices we make regarding what we write, and what we choose to submit — the same way the fear of being outed can affect how we behave, and the choices we make in our lives.

The thing is, while we’re beating this metaphor to death…being LGBT, whichever one or two of those letters you might fall under, isn’t a choice. Not for us. Not for me. So while we have the flexibility to shape our characters and make them into whatever little people we’d like them to be, in some ways their sexuality isn’t a choice, either. If it’s part of who they are, part of their story, then there’s really no choice about letting it be what it is — and there’s really no choice about whether you or I should continue to submit our LGBT stories.

The publishers are out there. More and more are opening their arms to LGBT novels; what they need to see now is more of them. More of us. More of our stories to show that they’re valid, they’re mainstream, they’re as compelling as every other story out there. Our stories may be part of the LGBT spectrum, but LGBT is part of the spectrum of life as a whole. Including our stories isn’t really a choice.

So don’t let it be a choice whether or not you’ll write them, or submit them. Write what you feel, whether it’s gay, straight, bi, tri, whatever. Write what you know, write what you love. Write through the fear of rejection, and trust that there are people out there who will judge your writing solely on its own merit and not for the characters’ sexuality alone. Write…and send it in.

I wrote my story. I sent it. Tobias is Tobias, Sean is Sean, and to hell with it. They’re in love. And if the story’s not good enough for the anthology, then I’m going to have faith — in this one publisher, and in every publisher I decided to submit to — that it’ll be because of a flaw in my writing***, not just because loving Sean helps make Tobias who he is. I’ll keep writing past that. I’ll keep improving. And I’ll keep submitting my stories, no matter the sexuality of my protagonists.

After all, they can’t accept it if you don’t submit it. If you don’t, you aren’t giving them much of a choice at all.

 

 

 
***Or, y’know, because I accidentally sent from my work email address and not my default email address. ~shakes fist at Thunderbird~