Hi there.

Psst. Hey, you. Yes, you. I’m talking to you. The aspiring author sitting there struggling over your query letter. The guy or gal wondering just how to approach an editor, an agent, whomever. The one trying to decide on business formality or sass, beautiful prose or wit, eye-catching originality or appreciable directness. The writer trying to figure out just the right way to walk up to this person who could hold the key to your career as a published author and say “hi.”

Well, hi.

No, seriously. It’s as simple as that. Just say hi.

Yes, you’ll need to tell me about your book. A little about yourself, too, though don’t overwhelm me. But really, just to start off with, say hi. Smile. Be polite, be friendly, and give me your message. It’s just like making friends.

And just like making friends, it requires a little tact.

Tact means not complaining about how you don’t like the submission format. Tact means not trash-talking other writers. Tact means not whining about how stupid you think the publisher or agent’s requirements are. Tact means not deriding the other agents and editors who rejected you. Tact means not proclaiming yourself the One True Savior who understands the truth of the publishing industry and will show us all the light of your genius.

Tact also means keeping your crazy quite firmly under your belt where I can’t see it.

You wouldn’t let it all hang out like that when making a new friend. Don’t let it hang out with me. There’s time enough to show me how quirky-awesome you are, when I know you well enough to appreciate it. On that first meeting, what I need to know is that you’re sane, you write well, your story engages me, and you’re capable of understanding the business aspect of this entire crazy machine.

So just say hi, and hope we hit it off well enough for your book and my editing schedule to be friends.

We won’t be friends. We can’t be. I can’t be your friend and do my job. I can’t worry about hurting your feelings when I’m chopping apart incorrect modifiers or urging you to drop the passive voice and use more active verbs. I can’t be your friend when trying to train you out of your little bad writing habits, even if I’m doing it in your best interests so your talent can shine through and showcase the good writing habits that made me love your story in the first place. I won’t be your friend, because friends can’t be honest with friends about their writing.

But we’ll be friendly. We’ll learn to love each other and hate each other–but more than that, we’ll learn to depend on each other through revisions and deadlines, galleys and proofs, cover art quibbles and panicked last-minute changes. We’ll learn each others’ senses of humor and share inside jokes swapped via tweets and MS Word comment boxes. We’ll tease each other about quirks, find out strange little things about each other, and know each other in ways that often, friends don’t. Writing reveals a lot about a person. So does editing. So do those moments at three o’clock in the morning, when we’re both ready to tear our hair out trying to fix that one last sentence before the book’s due in to production the next day.

And when your book releases I’ll share a drink with you in celebration, although I’ll never come to your kids’ birthday parties or help you shop for Christmas. I don’t care about photos of your dog in sunglasses or slideshows of your vacation to Redondo Beach, and please don’t tell me about your hot date last night or the guy you found your wife in bed with. I don’t want to know. I’d rather not picture you that way, and it’s really not my business.

So no, we won’t be friends. But we will be establishing a unique relationship that, if all goes well, could last for many years and through many books. You wouldn’t start a friendship by approaching a stranger and criticizing their choice of those shoes with those slacks. You wouldn’t walk up to someone in a bar and, without even saying hello, begin a spiel of negativity about every person who ever hurt you in the past.

So why would you start a relationship with an editor or agent by antagonizing them?

Taylana the Cat Princess.

Lately every time my mind wanders, it goes limping down memory lane. Maybe it’s a sign of early-onset senility. Maybe it’s just that time of year when one reflects on one’s life. I can’t say I’ve done much reflecting; I’ve done a lot of cringing, remembering stupid things I’ve done and embarrassing situations I’ve been thrust into. But while dodging the specter of my humiliating freshman Latin class or trying to forget how I lost a track meet by two inches of distance on a shotput throw, I stumbled across another memory: my English teachers.

I only had two between 6th grade and senior year; I had the good fortune of being in the AP English & Creative Writing class, which meant the same teacher guided our progress year after year and gave us personal attention when developing our speaking and writing skills. For my freshman through senior years, that was Mrs. N. She was utterly out of her mind – and utterly brilliant. She was the one who shaped my love of reading and writing, and encouraged me even when others admonished me to get my nose out of the books and go do something normal kids would do. Her lessons have remained with me for my entire life, along with her frizzy yellow hair and enormous coke-bottle glasses.

Actually, she looked a hell of a lot like the principal on South Park. Only crazier. A lot crazier. We’re not even getting into the incident with the eggs and the beeswax.

No matter how dotty she was, though, Mrs. N was a great teacher…and she saved me from Mrs. L, my teacher throughout the three years of middle school.

Mrs. L was a nice woman, for the most part – in that rather false way that said she was only being nice to her students because it was her job, though she really did work hard at teaching us the foundations of proper English while still letting us have free reign to develop individually. She even tried to stimulate our creativity, which led to our 6th-grade project.

We had to write a book.

Oh, not a full-length book. Forty pages, double-spaced…which was still quite daunting to a 6th-grader. We had a semester to write it. Most of us dove in with eager enthusiasm, chattering about our ideas all through class and completely ignoring Mrs. L when she tried to call us to order. I still remember my book; if I recall, it was called CAT PRINCESS.

I was in 6th grade. Shut the bloody hell up.

My heroine was Taylana. Her mother was a postal worker, just like mine. She was as confused about girls as I was about boys. I was projecting just a little – no, a lot. I was young, and at that age where every story I read cast me as the hero inside the shell of the author’s character. So when I wrote my own story, I wrote a story I’d want to be in and a persona I’d want to adopt, with the gender reversed. Taylana had bright green eyes, because I thought mine were too brown and ordinary. She had long, dark hair that didn’t need special treatments to be straight, and because she was a girl she didn’t have to argue with her mother about keeping it long. She had a black cat just like mine.

And she had brown skin, just like mine – though darker. She was purely African-American, while I’m only part.

There were a few other influences; Occula from Richard Adams’ MAIA, along with another story I’d recently read (but can’t remember now) about a middle-aged woman who was transported to another world and at some point discovered her real heritage…about the time her inner self transformed her into an angry mother bear. Literally. Thus Taylana was the lost princess of the cat people, who’d been sent to the human world to keep her safe; the black cat was actually her guardian, and could talk to her. She shapeshifted into a panther.

Let me remind you: I was eleven. Maybe twelve.

I wish I still had the story, for nostalgia’s sake. Other than a 3rd-grade effort about Dolores the talking hamster, it was my first real work of fiction. Well, it would be if I’d finished it. I failed the assignment, because about two thirds of the way through I put it down with no desire to ever touch it again. It was stupid, it was wrong, it was bad, I shouldn’t have even bothered. Or at least…that’s what Mrs. L led me to believe. During our progress check-ins, she’d read the stories and offer a little advice.

In my case, her advice was to make Taylana white.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, why is she black?”

“Because she just is.”

“She needs a reason to be black.”

“Why?” I asked again, confused.

“Because without a good reason for her to be black, no one wants to read about her. Nobody wants to read a story about a black person. Those stories don’t matter.”

And that was it.

Just like that she’d rendered my character and my story invalid without any consideration of its merit, its worth; all that mattered to her was that the character was black, which made it wrong.

Even worse, she’d rendered me invalid. She’d told me my perspective, my voice didn’t matter…and never would. She’d told me that even though I grew up around people of so many races – most of them not white, especially the majority of my family, my neighbors – there was nothing important about the stories they had to tell, real or fictional. There was nothing important about their thoughts, their perspectives, their cultural insight. There was nothing she could ever possibly relate to, simply because of the color of their skin. The color of my skin.

I felt small. I felt transparent, invisible, dehumanized. I was already a wallflower before, but after that I became wallpaper. I retreated into my books, hid my notebooks full of scribblings, and avoided my friends…my primarily white friends, who found plenty to relate to in our common childhood experiences and had no idea what Mrs. L was talking about, or why it should matter. They liked my story, with the unbiased view of the young – but it was too late to change my impressionable young mind, as an authority figure had already told me it was worthless.

It took another authority figure to straighten me out: Mrs. N. She gave us creative writing assignments starting in freshman year, and noticed mine were a bit stiff, unnatural. I wrote about white boys and white girls, not as normal people, but as ideals of what Mrs. L had told me people wanted to read. I wasn’t comfortable with them, and she could tell in every word – when I even did the assignments, as I felt like there was no point in even picking up a pen. She tried to work with me, despite my mutinous silence and withdrawn nature. After some patience, she managed to pry an explanation out of me.

And when I finally told her about my misgivings, she laughed.

Not at me, no. At Mrs. L. She also called her a few interesting names I won’t repeat here. And then she told me,

“Adrien, who cares what color they are? Who cares what color you are? Every day African-Americans and Chinese people and Arabs and Malays and Latinos and hell Nigerians – everyone’s out there having the same experiences as you and I. There’s a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl somewhere right now staring at a handsome boy with her heart in her throat and hoping he’ll notice her, and just because they’ve both got brown skin and black eyes doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel the same damned things as the blonde white girl when she’s looking at her handsome green-eyed boy.” Then she rapped my knuckles with her pen.

“Ow!”

Then she rapped hers. “Ow!” And she laughed. “See? I’m a nutty old white lady, and you’re a stubborn mule of a young – wait, what are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’ve got pretty skin. It’s like nutmeg. And mine’s like flour. Young dark boy, old pale woman. But the pen still hurt us the same way. And if you wanted to write about it, you’d write it the same way, because we have the same experiences, and they mean the same thing. Exactly the same thing. Your pen smack isn’t my broken leg. Do you get it?”

I nodded slowly, though I wasn’t sure I did, and wasn’t sure I wholly believed her. I’d been burned once already.

“Good.” She started to smack my knuckles again, then grinned when I yanked my hand back before she could. “You learn quick. Let’s see if you’re as quick with a pen. Throw this shit away, don’t tell your mom I said shit, and start over. Write stories about people who matter to you, and if they matter enough…they’ll matter to everyone.”

It took years before I had the maturity to really grasp what she was trying to tell me, but I’d already grasped one important thing: the hand she offered to lift me out of the pit of misconception so I could stand on even footing with everyone else. And what she taught me stuck with me beyond even high school and college, even though I didn’t know until five or six years ago that I wanted to be a writer. I’d thought about computer programming for a while, ended up in data analysis before moving on to full-time writing and editing…but thanks to Mrs. N I never stopped writing on the side, whether it was college assignments, fanfic, or random little drabbles of no importance.

And there was always someone brown in the stories – not just because Mrs. N said it was okay, but because it was what I wanted, and most importantly Mrs. N had taught me to stand up for what I felt was right regardless of any authority figure’s opinion. Whether the protagonist, antagonist, or supporting cast, there were always brown people as part of the landscape of the story – because brown people have been part of the landscape of my life. We’re part of the landscape of your life. You interact with us every day; maybe we’re part of your story. Or maybe you’re part of ours, and we’re the star; that doesn’t make the story any less valid, especially if you stop to think about the fact that we have enough in common in our lives for them to overlap. You talk to us every day; you know us. We’re your friends, your coworkers, people you pass on the street. We have the same concerns you do, the same joys, the same fears.

Just like you, we read. We write. Yes, there are higher rates of illiteracy among the ethnic population, but we’re fighting to change that. We’re fighting not only to make our voices heard, but to learn the right ways to communicate our message on common ground.

We’re fighting to tell stories that give us a little something more to identify with. We’ve grown up reading stories where the white person is the star, and anyone dark is a marginalized token that’s often stereotyped. Yet we’ve found something to identify with in those stories; we’ve found something to love, something that fires our imaginations and makes us want to write our own stories with people like us. People like you, with only a few differences of language, culture, and coloration. We’re trying to be recognized as part of the mainstream – because “mainstream” shouldn’t mean “white only.”

And it doesn’t, anymore. Despite some old voices who still insist no one will buy books with an ethnic protagonist, more and more writers are striking out to speak with colorful voices on every page of their stories. Are readers having trouble identifying? No. No, instead they’re falling in love with the stories and the characters, because good fiction is good fiction – period. They’re proving the status quo wrong.

One day I hope to prove Mrs. L wrong. One day I hope to see Kensington, Akhilesh, Sujit, Hai, Rio, Crow, Akai, Vice, all my rainbowed cast in print – and not just the ethnic rainbow. Grayson, Vee, Marcus, Sebasien, Kira – another rainbow, on the LGBT spectrum; another set of voices who are just as mainstream as the heteronormative ideal.

We aren’t any better than you. You aren’t any better than we.

We’re all the same, but no one asks if there’s a good reason for your characters to be white.

So why do we need a good reason not to be?

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.

Harbls, or What Not to Include in Your Query

“Interesting” is a strange word, with so many positive and negative connotations in modern vernacular it’s a wonder anyone can be sure what you mean when you use it. It can mean fascinating, disturbing, intriguing, annoying, fantastic, or “oh god, the horror, the horror! Mine virgin eyes; what has been seen can never be unseen!” There’s also the Chinese context, my favorite proverb of “may you live in interesting times” – which basically boils down to a polite way of saying “I hope you die in a fire.”

Trust me when I say I’ve used it in all these contexts after nearly a month of digging through the Lyrical slush pile.

I’ve seen some great queries. Compelling writing, clear plot summaries, professional address and presentation. I’ve also seen sloppy, poorly-written queries, bland queries, queries that aren’t queries at all…and some delightful gems bordering on sheer cracked-out insanity. These wanderers off the beaten path have informed us of everything from their life stories to their sexual fetishes to the weight of their dogs’ testicles in precisely measured ounces, which is key to the accuracy of the were-sex in their paranormal romance. (The latter two are thankfully not linked. Um. I hope.)

What were these writers thinking? Sure, these facts are…interesting. Informative. Sometimes unique. But they’re also far too strange and intimate, and vastly off-topic from what your query letter should be about: your book, your previous publishing credentials (if any), and why you chose this publisher or this agent. I doubt anyone would feel their precious Rover’s harbls were an appropriate topic of discussion in an official letter to a business partner – so what’s the logic of mentioning it in a query?

To start with, let’s take a look at the erroneous assumption that your query is wholly private. It’s a special secret between you and the agent or publisher, a little locked diary entry with a single key that you share between you, making moon eyes at each other as you pass it back and forth and hold it to your pulsating hearts (which, naturally, beat as one when you love someone – thank you, this has been your 80s flashback for the day). You poured your heart into it, your soul, and included every quirky, offbeat detail that you hope will make you unique and endearing – no matter how inappropriate those details might be. And when the day’s done you’ve made a special connection, because of this private thing you’ve shared with that precious someone.

Wrong.

First off, it’s possible you’re sending your super special query to an intern who’ll take one look at it, make a face I won’t even try to describe, and toss it in the trash. Second, if it makes it to the agent or to your chosen contact at the publishing house, it’s quite possible they’ll pass it around to everyone else at the establishment. Not to be malicious, no, but for one of three reasons: 1. they’re interested in the project and want counsel from their peers, 2. they’re not interested but think someone else might be, or 3. you sent a query with pictures of cats doing the nasty as relevant to the theme of your supernatural shifter story, and they want to be sure everyone knows your name in case you come across their desks with a fresh pile of crazy.

Do they do this out of spite? No. But industry professionals do talk, they do look out for each other, and at the end of the day memorable queries do sometimes come up. “Memorable” is a word like “interesting;” it can mean something awesome, or it can mean you’ll go down in infamy as the Cat Smut Dog Harbls writer.

Recently literary agent Michelle Wolfson got dragged into a bit of intarwebz drama on Twitter. She posts #queryquotes as she reads queries, with 140 characters of insight into things that make her go “hmmm.” (And “ech.” And “what is this i don’t even.”) Although she makes sure the quotes are anonymous and removes any identifying details of the stories, this sparked an argument with a published author who felt she was demeaning writers for the sake of her own cruel amusement. Many writers, editors, and literary agents jumped to her defense (although it proved pointless; it’s hard to argue with someone who’s fencing with a Nerf bat yet is convinced he’s holding a rapier). They pointed out that #queryquotes is meant to be humorously helpful, not hurtful. Yet many detractors were less worried about what she said, and more worried that she posted excerpts publicly. Was Michelle violating writers’ privacy by publicly posting lines from their queries?

No. Not just no, but hell no.

Step back and look at this with a little perspective. You’ve written a book, and now you’re letting that little bugger out into the world. Fly, little pages, fly, and hope that one day you’ll be read and appreciated by thousands or even millions of people. When you’re actively seeking publicity, you have no right to privacy as far as those words are concerned. People will read your book, they’ll talk about it, they’ll quote you, and sometimes they’ll say not-so-nice things – and you can’t do a damned thing about it other than wear yourself out flailing about. You can’t even cite copyright law, as long as they’re only quoting a few lines. Fair use is a bitch when it’s used against you, but it’s still fair use.

Your query is an extension of your book. You’re sending it out into the woolly wild hoping to find that one person who’ll love it enough to launch your publishing career. If you aren’t prepared to have your query seen publicly, then you aren’t prepared to deal with the ups and downs of making a published book available to the widely diverse and highly opinionated world at large.

So here’s a rule of thumb when crafting a good query: if you’ve written something you’d be embarrassed to see on #queryquotes, read to your mother, or have flashed on the big screen during the Superbowl halftime show, stop and take a closer look at your query. Ask yourself why that section is embarrassing you, then delete it. Keep deleting until you have something you’d be proud to place on public display. Rover will thank you. So will all the agents and editors whose minds you saved from irreparable scarring via TMI.

Because if it’s too embarrassing to be seen by the general populace, it doesn’t have a place in your query.

Excerpt: PAPER MOON

Okay, so Kerry / @uppington talked me into growing a pair and doing this. Those who know me know I’m a little sketchy about posting stuff from WIPs here, though I don’t really worry about the random one-off snippets I do for writing exercises. For me it’s a bit strange to post something from a draft that might change completely by the time I finish and edit it. But I haven’t posted in over a week and it’s either this or a long rant from editor-Adri (who spent this morning buried in the slush pile and is too cranky after the past week to say anything helpful) about knowing your genre, so…I guess I’ll be posting a chapter from the rough draft of PAPER MOON.

It’s dystopian, YA, fantasy – not swords-and-sorcery or urban fantasy, but just a darker world. To be blunt, it’s a gender-swap story that takes place in a totalitarian future regime with strong flavors of Paris under German occupation, and it explores gender perceptions by completely swapping male and female roles with the understanding that it’s not considered strange or abnormal in their society, nor a reflection on their sexuality, but simply part of daily life. To them the roles aren’t reversed; this isn’t cross-dressing, and there’s no fetishization of the reversal.

It’s something I’m really enjoying writing, because by placing men and women in opposing gender roles without trying to justify it based on preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity, I’m discovering a lot about common gender perceptions in society and my own thoughts about them. On LJ, it sparked a really interesting discussion about how certain characters are perceived, certain assumptions made because they don’t act the way they “should” for their gender. Might be a little heavy for YA, but the classification fits with the story progression I have outlined for my 16-year-old protagonist.

But I should probably stop talking about it and let it speak for itself. So…yep. Chapter.