A Daily Dose of Romance

Any time you send a submission to an agent or an editor, you are essentially pitching your work. So make certain it is your very best work. While no editor or agent will turn down a great story because of one or two missed punctuation marks, a submission chocked full of them will no doubt deter any interest.

One way to combat this is to have someone else proofread your work. A fresh pair of eyes will be more likely to pick up mistakes your eyes aren’t catching. The brain is amazing at self-correcting what the eyes see. You know what word you intended to write, so the brain tells you that is what is there. I’m always amazed at what my critique partners catch after I have gone through and edited with a fine toothed comb and done a special read through just to look for all those red squiggly lines Microsoft Word uses to alert you to errors.

But back on track, the biggest rule of thumb is to be professional. From keeping your letter concise and pleasant to not calling to inquire about the status of your submission every other day, treat writing as your job. Very few writers who are published earn their living solely through their writing. But if you ever hope to be counted among that group, then present yourself in a professional manner. It doesn’t matter if you are at a conference or never leave your house, any and all contact should be to the point and polite.

One of the best ways to learn this business is through other writers. If you have a local writers group, join. If you are fortunate to have a writing group that focuses on the same genre you write, even better. But if not, don’t worry. There are plenty of online groups to join as well. Sometimes you’ll need to pay membership fees for the more organized groups, such as Romance Writers of America, but there are many additional benefits to organizations like these that make the cost worth it.

My one prick of advice in joining a group though, is that it be a positive one. Do not put yourself in the company of other writers who tear down every effort you make (and there are people like this). This business is hard enough to keep on a positive plain, don’t sabbotage yourself.

Do you have what it takes? Will they be drooling over you, fighting over you? It could happen. Maybe. 

So, are you ready to throw out that pitch? Have that editor or agent on pins and needles to get your manuscript? Get their hands on everything you’ve ever written? Okay, maybe not everything, but at least they want to read something, right?

What every agent or editor wants is different. Some only want a query letter, so you’ll have two paragraphs, at most, to lure them into wanting to read more. Some will accept a synopsis and a chapter or so. But DO your research and find out. Literary agencies and publishing houses get thousands of submissions a year, and many now will not even bother to read a word you’ve said if you do not follow their guidelines for submissions. They are simply too busy.

Today I’ll cover a query letter only submission. You’ve written a pleasant, professional business letter, addressed to that specific agent or editor, made a point not to tell them how spectacular your writing is, after all, they’ll see that as soon as they request pages and start reading. The only thing left to put into that perfect letter is your pitch.

Well, just what do you say about your story? My personal approach is to treat that paragraph or two like a back cover blurb. Hook them into wanting more. After all, that’s the job of the back cover. We all pick a book off the shelf, flip it over and read. If we like what we see, we’ll read more. If not, we slide it right back onto the shelf and keep searching. It’s the same with editors and agents.

Now be warned. Just because you’re only writing a couple hundred words at most, don’t think it will be easy. The more condensed the writing, the more difficult. In those two scant paragraphs, you’ll need to cover conflict and motivation, emotion, the hero, the heroine, goals, setting, and most of all - a heart grabbing hook as the very last line.

If you do all those things, they’ll want you.

An important part of keeping up in this tricky business of writing is knowing the market. And what better way to hear that news than to attend conferences. Yesterday I talked some about a national writing organization I belong to and the annual conference they host. The workshops I’ve attended at RWA’s national conferences are fabulous. Not only can you attend workshops on craft and research, there are editor and agent panels, author panels, promotion divas telling you what does and doesn’t work, and usually workshops on the individual sub-genres in romance. All the latest dish will be heard.

Every workshop I’ve ever attended or listened to the recording of (you can purchase CDs of the majority of offered workshops) has been top notch. Always something to learn.

But if you want to pitch to an editor or agent - you might have a hard time. The slots fill very, very quickly as there is a priority ranking system. And in my experience of pitching at a national conference, there are so very many people, an editor or agent hasn’t the energy to get excited let alone remember your pitch or story by the time you get it sent along to them.

So how to remedy this? Small, local writers conferences are the best way for this. First, know your writing, exactly what you write and who you want to write for. Be certain of the publishers lines (word count and such) and that your work will fit there. Then watch the smaller conference circuit to see when and where an editor, or that dream agent, will be taking pitches. Your likelihood of getting an appointment with that particular editor or agent will increase by leaps and bounds.

Then, of course, you attend the conference and make your pitch. So while large conferences have much to offer, a smaller conference may have something more important to offer.

I promised stats of the romance industry, so here are a few:

Did you know that 1/4 of all books (that’s all, not just paperback books) sold are romances? Last year (2006) the genre of romance brought in over 1.3 billion dollars with the release of approximately 6,400 titles.

There’s something to be said about love…

In business, people network everyday. Well, writing is a business, too, solitary though it is. And it is important to make and keep connections with other writers, as well as editors and agents. One of the best ways I have found to do this is to attend conferences.

I belong to a national organization called Romance Writers of America. Each year they put on a conference that spans several days, has some of the best workshops I’ve ever attended, editor and agent appointments, lots of good food and of course plenty of romace novels. One of my favorite things at these conferences is seating arrangements for meals - round tables with linen tablecloths and low centerpieces. It’s perfectly acceptable to arrive for lunch alone after a buzzing round of morning workshops, find an open spot and ask if you may join. The conversation is always lively, and always about writing or the latest trends in the market.

You get to refuel your enthusiam.

At these lunches I’ve spent time talking with multi-published authors, people who have not yet completed their first book, and ladies who’ve been in the trenches writing and submitting for years…

And what I take away from these conferences most, is a love of writing and especially a love of romance. As a romance author, we are often looked down upon. Not by the publishers or editors or agents, but by regular people who see writing and reading romance as silly.

Well, there’s nothing silly about love.

Stay tuned…tomorrow I’ll post some statistics about romance that will most likely surprise you. I’ll also talk about the difference between national and small local conferences and my experience with them both in regards to pitching and selling that book.

One of the topics I get asked about the most is one I’ve already posted a bit on, body language. Specifically - attraction.

We’ve all experienced it, whether with someone we are married to, someone we dated, or with a stranger from across the room whom we’ve never so much as said a word to, or may ever.

Attraction can be as simple as looking forward to the company of someone you know, or a pure, white hot chemical heat that burns through to the soul, leaving a mark to last lifetimes.

The latter is the kind of attraction I write about. The kind of gut wrenching reaction that turns bad boys and wounded souls into protective men, just for her, just for the chance to see her face, watch her smile at him.

For love.

Men don’t fall in love the way women do, emotion swirling round like leaves in an autumn windstorm, flying every which way. For men, love pretty much runs up one day and bites them where the sun don’t shine. A man is more likely to show his woman he loves her long before he tells her.

Now whether she can read the signs…that’s another story.

My favorite books to read are classics. I love Seton and Flaubert, Emerson, Twain. Stuff no one reads much anymore. And I think I’ve figured out why. At least in part.

Stories like Dragonwyck and Madame Bovary are not long stories by the word count, but they take some time to read. You don’t plow through one of those in an afternoon on the beach and still get into the depth of the characters and setting, let alone the plot and tragedy of it all. For years I have collected anciently published classics. And while I do not have nearly as much time as I used to, I will pull out certain books and read passages now and again.

Authors told stories differently back then. Not only in the vocabulary they used, but in the way they made setting and time come alive, almost actual characters in the story. By the time you finished reading the book, you knew every nook and cranny, every piece of furniture, every bend in the river…

I miss those kinds of stories. In today’s market, the action starts right under your nose on page one, no build-up, no backstory, no lengthy description. All we ever write is just enough to give the reader a sense of time and place. Elaboration is considered unnecessary, frivolous, not publishable.

Why? It is a matter of society. More people watch television for information now than read the newspaper. Video games, computers and movies are time-killers and methods of escapism, not so much with books anymore. Being educated well enough to read is no longer the exception, nor do families sit around a fire in the hearth and listen to a story, or to someone read from a book.

People have become accustomed to immediacy. Information is not something we wait for, we Google it. We are impatient. We want information, entertainment. And we want it now. Action movies and stories start out with a bang and a boom, or at the very least evil lurking in the opening arrangement of music. They do not begin softly - unless someone or something is seconds away from being torn to shreds right before our eyes, all blood and screams.

What ever happened to just telling the story? To delving into emotion and tragedy, the psyche. Why does everything have to go boom?

So, where do you do it? A padded chair? The back garden on a sunny day? Oh, I know, in a corner booth at the coffeshop…

Writing, of course! Or are you accustomed to sitting in front of your computer screen? Do you write long hand on paper and transcribe it later? Use a laptop and travel?

In my post yesterday, I mentioned my AlphaSmart. It’s a little word processor that weighs about two pounds, runs for many hundreds of hours (that’s right, I said hundreds) on three batteries, automatically saves…

Now, before I start sounding like some kind of advertisement, let me say there are other brands of the same sort of thing out there. This just happens to be the one I own.

What I like about this device most is that I can take it any where and write. I don’t even need to find an outlet to plug it into like laptops often need. Just turn it on and start typing. It allows me the freedom to get comfortable in any chair, in any room of the house, the coffee shop, back yard or where ever.

I can only see a few lines at a time, so it’s difficult to edit myself to any real degree. And I don’t have to stare at an entire blank, white page on my desk top computer screen. I just write.

My first drafts are always done this way. As I fill a file, it’s simply a matter of plugging in my little wordprocessor, hitting the send button and…whamo! there are my pages, formatted all neat and perfect, the cursor blinking at me from my desk top computer. Not to mention the lack of distraction - no spider solitaire, internet, email. The AlphaSmart is just for writing.

So, do you have a favorite creative location? A routine or ritual of getting your butt into the chair somehow to get those pages out and into the computer? If so, feel free to share. The creative process is a wily one, and if it works for you it just might work for someone else.

No doubt about it, it is tough to keep the word count going during the holidays. Especially when you are talking Thanksgiving and Christmas - the two big ones. Family, travel, friends, the parties to plan and attend, these are all very time consuming, stressful, and often necessary parts of the season. And then there’s all that shopping…ick.

I know. I’ve been there and done all of them.

One way that helps me keep the productivity progressing is to have some piece of what I’m working on with me when I am traveling. Sometimes it’s pages to edit, or research for my next story. If I’m actively writing, I’ll take along my AlphaSmart (word processor) so I can keep going.

Now don’t get me wrong, I never get a great deal done on holiday trips, but, the few minutes I can manage to sneak away and look at my story keeps it fresh in my mind. So even if I don’t get a single word written or edited, at least when I get back home and in my routine I am ready to pick right up with my story. I won’t need several days to re-read and refresh.

This year in particular, keeping my word count going is important. I have a novella to finish and turn in to my editor, as well as a three book proposal to write. All to be done over the holidays.

And this is the week when all the fun begins…

In keeping with the theme of ‘Process’ that seems to have emerged this week, I thought I would bring up the topic of music. Many of the writers I know have a play list of music they listen to when they write. The songs change with each story to fit the feel and emotion they are trying to convey.

I tried this method of motivation once, but it just didn’t work for me. Which I thought was strange, because I can write with the television on in the background, or most any other noise. Writing in the middle of a busy coffee shop doesn’t bother me in the least, I simply fall into my story world and all those talking, moving people around me fade away.

But put the radio on…poof, there goes my ability to pay attention to the written word.

There must be something about music that draws me in so completely - the rhythm of the musical notes, the words, the harmonic sound of the voices. No, I don’t listen to the really hard stuff, it hurts my head. For me, music is too hypnotic to use it as a tool for creativity.

Over the years, my muse and I have come to an understanding…she works best early in the morning (not my choice) and she can’t focus with music playing.

Do any of you have such a fickle muse to placate?

Progress. Or lack there of. You decide.

I want to finish the first draft of my novella this month. My goal is to then let it sit for a few days, edit and polish, ship it off to my critique partners for review, re-edit and send it to my editor all by the first of the year. January brings the start of a new single title (the first in a trilogy). So the timing of a challenge with my local writer’s group was perfect. During the entire month of November, we post our fresh pages every day, the competition spurring us on…

Now don’t get me wrong, my page counts aren’t terrible. I know I don’t do a fast first draft. In fact, my first drafts come out slow, but quite clean and I usually whip right through edits - an entire single title will usually take me only a week or so to edit and polish. That said, and the fact that I am NOT a plotter, I am by nature a character driven writer, I am half way through this first draft. And we are half way through the month.

I know my page count for yesterday was terrible. In fact, I’m not sure I wrote enough to have even a line count.

But on the up side, my characters did reveal some more about the story, and themselves. This I like. This is inspiring. This will get the fingers tapping atop the keyboard today. So as far as progress, I’d say yes and no.

What would you say?