Writer's Grove

Ah, goggles & dirigibles—is there anything more divine? Yes! Goggles and dirigibles and FRUIT! Behold the latest composition in my ongoing series:

One of the things I’m enjoying as a writer is how I frequently get surprised by my need to research something. As a reader, I’m familiar with being taken to “whole new worlds,” but it happens often when I write as well.

1. Moms are cool.

2. I’m currently reading a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. It reminds me very much of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though this is a bit more straightforward and not couched in fiction. I’ll post a review when I’m finished.

3. I liked Robert Redick’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy quite a bit, though I haven’t written a full review. The creatures called murths were fascinating…wished I could have read more about them.

4. I’m now at 44K on Hammered.

5. There are degrees of geekiness and nerdiness, and I while I can truthfully claim to be both mildly nerdy and mildly geeky, there are certain things I must acquire to rise up in the ranks a become a TurboGeek or TurboNerd. The good folks at thinkgeek.com have me covered. For example, there’s this Dread Pirate Roberts action figure. It’s terribly fashionable, as I’ve wished. And then I need to get myself a new sonic screwdriver because the new Dr. Who has one. When I’m on the go and a bit sluggish and don’t have a pot of coffee ready, then I can have myself a Caffeinated Maple Bacon Lollipop. Mmm, bacon. With 80 mg. of caffeine in every pop, I’ll be shredding like Megadeth on my electric guitar shirt. Rock on.

I wish Chaucer would get more credit than he usually does. The dude was brilliant, and it’s hard to appreciate him fully without hearing his original language—which was, after all, a bit different from ours. He wrote The Canterbury Tales before the great vowel shift in English, and spellings weren’t entirely agreed upon, either (which continued through Shakespeare’s day). Still, modern readers can follow along pretty darn well, and when you hear it with the original pronunciation his gift becomes clear. I had a professor in college who would read it to the class with the shifted vowels, just as Chaucer would have in his time, and it’s wondrous poetry.

Hounded will be published one year from today. Is it too early to start a countdown?

Hmm. Probably.

While staring at the calendar and willing it to turn faster, I’ve been reflecting on what got me this far. Writing the book sure helped, of course, but writing the query letter got the book looked at in the first place. Lots of writers never get their book seriously considered because their query letter doesn’t snag an agent’s interest.

I’d actually suggest writing a query letter as a method of focusing your writing if you’re in the process of completing a project now. Distilling your project down to its essentials can be wonderfully clarifying if you’re flailing about with subplots and how you’re ever going to end it.

The meat of your query should focus on your main character’s conflict. What is at stake for your character, and what kind of heck must he/she endure before that conflict gets resolved? You put other goodies in a query too, like word count and marketing possibilities and maybe a wee bit about yourself if it will help you sell the story—but all of those are side dishes. Focus on the meat. You won’t be able to dwell on subplots very much and that’s okay—after all, if they don’t want your main plot, they’re not going to want the subplot(s) either.

My query letter got me several requests for partial manuscripts, a couple of full requests, and one whole agent (which is all you need). The meat was in the first three paragraphs. In the last paragraph I included the word count and genre, mentioned its series potential, and asked if I could send the manuscript. To celebrate the beginning of my year-long countdown to publication, below is the meat of my query letter for Hounded:

Atticus O’Sullivan has been running for two thousand years, and he’s a bit tired of it. After he stole a magical sword from the Tuatha Dé Danann (those who became the Sidhe or the Fae) in a first-century battle, some of them were furious and gave chase, and some were secretly amused that a Druid had the cheek to defy them. As the centuries passed and Atticus remained a fugitive—an annoyingly long-lived one, at that—those who were furious only grew more so, while others began to aid him in secret.


Now he’s living in Tempe, Arizona, the very last of the Druids, far from where the Fae can easily enter this plane and find him. It’s a place where many paranormals have decided to hide from the troubles of the Old World—from an Icelandic vampire holding a grudge against Thor to a coven of Polish witches who ran from the German Blitzkrieg.


When Atticus hears from the Morrigan that his nemesis, Aenghus Óg, has found him again, he decides to stay and fight rather than run. In so doing, he becomes the center of a power struggle among the Tuatha Dé Danann, where the sword he stole is the key to a plot to overthrow Brighid, first among the Fae.

That was all the meat I wrote. I doubt my agent pitched the book in the same way, and that’s not what you’ll see on the back cover of the book, but it worked. I left out a couple of gods and some werewolves and an Irish wolfhound named Oberon, but none of that was the meat of the story.

If I may, I highly recommend a site called the Absolute Write Water Cooler. Here’s the link. They have a Share Your Work section where you can post your query letter and get feedback on it. I didn’t discover it until after I’d already written mine, but it’s clear that it helps many people. They have lots of other forums too, and it’s a great community made up of published and (as yet) unpublished authors.

Okay. Is it 2011 yet?

Quick post: Saw two movies recently on the opposite ends of entertainment. One was Kick-Ass. Don’t take any kids. Just take your inner comic book nerd and enjoy.

One of the things I completely geeked out about is that I buy my comics at Atomic Comics…and it’s in the movie.

The other movie was Oceans, a documentary released today, Earth Day. Stunning. Beautiful. Jaw dropped when I saw the blanket octopus and the mantis shrimp.  Check ’em out:

Oh, and yeah, the guy swimming along the Great White in peace was a trip. Amazing. Makes me wonder what else we’re missing down there. Two thumbs up for both movies.

Today I am supposed to receive the copy-edited manuscript for my second book, Hexed. I’m incredibly excited about this—so much so that I might indulge in excessive superfluous exclamation points!!!!!!

You might wonder why.

Why would any sane person want to see their written work all marked up by a stranger 3,000 miles away?

Because there will be a title page with my name on it that the publisher made up all special just for me. There will also be an ISBN number assigned specifically to my book. It’s all proof that my dream of getting published will be real someday…in just a wee bit over a year from now. *tiny groan*

April 26, 2011…*another tiny groan.* It’s a long time to wait. Nineteen months and one day after the deal was struck, Hounded will finally hit the shelves. That is a bit longer than most deals, but since it’s going to be followed in quick succession by Hexed in May and Hammered in June, the extra time is built in there for me to actually write two books.

It will be bearable, of course, because the day will eventually come. I get to wake up every day and know I’m twenty-four hours closer to my goal. Eventually I’ll get to see my covers and do a little dance. I’ll get to hear the reader of the audio version attempt to do all the accents in the books (Irish, Polish, Tamil, Russian, Finnish, Mandarin, Icelandic, and German) and grin until my face hurts. And maybe, in the interim, I’ll get some good news from overseas, or some news about dramatic rights. It could happen anytime, and that makes waiting more fun.

As far as progress goes, I’ve taken a step backward, but I think it’s more of a course correction. I’ve been writing about these vampires recently and not digging it at all. I wrote about four thousand words, had this huge imbroglio set at University of Phoenix Stadium, and it didn’t feel right. So I highlighted the lot of it and pressed Delete. It wasn’t really a subplot; it was more of a derailment, a complete tangent, and it’s better that I wait on the vampires until I can develop them properly in their own story. Hammered isn’t about vampires. It’s about Ratatosk and Yggdrasil, Thor and Odin, and How to Tempt a Frost Giant.

O frabjous day! There shall be many words to cuddle, plus hot chocolate with marshmallows! I raise my mug to you, and hope you have some lovely words to cuddle up with too.

I expect there are many people staggeringly inconvenienced by Iceland right now. People who have never looked at a globe are now scowling at it, shaking their fingers scoldingly at the volcanically active island and complaining about their cancelled flights. I don’t know why they’re so surprised. I mean, you could just take a look at this map of Iceland from 1590 and know that someday it was going to throw out some serious shit: