Tag Archives: Hounded

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And my series title is…

The Iron Druid Chronicles. I got the official word today from my editor at Del Rey!

I love it! It sounds so badass! I have hopes that maybe a tiny dusting of its badassery will accrue to me, since I’m the author. ;)

I’ve waited a long time to know what the series would finally be called—almost a year. The original series title I’d queried with (and got the deal with) was ditched long ago: I’d called it The American Druid Series. But it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t appropriate for several reasons:
1. My Druid is Irish—as in, he’s really from Ireland. (That means he can never be President—is that a spoiler?)
2. It sounded like a vaguely patriotic title, and my Druid cares very little about the interests of any political entity, much less one that’s only been around for 234 years. (He’s 2,100 years old.)
3. The series goes far beyond the boundaries of America after the first couple of books.

What followed was a long journey through rivers of discarded ideas. This one’s my favorite, offered whimsically by my Assistant Editor, Mike Braff: “Druid, where’s my car?”

A large part of the problem was that “Druid” doesn’t scan well with other words. It doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, shall we say, when one is trying to formulate a phrase that’s simple and memorable yet captures the essence of multiple books in a series. When we strayed into ideas that didn’t have “Druid” in them, however, we ran into other issues—the titles sounded too sci-fi, or too mystery-ish, or sounded too close to other titles out there. “Iron Druid” came to me yesterday on the way home from the day job, and it was one of those facepalm moments, where you can’t believe you hadn’t thought of it earlier. Especially since I’d written that exact phrase on page six of Hounded. So I sent it off to the big house in NY, and they liked it, and now I imagine they’ll do something logo-ish with it to make it look even cooler than it sounds.

I want a T-shirt that says The Iron Druid Chronicles on it. I want the mug. The sheet set. And the limited edition Monopoly® game (I get to be Oberon!).

As if that news weren’t spiffy enough, Tricia (my editor) told me the typeset pages for HEXED are on the way! Woohoo! This is a very cool Wednesday.

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One Hundred Plus Three

Not sure if there’s some sort of numerological significance to this, but today marks my one hundredth blog post and my third novel accepted by Del Rey!

I have been smiling so much about that last bit that people have begun to fear me. They swerve out of my path and refuse to make eye contact, frightened that I might be happy at them.

I’m incapable of turning down the wattage, however, because at this time last year I didn’t even have a book deal yet (The deal happened on Sep. 25, 2009), and now—11 months later—Del Rey has accepted HOUNDED, HEXED, and HAMMERED!

And starting about eight months from now—April 26, 2011—people will finally get to read my books! The trick, I am told, is to make them aware of my existence between now and then. I hope I can manage somehow.

My release schedule—April, May, and June of next year—means readers will get to sink their mental teeth deep into the series right away. It also means I’m in a really weird place right now…the sort of place they never tell you about, and by they I mean all those people who write about the writing life…you know: writers. I’ve written three urban fantasies, but I’m still a few months away from having a cover or early reviews or any of those other shiny things writers like to gush about. And don’t get me wrong—I’m going to gush about my cover(s) and my (hopefully kind) early reviews, etc.—but in the meantime I’m a writer without any books to point at. It’s a funky state of being; I should probably take notes.

The reason they never told me about this place is that there truly aren’t many writers who have debuted in this fashion. From what I understand, I’m only the third to do so for Del Rey. I don’t know if other publishers do this or not…so maybe I’m the third, period. Naomi Novik began her wonderful Temeraire series this way, and Stacia Kane just got finished releasing her first three Downside novels last month.

I’ve been told my blog posts will start poppin’ up on Suvudu. Maybe it will even be this one—if so, hello there, nice person who clicked on a curious link! I should probably warn you that I will not simply be writing about my books. I tend to write about beer and miniature dwarfs and things of importance to nerds, and I do my best to post twice a week. I also like to interview other authors because I’m sort of a fanboy and easily impressed by smart people (my interview with Gail Carriger will go live a week from today, August 31). Browse through my archives to get a sense for it—I have 99 other posts here to enjoy! And if you say hi in the comments to let me know that you’re now aware of my existence, I’ll repay you by introducing you to Sigurd Kneecapper on Saturday—plus an awesome microbrew! :)

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Glimmerglass & Cooperstown

Sigh. Today’s my last day in NY. Heading back to the dry heat tomorrow and trees with many thorns instead of leaves.

But I visited a couple of cool breweries down near Cooperstown I wanted to talk about for a bit. One is called Ommegang, and they have a beer there called Three Philosopher’s Ale that they sell for $3.50 a bottle. Yeah, that’s a 12-oz. bottle. They age it in a cellar like wine. It’s unusual stuff—might not be for everyone—but I know that some people find it to be divine, and I give it a free cameo appearance in Hammered in a scene featuring Atticus, Gunnar, and Leif. You can find Ommegang’s beers in some stores back east and finer liquor establishments all over. The tour of the brewery is cool and the grounds are immaculate. They have a really large grassy area behind the brewery suitable for concerts, so they occasionally have concerts there since they’re cool like that.

That’s my cute kid and my sister in-law around the Ommegang fire pit. The tree-lined grassy area extends (quite extensively, natch) to both the left and right of this picture. Very pretty.
We also visited another brewery in the area called Cooperstown Brewing, which is actually located in nearby Milford. Here are their beers, from light to dark: 

I like the Nine Man Ale, a very clean pilsner. That Back Yard IPA is kind of neat because they grow the hops to finish it right on the property. Here’s their hop vines:

Yesterday we went to Glimmerglass State Park, which is really Otsego Lake that James Fenimore Cooper called “Glimmerglass” in his books. It’s a glacial lake fed by springs beneath the surface. When you go swimming in there you can sort of feel where the springs are, because there are colder patches of water. The swimming area is lovely and so are the grounds around the lake, with lots of benches and trails and remarkably friendly trees.

Yeah, I’m going to be leaving all that and return to this:
That’s a creosote bush, by the way, for those of you who have never seen one before. They’re the dominant desert scrub, and they give the whole valley its distinctive smell when it rains. I happen to love the smell, but I know some people don’t dig it. These things can grow forever, cloning themselves. There’s one that’s dang near 12,000 years old. Anyway, they can grow pretty close together at times and they provide quite a bit of shelter to plenty of desert animals. I mention them a couple of times in Hounded, so I thought I’d provide the picture here to aid the imagination. :)
Working through my TBR pile and fiddling around with outlines for book four and an epic fantasy trilogy while I wait for my editors to take a look at Hammered. Life is good. 
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Squee! My meetings in NYC!

So: about a year after my agent picked me up out of his slush pile, I finally got to meet him! My wife and I met Evan for noodles at Soba Nippon under the watchful eye of an attentive waitress who wasn’t afraid to instruct us how to eat. Evan was “doing it wrong,” I guess, and after placing a mystery liquid down on the table and leaving, she came back and poured it into his bowl for him and mixed it around so that he’d enjoy it properly. I found this both highly amusing and very sweet of her to be so concerned with Evan’s gustatory delight. Besides trading personal stories, we spoke about my current series and how it was going and also spitballed ideas for an epic that I want to rework down the road.

Apart from being an incredible agent, Evan is almost unspeakably cool. He knows a lot about New York and where to go eat before you see a show. He rattled off about twelve places (complete with directions) that we should try to visit. We forgot all of them and wound up eating at a rather disappointing (for me) Irish pub around the block from our hotel. Their fish and chips were out of the freezer, not fresh at all; it was nothing less than a complete abdication of their responsibility to provide good pub fare for their customers. But things got so much better after that!

We went to see American Idiot at the St. James Theatre and found it to be unexpectedly cathartic. I was already a fan of Green Day’s American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown albums, but it’s hard to see them as anything but genius after watching the Broadway production. It captures the youth of 2000-2008 perfectly—I know because I taught ’em. The lead eerily reminded me of a student who just graduated, in fact. The songs were connected together with a narrative and rearranged beautifully in some cases, and the wirework they did during the dream sequence of “Before the Lobotomy” was stunning. Highly recommended.

The next day, I got to meet my editors at Del Rey, Tricia and Mike, at the Random House building on Broadway! They have lobby security kind of like that scene in The Matrix where Neo and Trinity have to go rescue Morpheus. I meant to ask why, but I never did, so now I will guess: without the security, crazed would-be writers would overwhelm the editors like a horde of zombies with hand-delivered manuscripts. “Just look at this!” they’d say, waving a sheaf of papers in 12-point Courier, “It’s a tender military sci-fi tale about a race of furry reptiles who fetishize automatic weapons! A plucky orphan fursnake and his mollusk friend must stop the Dark Lord Uzi from shooting up the planet with demon gunsauce!”

Once past security, everything was remarkably tranquil. We went almost all the way to the tippy-top of the building and stepped into scifi/fantasy nerd heaven. The 24th floor of Random House is currently enchanted to make everyone and everything appear as it would in an epic fantasy. They rotate the enchantment for variety: last week was steampunk week and they looked something like this, and next week everyone will look like Warhammer 40K Space Marines. Tricia and Mike were dressed in flowing robes of shimmering samite, just like I expected, while my wife and I wore homely tunics stained with grease and mustard. They greeted us courteously and then led me to a treasure vault guarded by two gnome paladins who grudgingly stepped aside once Mike uttered the password. The password changes every day, so I can safely tell you what Mike said: “Argyle is curiously in vogue at Tor headquarters.”

The vault was a treasure indeed. It was full of Del Rey’s books. Like, all of Tolkien. And Alan Dean Foster. Anne McCaffrey. Terry Brooks. Everything good, basically. And my editors said unto me, “You may take whatever you want, thou good and faithful author. One day soon, your books will be added to this sacred vault.” I knelt and wept and showered them with gratitude, and they allowed me to kiss their rings.

Left, Tricia’s Lucent Pearl Ring of Editorial Savvy. Right, Mike’s Doomcloud Diamond Ring of Smiting.
I took a first edition of The Ruling Sea by Robert Redick and counted myself the most fortunate man on earth. Next, I met the editor of said book, Kaitlin Heller. She assaulted me with her champion, an ensorceled Silent Bob action figure. We sparred—silently—until I was forced to yield. I also met David Moench and editor Anne Groell. The latter was not clad in her customary editorial robes, but rather fully armored for battle. Her office was a field tent and she greeted me like so:

I gave her a hearty salutation and she bade me good day, though a warning flashed in her eyes. I bowed and scraped before I fled, and then I asked Tricia why yon editor kept such a grim aspect.

“Verily, she is besieged,” quoth she.

“In what way? I saw no forces marshaled ‘neath her tower.”

“She must gird herself to meet the constant queries about the release date of Ser George R.R. Martin’s book, A Dance of Dragons. She is the good ser’s editor, you see.”

(Note: To hell with Kevin Bacon, I now have two degrees of separation from George R.R. Martin! Yes, his next book was a topic of conversation over lunch, but no, I can’t tell you anything about its release. Sorry. Anne was actually quite cheerful, though, if that tells you anything.)

I was then privileged to meet the High Priestess of Del Rey, Betsy Mitchell. She was gracious and kind and apparently in on all of The Plans for Lunch. I knew only one of The Plans, and Tricia knew only one of The Plans. Betsy and Mike were in on both of The Plans.

We left the 24th floor and looked like normal nerds as we walked to Hell’s Kitchen—well, at least I did. I give you proof of my rampant nerdiness with a quoted snippet of our conversation:

Tricia: “This neighborhood is called Hell’s Kitchen.”
Me: “OH! You mean where Daredevil lives?”

Yes, I really said that. I embarrass myself all the time. There is no cure.  

The Plan for Lunch I didn’t know about was choosing this particular pub for our luncheon:

HOW COOL IS THAT! The perfect place to take a guy who’s written a series of urban fantasies about a Druid. They had exposed brick walls inside with spiffy paintings hanging on them. Navigate past the bar to the back, and there’s a wee patio outside with sunlight and growing things. We sat there and I ordered the fish and chips and a Smithwick’s.

I learned several very important things on that patio: 1) I’ll get to take a peek at some preliminary cover sketches in about a month! 2) Brooklyn is nicer than Manhattan. 3) Del Rey is still seeing tons of vampire stuff from agents (they only accept agented submissions). 4) Tie-ins with movies are difficult to write, edit, and negotiate. 5) Mike likes “dirty water” dogs. But don’t judge!

Our food came, and since I’ve embarked on a lifetime quest to find the best fish and chips, I took a picture:

And now a brief review: These were extremely good. Druids’ fish & chips get high marks for being fresh. The chips weren’t frozen wedge fries like I had at the other place, but rather homemade, lightly fried tater chunks. The fish batter was also a fresh beer batter rather than the heavy breading you get on frozen stuff, and you can tell by its light golden color that this a delicate coating with new oil in the fryer. It was very good, some of the best I’ve had, and the salad on the side was an unexpected bonus. Now, is it the equal of Rula Bula’s in Tempe? Not quite, but it’s very close. Here’s where it falls short: you can’t really eat this with your hands; it’s cooked and presented in such a way that you need to use a fork. If you tried to pick up the fish, it would fall apart on you. Also, the tartar sauce was a bit thin—I prefer it chunky—though it tasted just fine. These are minor quibbles, though: in terms of taste and freshness, this was a superior plate and I’d recommend it to anyone who finds themselves abruptly hungry in Hell’s Kitchen as they search for Daredevil.

Okay, so after we ate and downed a couple of pints, it was time for The Plan that Tricia didn’t know about. The Plan was simple: get Tricia to wear a luchador mask (that’s a mask worn by Mexican wrestlers, if you are uninitiated in the joys of Lucha Libre) and document it photographically. We were careful not to execute The Plan until Tricia had consumed a couple of beers. It was the linchpin of our strategy, honestly. And it worked! Ladies and gentlemen, here is a picture of our Luchador Lunch:

Literary Luchadores at Druids in Hell’s Kitchen
I’m the guy in the mask.
Besides being silly for the sheer fun of it, I do have A Point To Make with this blog. Occasionally one hears that editors & agents are mean people who are out to crush your dreams if you aren’t well connected or “know someone.” That is absolutely untrue. The number of people I knew in the publishing industry was zero before I sent out Hounded last year; I was (and still am) just a random dude who writes when he’s home from his day job. Now I finally “know someone,” and it’s funny how they don’t look anything like dream crushers. They are spectacular people who have action figures in their offices and hurl marshmallows at each other with miniature catapults (no lie) after they’ve read their thirteenth emo vampire query of the day. And they’re only too happy to make your dream come true if you write a book they want to read.
Mucho peace and luchadores (they are not mutually exclusive); I’ll post some more stuff from upstate NY in a few days.
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A Deal is Made, a Book is Finished!

Happy dancing abounds, for Harper Voyager in Australia is going to publish Hounded, Hexed, and Hammered! I hope all the Aussies and Kiwis really like the books and make me come down there. ;-) The plan is to release them simultaneously with the US editions, so that’ll be April, May, & June of next year.

Today I also finished Hammered—or my first draft of it, anyway. This makes me happy because I’m still a month out from my due date. I’m going to read it all through with a critical eye and make some minor revisions suggested by my alpha readers, then I’ll send it off to my beta reader and my agent. Delivery to Del Rey will follow shortly thereafter.

I’ve kept tabs and posted plenty of updates on the writing of Hammered for my own curiosity, so that I could go back at a later date—say, this one—and see if anything interesting emerged. I’m going to take a more in-depth look at my archives later and see if I can make a fancy chart, but the first thing I’ve noticed is that this one took a bit longer to write. It’s to be expected, really: I knew when I finished Hexed I’d probably never write that fast again. From the first typed word to final delivery in New York, it took me only five months. Hammered is already pushing six months and it’s still not ready to deliver…but it will be soon. The takeaway here is that I wrote two novels in 11 months. I didn’t know that was possible for me until I did it. :-)

Also, I’m getting very excited because next week I get to meet my agent and editor in person for the first time! Here is what I know about them so far:
1. Evan is male.
2. Tricia is female.
I think we’ll have plenty to talk about, don’t you?

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My first blurb!

Color me excited! (I think that’s alzarin crimson with a touch of cadmium yellow.) I’ve just received my first blurb for Hounded from fantasy author Ari Marmell:

“Offering a page-turning and often laugh-out-loud funny caper through a mix of the modern and the mythic, Hounded is perhaps one of the most fun debuts I’ve read in a good long while. I don’t know what Hearne has planned for the future, but I’ll be watching for more.”


Woohoo! Happy dance bereft of grace! Cute puppies! Hot chocolate with marshmallows! Thanks, Ari!

I don’t actually know Ari. Somebody at Del Rey who knows somebody knows Ari, and they asked him if he’d be willing to read Hounded and maybe write a little something if he thought it was nifty. He said yes because it’s always good to rack up Karma Points. He got absolutely nothing out of doing this besides Karma Points—not even something cheap and nasty, like a convenience store hot dog. Authors do this sort of thing because they hope that someday, somebody else will read their book and say nice things about it too. If they don’t like a book, they don’t lie and say they did—what would be the point? There’s no upside to recommending a snorefest to people; it damages your credibility. That’s why I’m so grateful for this blurb; he didn’t have to say any of that, but he did.

Several other people are taking a look at the book and may offer blurbs down the road. If/when they come in, I’ll be sure to share. ;-)

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Cover Musings

The typical urban fantasy cover shows us an attractive young woman in leather holding a weapon. It’s staggeringly popular and I’m not here to question why. I mean, duh, what’s not to like? But Hounded is a wee bit different from most urban fantasies in that the protagonist is male. There are a few other male protagonists out there—Harry Dresden, of course, and then the dude in Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages series and Simon R. Green’s Nightside books—but mostly, it’s a genre dominated by kickass heroines.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Plenty of people want to be dominated by a kickass heroine.

But I can’t put one of those on my cover. I can’t even put my character in leather, because he doesn’t wear it, and he doesn’t wear a trench coat or a leather duster or a hat pulled low over his eyes. To make things more difficult, my main character isn’t a vampire or a werewolf—nor is he in love with a vampire or werewolf, employed in the vampire and werewolf-slaying industry, or related to a half-vampire and raising werewolves in the basement. He is, in fact, a Druid—but not the kind with giant beards and white robes.

So. How does one design a cover for such a character? How does one come up with something that will appeal to fans of the genre? Well, stay tuned. People smarter than me at Del Rey are figuring it out, and you can be sure I’ll post it here when it’s available. But I think it’s safe to reveal two things at this point:

1. There will be no purple.
2. There will be no man boobs.

And I will not apologize for those things, because they are wrong.

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Summer’s here (for me)

School’s out! I get to write full time now, and catch up on all the things around the house that have gotten away from me. Like, you know, the entire backyard.

Good news! My typeset manuscript for Hounded is here—the galleys, I believe they’re called—and they’re simply beautiful to look at. Seein’ my first book in print like this has had me grinning like an idiot all day. There are little boo-boo’s to fix here and there, typos that creep in during the process, you know, but nothing serious. In other good news, the manuscript’s been sent out to a few other authors here and there for blurbs, so I might have some of their spiffy (and kind) words to share down the road.

As I’m leading up to the big finale in Hammered, I keep changing my mind about who’s going to feel the pain and how. I wonder if it’s like that for the Fates (or the Norns), trying to figure out which thread to cut and how to knit the others together afterward.  I’m even throwing in a couple of the Norse gods—Heimdall and Tyr—that I hadn’t originally planned for, because more mayhem and peril is always a good time. My plans for the fate of Freyja have also changed…

Coming soon: a puppy cuteness overdose (we have a Boston Terrier pup), another Still Life with Fantasy and Fruit, and a red-bearded dwarf named Olaf Umlaut.

writing

Alphas & Betas & Editing

This is about alpha and beta readers, not werewolves. Rarr! Sorry. It’s also about all the fixin’ that needs to be done before a book appears on the shelves.

Nobody writes perfect, golden prose on their first draft. Or even their second or third. I could be wrong…but I doubt it.

Every writer’s different on how they approach these things, but it’s fairly common to have some sort of feedback during the writing process. An objective pair of eyes can catch inconsistencies and let you know whether what you’ve written A) makes any sense and B) if you’re entertaining. I use two alpha readers who look at each chapter as it’s finished and one beta reader who looks at the whole novel only. These three people all look at the book before my agent or editor sees it.

So hey, shout-outs to my alphas, Alan and Tawnya: They catch all sorts of good stuff and let me know when I’ve made a factual error. For example: “Kevin, blue spruce trees don’t grow in Europe. Dumbass.”

Calling me a dumbass wasn’t really part of the original comment—I simply felt like one. And I’m grateful to my alpha reader for checking on these things. I should have taken the time to research that, but I was probably in a character/plot groove and didn’t want to pause to make sure I named the right species of tree. A good alpha reader will call you on stuff like that, and it’s hard to find good alphas. Who’d want to read a novel in spastic spoonfuls, sometimes weeks apart, and nitpick instead of simply enjoying the story? Such people are a rare breed.

My beta reader, Andrea, is my Politically Correct filter. (Sometimes I put things in there just to set her off. It’s funny when she gets into a snit.) She also finds inconsistencies in tone that occasionally creep in during the course of writing, and she suggests that I flesh out a character here or maybe leave out something there. Since she reads the whole book in a sitting or two, she spots larger issues rather than tiny ones.

After the alphas and beta are finished and I’ve made changes according to their suggestions, I send it off to my agent, who may/may not have plenty to say (there was a lot for Hounded, but he had me deliver Hexed to Del Rey as is) and only then do I deliver it to my editor. This means my editor is probably seeing my fourth or fifth draft, but I go ahead and call it my “first” draft in terms of my computer files.

Then we go back and forth with changes until she says heck, this is pretty good, I’ll accept this. At that point everybody takes a few minutes for a happy dance. To give you an idea of quantity, there were five rounds of changes for Hounded, only three for Hexed.

But wait! We’re not finished! Next the copy editor gets hold of it and lays down some Grammar Fu with a green pencil. He/she will also catch lots of factual issues, ask great questions, point out inconsistencies, and I can make changes there as necessary.

After that it goes to typesetting, and the only changes I can make then are minor spelling/punctuation doodads. Inserting/deleting passages is probably not a good idea at this point, because it costs money.

Finally, it’s finished. Only after months of work will it go out to the general public. The author’s name is on the cover so he/she gets all the credit, but quite a few people are involved with any publication. (I didn’t even mention the cover artist and all the people in marketing and publicity. That’ll be a blog for another day.) So to my alphas and beta and my agent & editor(s), thank you, and cheers.

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The Meat of a Query Letter

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?