Archives for posts with tag: pitching

Hash, Rejected: Eggs, Baskets, and Dartboards

June 9, 2011 //
2

Exactly three months to the day after submitting Hash to Angry Robot Books for their March Open Submissions Month, I got back the dreaded form letter:

Dear Sir, [REDACTED] decided not to take your manuscript to the next stage [REDACTED] wish you the [REDACTED] in placing your manuscript elsewhere [ETC].

Well.

It has been my profound privilege and pleasure participating, of course, and waiting these three months has been something of a quiet adventure of its own; maybe a bit like having a mildly venomous snake loose somewhere in your apartment complex: if not a constant reminder of your own mortality, certainly a topic for light conversation and idle concern as you tuck yourself into bed at night.

And, let’s not forget about the lessons learned in constructing a good pitch, and the realities of staring down a statistically improbable prospect such as publishing a book in the first place. I am indebted to friends, family, and colleagues along the way, and would like to wish you all good night, and in your own endeavors, the very best of luck.

*click*

Okay. Is this thing off? Is the press conference over?

Good. Because I’m not happy. I’m pissed.

Not at Angry Robot. They’ve got a great stable of writers and books – they need to be selective, especially when taking a chance like an Open Door Submissions month. To even give me that consideration is huge of them and if it comes around again I intend to jump at the chance. I’m not angry with them – how could I be?

I’m angry with myself. I spent three months waiting around, with this one book in this one basket (whose own stated odds were – literally – four-in-one-thousand), hoping against all hope, oh-maybe-that-Mister-DeMille-will-pick-me and I’d be the next leading man on the New Talkie.

That was stupid. And let this be a lesson to everyone so you don’t make the same mistake: don’t spend your time hoping. Yes, hope is the great social bearer’s bond – it floats nations in crisis, drives revolutions against despots, saves lives in the face of tragedy, and, modulated through the right kinds of speakers can actually summon Batman. But it’s also like guilt - it’s something we do to make ourselves feel better that we’re not doing something more useful.

If you slapped the writer filter on and scanned over my last ninety days, you’ll find I did nothing to write a sequel, nothing to solicit agents, nothing to polish a third draft of Hash, and outside of my one short story, no other fiction writing at all. I just sat there and hoped. I look at today’s markets for digital and print content – all of them - as something of a dartboard. I threw one dart, hoping to hit a bullseye.

Probably not the best plan.

Time is the most valuable thing you have. If you want to be succesful in an endeavor, you need to use that time. I’m not saying I regret the time I spent with family and friends. I’m not saying I regret the passion I poured into my work in other areas. But I regret being myopic, regret holding an outdated notion of being discovered in today’s self-reliant, asymmetric, fragmented neo-tribal world.

If Hash is going to succeed, I need to really pour in the energy to help it along - that means meeting the right people, pitching it to the right people, rewriting it to sell, and working on The Next One and The One After That with reckless disregard for my current book’s success or failure. Because this really is up to me. More, now than ever, our success or failure is in our hands.

Ultimately, I’m not upset that I got a rejection letter. I’m upset that by spending three months of my life waiting, I only got one.

Man, did I pick the wrong week to quit drinking.

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things

Some Realities

March 10, 2011 //
2

As much cultural credit as today’s human being gets for being an emotional nonentity, I confess I’m remarkably bad at it; I spend most of my time either on the cog-railway climb up the slope of an emotional stress-high, or on the nosedive-crash end of it as all the adrenaline exits at the close of an endeavor.

It’s right around those metabolism moments as I blow off the alkaloids of the bygone months of panic that the reality of what I’ve done – and what’s left to do – starts to sink in.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things

Pitched

March 9, 2011 //
5

It was two months ago that my path crossed with Angry Robot Books – a random tweet from an SF icon and the path of my nascent novel, Hash, was suddenly clear.

Sixty days, three drafts, and countless sleepless nights later, I had honed my initial manuscript into a pitch-worthy form, spending the last week on the pitch itself, seeking advice from veteran authors as I neared my self-imposed deadline.

At quarter-to-seven tonight, I checked over the guidelines one last time (six times, really, but I don’t want to sound too fussy), packed up the requisite RTF, and sent the bundle on its way.

I was cheered up by a quick auto-response, phrased just right:

Fingers crossed you get the response you’re hoping for.

I genuinely appreciate that little sentence; makes me feel like all the salt-throwing, spell-reciting, and turn-around-thrice-ing that I’m doing in writerly superstition isn’t as silly as it might sound.

At some point, we have to give our work to the greater chain, and let the confluence of events take us along or not. In those times, I have little but superstition and casting runes, which I do in my own little way. To know that we all find ourselves in that waiting room, all end up in the antechamber of life, is comforting in a way I can’t explain.

I’m hoping it’ll help me through this wait. In the meantime, I think it’d be a wise choice to start thinking about the next book.

If I end up getting bounced, if it’s for any reason that I could help someone else avoid, I’ll be sure to post it here. If the unthinkable, unspeakable, unimaginable happens and that wonderful thing which shall not be named comes to be, I’ll probably write a post about that too, once I pick myself up off the floor.

 

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things

For the Love of God, Have Someone Else Look at your Pitch (48 Hours Left)

March 7, 2011 //
4

I start today’s post off with an image; one that reminds us that many ideas – such as Holland’s ChocoVine, “The taste of Dutch chocolate and fine red wine” – look a lot better to their creators than they do to the outside world.

I cannot stress enough: if you’re pitching a book – like I’m doing with Hash for Angry Robot Books’ Open Submissions Month – for the love of almighty God, have someone else look at your pitch before you send it.

I’m not trying to say your ideas are bad. I’m trying to say you, as the author, have no idea whether they’re bad or not. You’ve been in that damned writing cave until your eyes went white and you started navigating by your overgrown nose hairs. You’ve got two, three drafts, and at the end your pen has dragged right off the edge so it looks like THE ENDRRRGGH__ I’m saying it’s time to step out of the cave before you try to paint your dreams for the outside world.

It’s about stepping out of the cave. It’s about coming to the realization that you are not the ultimate arbiter of your own work. It’s about testing your work against those who are either closer to your consumer than you are, or closer to success as an author than you are.

I had the good fortune to bounce my work off an old hand, one who had plenty to say and no compunction in making the stakes plain. Among the gems:

On The Twenty-Five Word “Pitch Tag”:

This isn’t Lolita; who cares about your character in twenty-five words? Tell me the UNIQUE IDEA.

On Character Biographies:

Don’t tease in a character biography line. Either lay out how the character contributes to the plot, or cut it.

On Semicolons in a Pitch:

I seriously want to strangle you right now, Charles. Keep your semicolons in your prose and out of this pitch.

The Crux of the Biscuit

In the end, he really laid it down nice and neat. Pitch writing isn’t prose writing. It’s closer to newspaper copy than anything else. For a prose writer, that’s a transition that’s damn near anathema – but you have to do it. You’re writing to convey the greatest effect in the fewest words for an audience that has no time to waste.

And when I say no time, just look at the numbers. By Angry Robot Books guidelines, you’ve got two pages to truly explain your book – stinger, characters, and entire synopsis – before the first line of prose even enters the equation, and the way you do that – for good or for awful – means the difference between the readers getting to your sweet, sweet prose…or just pitching the whole dripping mess in the big unfolding whipsaw shredder they bring out for open season.

Now, I don’t mean to put words in the mouth of Angry Robot’s crew; they could be far more generous than all that, and ready to give endless sums of their readers’ and editors’ time to pitches that dawdle, linger on self-congratulation, or spin off into M.C. Escher-land.

But I doubt it.

Remember – Be Nice

If you do choose to sit your pitch down in front of a pro, need I remind you to be gracious with the feedback that’s given? I hear it’s a common occurrence for writers to spend much otherwise productive editing time voraciously defending their choices. I can’t think of a worse idea than looking a gift review in the mouth, and yet it happens.

These folks are your audience, and in the case of pro writers, decorated soldiers in the army you hope one day to join. Maverick or no, you have intellectual betters that have plenty to teach you simply by their sheer tenure, let alone the tenacity and skill it took them to break out just like you hope to do. Respect.

If you need any more reason to be nice to your reviewer, consider this: my reviewer, a well-tuned and veteran SF author, after thrashing through the pitch and honing it down to gleaming, bristling nerve and bone, turned toward me and said: “Your stuff’s good. It has a voice, it’s like Philip K. Dick but for today’s audience.” And then, before I could stammer out a thank you, he wrote it in a recommendation. Talk about speechless. I’m pretty sure I went out of there drooling, vowing endless gifts of eighteen-year-old Scotch to the writing gods.

I’m saying, get your pitch reviewed. And be nice to your reviewers. It really comes back to you. As for me – I’ve got about 48 hours left to get this pitch fixed up. By the way, if you’re wondering if a pitch review helps with the terror of rejection – it doesn’t. I’ve got shakes bad enough to mix concrete with.

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things

What Other Books are Like Hash? (83 Hours Left)

March 6, 2011 //
0

There are unutterable phrases in the writing world.

Missives that bring shame, closed doors, and swift boots upon the backsides of their unlucky speakers. They’re all hard-learned, and to a rookie like me, ever-arriving; I’ve yet to uncover even one percent of the possible verbal landmines littered about the no-mans-land of the Great Unpublished.

But, here’s one no-no that I learned early on. Do not say: “My book is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.” Honestly, that phrase should get a rolling jeer from the entire game-day population of the Astrodome, let alone your publisher. How can you sell something that isn’t like anything else? Son – (I’m now playing the role of the publisher) we sell what sells, and what sells is what’s like what sold.

So, what’s my first book Hash like? It’s been a little tricky to catalog the progression, as we’re talking the product of ten years of trying, failing, restarting, and all of the baggage that comes with it, but it’s a pool I’ll have to jump in eventually, so let’s start now.

The Bones

Hash deals with a future society – still mostly grounded on Earth – but earning, trading, and mixing the narratives of culture and history very differently than today. Think of the architecture and life-speed as the new slum rat race of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and associated Sprawl books, the far-and-away set of exchanged values and social pressures present in the color-obsessed denizens of Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey, dipped into the grime and industry of Alan Spence’s memoir of early modern Glasgow, Its Colours They Are Fine.

The Blood

Hash is a conflicted story, and one at the apex of a crisis. This is not the City of the Future at its finest. This is a human population in the midst of an oncoming storm and requisite collapse, at the heart of which lies an engineered virus similar to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Food, the precious resource and unspoken lever that drives the rise and fall of vast machinery, shares the enshrined place that water does in Frank Herbert’s Dune. As the world begins to deal with both scarcity and isolation, pockets of communication and trust resemble those present among the Prisoner-of-War population of James Clavell’s King Rat.

The Brain

Ultimately, Hash becomes a race to solve the mystery behind the virus and its connection to the City’s collapse, similar to the often-bizarre but ultimately vital connections made in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Dreams and their manipulation, to tap into both their creative and destructive power, finds an exalted place similar to The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Finally, the quantum and imperfect nature of memory is the investigative hook as was explored by Stanislaw Lem in Solaris.

The End

I hope that if you are a fan of any of these books, you’ll consider Hash a just and worthy homage to these giants of fiction, and my own modern take on the timeless themes of memory, scarcity, and society.

In less than 83 hours, I’m going to kick off the next step along the road to getting Hash in your hands; if the gods of fiction humor me and are pleased by my offering, you may just see it on the shelf.

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things

March, the Adrenaline Month

March 1, 2011 //
0

I’ll confess it – I’m sweating bullets. I’m sitting in this chair – or that chair – or that chair over there, doesn’t matter which, and I’m scared to death. I’m putting something out there. Out there. To be ridculed or ignored or folded up into little origami shapes that say more with paper than I ever could.

Oh, it’s not the first time I’ve looked into finding a broader audience for my work, but nothing’s ever been quite this urgent. And March – well, it had to be this month, didn’t it?

MARCH

Look at the word! See how it steps on things with its pendulous legs, dangling its unspeakables, content being the confluence of thought-traffic and adrenaline. And it knows it; work is certifiably insane, I’ve booked no fewer than six major presentations, I’m mentoring a live-in teenager for a week, organizing an eight-man boat crew, and…

And that’s not the big news at all. The big news is that Angry Robot Books just opened their March open-door submission program for 30 days.

Knowing this, I’ve worked over the last quarter of a year to update, expand, and polish my first novel, Hash, up to their standards, and now stand at the doorway with a manuscript I’m ready to pitch. Almost.

They’ve made it pretty plain that when they say pitch, they mean some serious pitching. Summaries. Synopses. And listen to this:

We will also smile on you if you can include a one-sentence summary of your novel, here. Yep – you read that right.

Lordy mama. Light my fuse. If that doesn’t say “your book needs to be tweetable” – I don’t know what does. Am I ready to Tweet My Book? Are we there, in that future? And can I deliver?

I’ve given myself a week to find out. I commit to send in Hash, including all the materials, by Wednesday, March 9th, no later than 11:59 PM, PST.

Ready? Go.

Read more about Hash here.

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Categories Writing and Bookish Things