Big Five, Sign On!

Hello!

What? Isn't it Monday? Why, yes, yes it is!

There are two things going on today. One is the Twitter push for the Big Five Publishers to be open about their diversity statistics via the Diversity Baseline Survey.

For the original tweet and petition from Lee&Low, click here.
Click here for more information about it from my writing pal SC.

So far, only Macmillan has signed the petition. If you've followed the #WriteInclusively or #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtags, you'll understand the importance of having a diverse staff controlling what gets published.

As a child, there are only two stories I can remember reading that featured a young black girl. One was a book called Corduroy, about a teddy bear who wants to be sold, but the mother of the little girl who wants him says no because he's missing a button. The little girl is black, and I used to pretend that she was me.

The other book was an American Girl book for Addy, a slave girl in 1864. There have been many American Girls since Addy, but only one other that was a little black girl from 1850*, who wasn't a standalone character and was archived. The majority of the currently active dolls are not only white (6 of the 9), but little blonde girls (4 of the 6). Not only that, they archived Felicity, Kirsten, and Molly! (These were my three favorite girls.) No offense to the other little girls whom I haven't read as I aged out of interest in the stories, but these three were extremely diverse on the surface level alone. Felicity was a redhead who dared to put on pants in the 1770s; Kirsten was a Swedish immigrant; and Molly was the girl-next-door tomboy.

*Reading more on Cécile Rey, the other black American Girl, while I'm sure her character was whimsical, she seemed to be a pretty stereotypical black character. Paraphrase: Confident, curious, and loving the limelight, her lessons bored her, and she wanted to become an actress and loved to party. Hm...

And after 1864, where are the black American Girls? After 1824 where are the other American Girls of Color? Skimming through, I see Julie has a Chinese-American friend whose collection was archived in 2014. Can you imagine the interest the company could generate if they gave us, say, a black American Doll from 1958? Is that too hard a period to write about from that perspective? I know there is a glamorization of the time period because of the fashion and classiness, so maybe they just...I don't know.

And this is why it's important for people to mean what they say when they say they need diverse books. That also means you need to not only have people who advocate for diversity, but people who ARE diverse. They'll see those gems that the majority just might not feel are "right for them." They have a fresh take, a different eye. So I'm hoping the other 4 of the Big 5 will take a stand and follow suit.

Oh, by the way, this is a blog hop, so if you want to join in, scroll back up and click on SC's post to find the LinkyLink. :)

Express Yourself Weekly and News

Happy Tuesday! Welcome back to Express Yourself Weekly, brought to us by Jackie @ Bouquet of Books and Dani @ Entertaining Interests! Each week they have a question for us to answer, and this week's is:

If you could try out one occupation for a week, what would you choose?

I would love to be a WWE Diva for a week. It's always been a dream of mine to wrestle, but I think I'm even shorter than the average Diva and have no flexibility. I think I'd be a hard-hitter, though, and could do some good submissions.

In other news: TODAY IS THE DAY! Cactus Heart Press Issue #11, The Speculative Fiction Issue, is out today! My short story "Origin" is now a published piece of work! I'm so excited. This can only be the start of big things for me, so I can't wait to see what else happens. :-D

Look for Me in Cactus Heart Press! (w/gifs)

I was trying to hold this news in until Friday for Freeday, but forget it!

My short story "Origin" will be published in the Speculative Fiction issue of Cactus Heart Press this March!

So, how it happened. As you may have seen, I did a live write-up of "Origin" here 2-1/2 years ago (really? It was that long ago?!) based on the song "Origin of Love" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which I finally sat down and watched last week and LOVED).

Late December, Kate Sheeran Swed e-mailed me. She will be the guest editor for Cactus Heart's Speculative Fiction issue, and she had read "Origin" and invited me to submit to the publication. I immediately turned into

then asked if I could submit "Origin." She spoke with the main Cactus Heart team, and as long as I removed the story from here, I could submit. No problem there! So last week, I received the confirmation that they accepted my little short story.

(I can't even pretend like these aren't my actual victory dances.)

This is big for me, as it would be for any writer, so I'm extremely excited, and having bought Cactus Heart Press's last issue and seeing what they are about, I know it's a perfect fit. I'm playing it cool, but:

About Cactus Heart Press:

"Cactus Heart is, of course, a metaphor for how we believe literature and art should be. It should shock and wound and delight us; it should fill us with delight and terror and mystery. It should survive.

We are devoted to spiny writing & art—sharp, relentless, coursing with energy and able to thrive in the harshest of places, all while maintaining a vulnerable, succulent interior."

About Kate Sheeran Swed:

Kate Sheeran Swed loves hot chocolate, plastic dinosaurs, and airplane tickets. She has trekked along the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu, hiked on the Mýrdalsjökull glacier in Iceland, and climbed the ruins of Masada to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea. Following an idyllic childhood in New Hampshire, she completed degrees in music at the University of Maine and Ithaca College, then moved to New York City. Her stories have appeared in Writing Tomorrow,Verdad, HOOT Review, and Words and Images. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific University.

You can find her on:
Twitter @katesheeranswed
Facebook.com/KateSheeranSwedPinterest.com/KateSheeranSwed

Friday Freeday: The Importance of Learning

(Side note before I start: I might add another post on Wednesdays. What will I add is the question.)

Happy Friday!

(Side note after I start: here in Dover, we have a Firefly Music Festival going on, and about 10 people are in each department at my job, so I'm just going to go ahead and blog and read. lol)

But anyway, having had worked on my fantasy novel The Crystal Bearer for close to 11 years now (wow, where'd the time go), I can now say that I've gained enough knowledge about the outs of writing. The ins change depending on you and that particular story. The outs, however, remain the same, and I couldn't say I learned them until maybe last week. Sometimes, things don't make sense until they do.

I was in college for half of the time I was writing my novel, so do you think I had time to network? Find AgentQueryConnect.com? Know there was a...actually, I don't think there even WAS a Twitter yet, so I definitely didn't know there was a writer's community on it! All I knew was that I would finish my novel, then I would send it to publishers.

HA!

Needless to say, that's no longer how it works. First off, no one's first draft is publishable. Geez, when I think back on mine, I shudder. I had TWO major overhauls, one where I cut scenes I loved, and one where I actually added scenes. I had to stop and think about what was important to the big picture, and what was just filler. I had to cut THOUSANDS of words, because I learned there is a desired word count among agents depending on the genre and target age group.

Secondly, if you never let anyone else outside of your house read it, you won't really know if your writing's actually any good. I had friends and family tell me for years that I was a good writer, but when I personally think back on my writing, I KNOW it was bad. lol I mean it could've been worse, but it was definitely eye-roll-worthy. So trying to publish before a stranger reads your work, so you have an idea of how your novel will be received, is testing it a little. The betas/CPs I've gone through were a big help, and the query critiques even more so!

So do what you can to learn any and everything you can about writing before you try to put yourself out there. You'll do better for it!

Friday Freeday Question

Hello. Extremely short entry today.

So, I went to click one of my links that showed my college publication "El Celular Roto" and learned that portion of Temple's site no longer works. What do I do now, since that was pretty much the only real publication I had so far? =/

Best Week Ever

It's Saturday, and that means it's time for BEST WEEK EVER!! (Please don't sue me, VH1.) With each Saturday, you will get to see whether the title is ecstatic, sarcastic, or a little bit of both.

For my first BWE post, it's a little bit of both.

I almost don't remember Sunday. I had to stop for a second to remember what I did. I woke up about 15 minutes later than I usually do for church on 4th Sunday. The choir I'm in sings at our 8am service, but my sister usually gets up at the time I got up. It only comes around once a month, so I forgot, and we were slightly late to meet everyone. But it was a good service. Then, we went to Kirby & Holloway's, a mom & pop restaurant here that has good food but terrible service, which we got. Sunday, I also decided to schedule my Y and Z posts so I wouldn't have to look at A-to-Z again, so I was free!

Work. Ugh. A very long week. By Wednesday, I felt like it should have been Friday. When I graduated college in 2008, I had only had one interview for an internship which I didn't get, so I came home to data entry. After 2 years of that, then a bad 6 months of online customer service at the same job, I quit and applied at a temp agency. I've been at my current assignment for a year now, and they really like me and give me a lot more work than what I'm contracted for (telephone operator,which takes up probably 30mins of my day). Instead of placing me in a permanent position, however, they tell me to "apply for the jobs on the state site." Now, a job had opened up in one of the buildings where I attend bi-monthly meetings, manage all the paperwork, and also handle dental liaison things. They expected that I would get on the list for an interview, and I'm not sure why, because the hiring manager (who I know now, because I've been there for a year) doesn't choose the interviewees, the state does. So, when I didn't make the list, everyone told me to "just keep applying."

Needless to say, I did two things. 1) When the temp agency asked if everything was okay, I explained the above in a much less bitter way and told her that if they can't create a job out of all of the non-telephone-operator work they have given me to do, then I will need to find another job, since I'm on telephone-operator pay. 2) I renewed my business license! I started an editing business in 2010 (I can't believe that was 3 years ago), but I'm not good at marketing, so I only had one steady customer, and she usually only needs work in the Summer. I'm going to do my best to put in the marketing time because I love to edit, and I want to do a job I love to do. My mom also told my sister and I about friends of friends who started their own business and are now millionaires, and while I don't expect millions, if I can make money doing what I love, I need to try it.

Secondly, I submitted to my first contest in at least a year. Duotrope.com is a great source for submissions to websites and magazines for writers. One of the sites, Hazardous Press, have a topic that I had been working on for a roleplay, and I was able to flesh out a character for it. The publication is for charity, but I also think they pay whoever makes the cut, so wish me luck! It would be my first real published story.

Finally, my mom has gotten me sick. Again. I don't feel as badly as I did two weeks ago because I took 3 packets of Emergen-C (which altogether contains 3000mg of Vitamin C, 30mg of B-6 and 75mg of B-12, well over the daily value), so I'm going to try not to be too mad at this lady who doesn't quarantine herself. I have a Mother's Day photo to take with my sisters and cousins and a concert at a sister church today, so I'm going to keep sucking down Emergen-C and take an anti-histamine.

This is a much longer post that I expected. I hope everyone has a great weekend!

A PSA from AQC: Stop Right Now

Thank you very much. I need somebody with a human touch.

Sorry, Spice Girl moment. We didn't have a set topic last night, but one thing we kind of floated around was knowing when to stop and move on to another project.

As writers, we get to a few points in our lives where the current project just isn't working. There seem to be two major points that signify this:

Before the finish-line: 1) You are writing and writing and deleting and deleting, and nothing is coming together for a story you deem publishable. This is the point I reach often. I work on a project. Read it. Gag, then don't look at it for another few months. Sometimes, if another idea sparks that might be better suited, I will go back and try to reconstruct the disaster that was put away.

After the finish-line: 2) You're past the writing, editing, and polishing of your first manuscript, and you're querying...and querying...and querying...and you get requests for partials and fulls...and get rejection after rejection after...well, you get the point. At this point, it is probably best to stop and decide whether something needs to be done to your manuscript, OR, as someone said last night, "Maybe it's not meant to be your FIRST book." There are times where you need to work on something else that will make a solid first impression, and once you've got that under way, go ahead back to your first baby and see if it's ready yet.

Though this is a short entry today, I found the advice of the AQC veterans helpful and insightful. If you haven't joined already, visit www.agentqueryconnect.com to see what it's all about! There are tons of forums and groups waiting for you. ;)

A PSA from AQC (Chat Series)

Good evening.

I was over-zealous in posting pieces of our chats in AQC, so I'm going to start from scratch and instead of give the chat, I will just list some of the important tips when moving into the business phase of publishing.

Reality of the time frame: the average time from signing to your book debut can be between 12 and 24 months. Major houses already have a set schedule, so you will have to be fit into an open slot.

Substantive edits are edits from your editor regarding anything from grammar to character/story development. Copy editing is more on the lines of proofreading and editing. You don't have to accept all of your editors' substantive edits, but it is a joint effort.

Publicists handle unpaid publicity, otherwise, the marketing department pays. Press releases, review outlets, and advanced copies used for review fall under the publicist.

Earning out means you get royalties. Selling through means being on track for another book.

The design department handles your cover design, font, and chapter headings and dividers. You won't have much say in these, but this department has far more experience.

It is wisest to give out advanced copies to people who will actually review your book. You want to produce buzz and word of mouth. Your publisher will also give away copies. Consider fellow writers, bloggers in your genre, and giveaways, but rely more on the first two.

Be sure to keep record of good reviews and blurbs provided by fellow authors that your publisher can use later.

This week's chat was hosted by historical fiction writer Sophie Perinot, aka Litgal! We have many established authors down at Agent Query Connect, so if you need help and aren't a member yet, sign up now! Our chats are every Monday at 9pm, so hurry before Monday comes back around. ;)

OHMYGOD I got a PERSONAL rejection!

So, you think I'd be sad, right?

Well, no because I honestly hadn't expected to hear back from this company, so when I did it was a pleasant surprise plus one!

First, there was an apology for taking so long to get back. The reason was because the two agents were juggling my manuscript back and forth between them trying to decide one way or the other. Second, when I thought for a moment, "Did they really read it?" (and actually, they also misprinted the title in the subject, so I wondered, lol), the agent told me what parts he wanted to know more about, what parts needed clarification, and how he felt I had a different take on fantasy and he wants a copy when I get published!

If I had been having a bad day, this e-mail would have brought me up so much. I feel really good that 1) I got a personal response and 2) that potential was seen in my little ol' story. I'm getting excited again just thinking about it.

I think the only downside is that I have to open this thing back up. haha I really need to search for some betas because he's the second person that told me--in a time where everyone's saying go under 100k--that they want me to expand on this story!

So for now, I think here's what I will do. I have to look at the points he gave me and apply especially the parts of clarification that are needed. I still want to submit to the New Visions Award, which is due by the 31st, so I will make the clarifications and submit. I will go from there on the idea of expansion.

Save the Queen: The query

I THINK I might have it...
_______________________________________________

To So and So Agency:
Ghuli cannot understand why she is being hunted. When she is forced out of hiding, she meets the person with the answers.

The last of the Crystal Bearers, peaceful people with crystals in their hands and feet, Ghuli hid for most of her life. An army of iron beasts, the Contagion, burns cities and cuts down thousands searching for her. Despite her own impulses and desires for adventure, Ghuli has her watchmen to protect her from potential danger.

But for how long can they protect her from herself? Ghuli stumbles from continent to continent, plagued by everything from preying beasts to her own uncontrollable powers. Dark, fragmented dreams reveal that she may be the true cause of the world's terror. Then, Ghuli meets the one who controls the Contagion. She blames Ghuli for the death of the other Crystal Bearers and vows to stop at nothing to make her pay. Ghuli fears believing her, but her words line up with the dreams.

Before the world is destroyed, Ghuli must piece together the truth and gain control of her powers. She is the only one who can stop this foe and the Contagion once and for all.

SAVE THE QUEEN is a young adult high fantasy. It balances dark tones with light and has a touch of action-adventure. Thank you for your consideration.

Back to my query...(Dead man walking)

So, one of the more annoying questions a writer with a newly finished manuscript gets is "So do you have a publisher yet?" It's not really their fault for asking, but they don't know there's a process that you have to go through to get an agent first when you're going the traditional route of mainstream publishing.

That process generally starts with a query.

A query is a proposal that sells your 70-100-thousand-word book in under 250 words. You need a hook. You need a touch of what goes down. You need to get it as close to right as possible.

And as Revo said in his WriterWorld of Horror, the flawless horse doesn't exist. http://therevofiles.blogspot.com/2012/04/writerworld-of-horrors-part-two.html

You just need to pique an agent's interest. But what's too much? What's not enough? What do you show, and what do you tell? These are questions we writers deal with on a critique-to-critique basis, and I got so fed up with my inability to get more than one agreeing response (I've had people look at the same query and have one person say I said too much while another said I didn't say enough), I stopped looking at it for two months. I also sent a proposal to a company that said, "Don't send us queries, they're ineffective." I'm paraphrasing, but that was still a blessing.

Anyway, after we get it as right as you want it, we then play the waiting game, because once you send in a proposal, synopsis, query, many places let you know there is a wait on the 2-6 month scale, so, here's to throwing your baby out there and seeing if someone says, "Can you send us the full manuscript?" or "Thanks for letting me read that...but no."

*imaginary shot of rum taken*

The other day, I decided to write a query off the cuff without looking at the last one I'd written. It was about as vague as it could get, and when I finally found the last query I concocted on AQConnect (writers need to go here, by the way http://agentqueryconnect.com/), it was much more detailed, too. I like things out of both of my last two queries, so I'm going to splice them and see what happens. I'll probably get some AQC's to critique it first, but I will post it here.

 Crossing my toes! (Because I need my fingers to type.)

Other writings

Something brought to my memory that I have a Spanish-to-English short story floating around on Temple's website! It's based on the world's weirdest experience that I had with a stranger, and I added more to make it a surreal(ish) story for my Spanish class. Then, I was invited to submit the story for Temple's program "In Other Words." Sadly, I don't think they're doing it anymore, because the last edition was in 2010.

So here is the link to the main page so you can browse around if you like:
http://www.temple.edu/inotherwords/

And here is the link to my direct story: El Celular
http://www.temple.edu/inotherwords/hawkins.htm

Also, back when I dabbled (badly) at poetry, I submitted two poems to this very open poetry forum, so here are the links to:

an excerpt from Chain of Haiku from a Rambling Cancer:
http://www.poetshaven.com/singlepage.php?html=bookcontents.php&footer=1&section=21&page=516

and Journal Entry from My Imaginary Lover:
http://www.poetshaven.com/singlepage.php?html=bookcontents.php&footer=1&section=21&page=517

Ignore the pen name; I was testing names for a long time. Ignore the tense changes, too, because I forgot to edit before I sent it in. Youth. *sigh*