Yowsa

This is going to be quick. Lookie what I got!

An Odd Week

Yep, this week has been very strange. We finally have both the invalids back home, out of the hospital, and in the bosom of our family. Last week, I wanted to strangle my daughter. This week, we're close again. Last week, my father in law looked like hell, this week he looks almost normal. I was sick at the beginning of week, now my husband doesn't feel well, and the brat (otherwise known as mini-me) is out for the night at a birthday party.

Thank god.

I received another review today from novelspot.com. I was excited about it because it's a more in-depth review with both praise and criticism. The beginning starts like this--

The Reckoning of Asphodel, by Celina Summers, is traditional high fantasy,
with chivalric knights and wood-wise elves, beautiful princesses and wise female
seers, good and evil sorcerers and magicians. It's written in the language
typical of the genre. It is, however, much better written, with more complex
characters and situations, than many similar books. This is a serious fantasy
novel, not the verbal equivalent of a computer game.

I also liked this part:

Summers has created a complex and colorful world inhabited by equally complex
and colorful characters. Minor as well as major figures are quirky and
individual. The dressmaker, Myrielle, advising Tamsen on using proper dress as a
woman's weapon is clever, funny and down to earth - a good supporting
character.

You can read the rest of the review by clicking on the novelspot.com link.

Feel free to read the whole review and leave a comment. I, personally, am pleased by the review mostly because the reviewer got exactly what I was trying to do. There is a lot to be said for having your debut novel compared to Lud-In-The-Mist! I was completely overwhelmed.

This review brought up an interesting point for discussion. The first person POV apparently didn't work for the reviewer--she found it constrictive and limiting and called my villian 'cardboard.' I disagree with that statement mostly because I know what happens next. Spesialle is purposely limited in the first book; we really get to know him in the second book. But...is first person POV really limiting?

I don't think so.

At any rate, check out the review. Once you read it, you'll realize how proud I am. And remember, you guys wouldn't love me if I wasn't an arrogant smartass. I understand that my friends Bibsy and Dan are having a hell of a year already--you might want to check out their blogs. I have them listed on the sidebar. Plus I have another, secret project in the works. *grin* You guys might like it.

Checking out now. See you later.

I Swore I Wouldn't Post About This But...

...I can't help myself. I swore I'd leave the Cassie Edwards plagiarism quagmire alone. I swore that I wouldn't jump back onto my unheeded soapbox and shout my disguat to the uncaring crowds on the sidewalks of cyberland but I can't help it.

Smart Bitches (God, I love that site) broke this news last week. Now it's all over the web and the AP and various other news agencies. Cassie Edwards, Queen of the Savage Whatever Indian romance novels, plagiarized her research material. Although almost all writers research, very few that I'm aware of lift research word for word from an academic tome and insert it, with a few comma changes or maybe a word or two, wholesale into their fiction. I'm not going to rehash all of that here; head over to the Smart Bitches for the full 100% lowdown on the allegations surrounding Ms. Edwards. What I am going to talk about evolves from a post I had at Absolute Write.

So how exactly does the industry punish plagiarists? This isn't the first name author whose world has collapsed under this allegations; there was a notable case of Janet Dailey plagiarizing from Nora Roberts a few years ago. I'm not talking about the legal actions one author can take against another, I'm talking about the publishing industry at large.

Do authors get asterisks? Do they get their awards pulled? Are they blackballed from the Writers' Hall of Fame? How will the industry penalize Cassie Edwards, a woman who's had more books published than I care to think about? Will they pull all of her books from the shelves? Nooooooo....that would cost them money.

So you tell me: what will happen to Edwards and all the other uncaught plagiarists out there? What is the societal penalty for the wholsesale theft of intellectual property? Anyone? Any thoughts?

Yeah, I heard the crickets too. You see, what makes it so easy for plagiarists to get by in this day and age is that it is an unpunishable crime. Ever hear of someone going to jail for plagiarism? Nope; me either. Janet Dailey is still writing and still making money despite the settlement of the lawsuit in which she admitted she stole from Nora Roberts. Think Cassie Edwards will have a book come out later this year? Although Signet , a division of Penguin, is 'reviewing' the situation, will their review encompass true penalties? Or, will the overwhelming pull of the all mighty dollar keep Cassie Edwards, Plagiarist Extraordinaire, on the bookshelves of stores across the world? Will her agent drop her? Will her readers drop her?

I think I know the answer. I'm sure you know it too. At every level of this business, I have encountered one plagiarist after another. I've seen the victims of plagiarism barred from sites while the plagiarist remained. I've seen plagiarists whine about their various ills and ghost writers who 'screwed' them after their stolen 'book' has been published. And now, this?

Don't you think it's time to lay some of the responsibility for plagiarism squarely where it belongs? How about an industry where, as best I can figure, the criminal is rewarded and the victim unheard?

Nah. A pipe dream. Hand me another syringe, Jose Canseco; I think there's someone needing a fix over there.

How ELF-Killing Took On A Mountain Bike

Okay, enough nostalgia. Let's get back to what I do best.


Which is....?

Ah, a sea of hands waving frantically in front of me, like Horseshack with a bit of a digestive upset. (You have to have watched Welcome Back, Kotter at least once to get that one, kids.)

Yes, yes--you're right. I'm best at ranting in a pseudo comedic manner. Why don't we get started? So anyway, I just checked my blog stats, hoping that they were a little bit higher and guess what? What a spectacular explosion of interest in my blog! Naturally, modest little me thought, "Wow. That's a hell of a lot of hits coming from the Preditors & Editors or LoveRomances and More sites. I'm liking this nomination thing A LOT."

So I checked the reports, to see which of them was the bigger referring site and Lo and Behold! A HUGE report comes up. My weekly average went from 200 weekly visitors to SEVENTEEN HUNDRED unique views. I was so excited I spilled my milk and dropped my Geritol.

Until I saw the referring sites.

Now those of you who really WANT to be here, riddle me this. What, if anything, does my blog have to do with mountain bikes or environmental defense groups?

What really killed me was that people googled in order to get here. Want to know why? Because 'elf' correlates closely to E.L.F.--the Earth Liberation Front--and also the BMX Elf, a popular mountian bike. Now as to why they got directed to my site I have no idea. All I know is that somehow in the cyber-world, some wire got kinked and now I have a bunch of eco-defense people and biker dudes and chicks stopping by my blog.

Welcome by the way. This blog is about ELVES and killing them; it's certainly not about trees or off-road trails. Hope you enjoy your (brief) breeze-by and if you find one of the Elves run over the pesky little bugger.

Now maybe YOU guys can answer just one question for me. How in the bloody hell did you end up at my blog, for Chrissakes? Possibly only Brittany Spears' site is less related. I beat that one because I spell correctly and have all my hair. But seriously, I appreciate the hits and all that but------

-----WHY?

Don't get me wrong: I like mountains, and bikes, and trees. I don't really even have a problem with sand if you get right down to it.

Ahem! Now that you're all here, you might as well look around. Be sure you follow the links in this post. They'll get you where you want to go.

Or at least, where I want you to go.

Trust me. My youngest daughter broke her patella and tibial plateau while riding a mountain bike in the woods yesterday. Just....trust me. If you don't believe me, be sure to check out the keywords I've left for this post. Happy eco-defending and/or mountain biking. Just be sure you buy my book.

The Impact a Great Teacher Has

So in my last post, I was talking about dedications for the upcoming Asphodel books and I mentioned that I would dedicate the second book to some of my high school teachers. These educators taught me the rudiments of what would eventually turn into a writing career. Without them, and the attention they paid to me, I would never have gotten as far as I have. Let me explain.

When I started high school in Clarksville, Tennessee, I was really excited about a particular elective I could take: Latin. I still remember my first day in class, when my best buddies Eddie and Jimmy (twin brothers who now have gravitated to the more mature 'Ed' and 'Jim') sat at our desks, opened our textbooks and looked expectantly at the teacher--Grady Warren. He started us in immediately on conjugations and declensions; our first translation work as I recollect was about a pulchra puella and her frog. Before too long, we were competeing in Junios Classical League events. At state, we garnered quite a few first places between us.

Then came summer. During the summer Grady and his wife Kaye (Dr. Warren, who taught at Clarksville High School) held open house for their students. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, hordes of adolescents descended upon the Warren's house, which was tiny and crammed with books and pets, to study willingly during the hot, humid Tennessee days. On Wednesdays, those of us who were chosen for the certamen (Latin for battle--it's Latin quiz bowl essentially) team that would represent Tennessee at Nationals, would gather to practice in some vicious games to hone our knowledge and our skill. My nickname was fauces, which is Latin for jaws. That should tell you all you need to know about my fledgling personality. We played against the certamen greats of the past: college students who, through love for the Warrens and the language and the game, gave up their summers to serve as our teachers. The Warrens provided the chips, cookies, and cola, the study guides, their home (which had a volleyball court where we played as well) and we, unthinking and completely ignorant of the financial cost of hosting a group of ravenous kids, happily spent our summer vacations learning. We went to Nationals, won numerous chapionships for TJCL, and came back to do it all over the next year.

The other teacher, Kitty Savage, is a bit different. She taught English in the hardcore, old-fashioned way. We thought she was older than dirt and meaner than a snake, with her chain-smoking of unfiltered Camels during breaks and her abrupt, brusque way of instruction. Most all of the kids hated her--except for me. She was our 10th grade teacher, and for some reason she saw something different in me. Mrs. Savage turned out to be a wonderful (if gruff) woman. While she hammered the basics of grammar into our heads, she softened the blow with good books and writing projects. It was when she saw my writing that she took me under her wing. For the rest of my high school education, I'd go over to her house quite often with my mother. As they sat there drinking tea, Mrs. Savage would tell me the most wonderful stories with the sole purpose of expanding a young mind to the great stories in real life that could be told. For example, as a young war bride, she had worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on the Manhattan Project. She'd saved all the newspaper clipping in a big album, and I got a bird's eye look at how a young woman lived, worked, and dreamed in the biggest top secret city in the country. She told me a local tale of how a man named William Kelly had invented a cheap, easy process to turn pig iron into steel, and how his British employee stole the secret that eventually came to be called 'the Bessemer process.' She took a girl who spent a lot of time dreaming, and turned her into a hard core researcher who could write a term paper as an epic poem. She, too, sponsored a competition group. She tookd groups of students to state and national History Day competition every year I was in school. She came away with three state champions in Research Papers; twice it was me and both were done as epic poems. She couldn't quite rid herself of my artistic pretensions.

Mrs. Savage is dead now; she died at the age of 92. The Warrens are very much alive, still bringing the joys of the Classics to classes of eager students. One of the twins, actually, is teaching Latin in Clarksville too. Ed married Laura, who was my idol when I was a freshman and she was a senior, and they both teach Latin. When I went home for Christmas, the Warrens' students had a reunion to honor them. I saw people I hadn't seen in twenty years, including the teachers who had impacted me strongly, the older students whose footsteps I'd tried to follow, and the friends my own age who are now doctors and lawyers and teachers in their own right. It was bittersweet in a way, because it felt like we'd never left.

So when someone asks me which profession is the greatest for mankind, I instantly say teachers. I know how mine impacted me, I know how one miserable year of teaching Latin brought me to my knees as a colossal failure, and I know how twenty some odd years later, what they taught me has brought me to my professional destination. Without them, Asphodel (and Darkshifters and Terella and so forth) would not exist. And that's why book two is dedicated to them. Who else, in a book called "The Gift of Redemption" could it be?

Thanks, Grady. Thanks, Kaye. Thanks, Kitty.

It's all YOUR fault!

Residual Anger

Confession time: I am a hot-tempered woman. When I get angry (which is a lot) I get very quiet and icy and that's usually the hint for trespassers to back off before I explode. There have been times in my life where I allowed that anger to overtake my good sense; more times, in fact, than I care to think about. Each of those explosions caused dire consequences, some of which I've had to deal with for fifteen or twenty years.

For example, when my mother passed away I hadn't spoken to her in over five years. This wasn't a one-sided situation, oh no. She didn't talk to me either. It all stemmed from a single incident.

I was catering a large event--about five hundred people for a crawfish boil in Tennessee. After the gorgefest was easing into the 'straggler' time, I sat down to play a game of euchre with some friends and drink a beer or two. In the middle of the game, my mother and brother showed up out of the blue. She started screaming at me in a mixture of English and French which was my mother at her worst. As I stared at her in complete silence, I stewed over my two options: I could stand up and knock her on her ass, or I could just walk away. I chose the latter. Deliberately, I stood up, turned my back on her, and walked out of the pavilion to a mosquito-infested pool. While I cried like a baby, my brother tried to start a fight with my friends. Bad decision: they were all in the military. By the time I got back, my mother and brother were gone and I had made the decision that in order to keep my sanity, I needed to amputate that portion of my life. The anger, the hatred, the sorely troubled love, the desire to please--all of those emotions were jettisoned from my personal baggage so that I could go on living.

And, so I did. I moved back up to Ohio and away from my mother's reach. The next thing I heard about her, she was dead. My anger had prevented me from being there in time to say,"I'm sorry." or "I love you." Any chance of reconcilation was buried, eternally, six feet from my grasp.

This is not a pleasant place to live. Although I've spent much of the last few years trying to tie up all those loose emotional ends, it will still never justify my mother breathing her last without me there at her side. Some of you remember when she died from our association on another website. What none of you know is that every day, at some point, something reminds me of her. In that moment, I'm right back in that self-accustory state.

Today is one of those days for me. I spent much of the afternoon on the cardiac ward with my father-in-law. As my husband and I struggled to find a way to entertain a man who is absolutely miserable and in pain, I wondered what could have changed in my life if I had tried to reconcile with my mother before she died. I realized something very important: it wouldn't really have made a difference. I would have tried to forgive her, but she never would have forgiven me. The last look I gave her was one of disgust, the last thing she saw of me was my back as I walked away from her for the final time. Even then, in the back of my mind, I knew it was the final time anyway. Even if I had been there, I couldn't have found the closure that so viciously eludes me now.

And then, another picture enters my mind: my mom, driving me to competitions, chaperoning our History Day group to the national convention and the look on her face when I won the research paper award, the way she so casually brought up my successes to farmers at the store. I realize how proud she would be of me now that I'm published, and I'd like to think that if she were still alive, she would know that a lot of what I have accomplished is due to her unerring belief in my ability to succeed.

Just that quickly: mother became Mom. For some reason, that one little linguistic change put a whole lot of things about this residual anger squarely into place. So tonight, as I type this long, boring story out into my blog, I no longer think about the mother who humiliated me in public, but about the Mom who drove me all over the countryside in an effort to help me succeed at what I wanted to do most.

So. Asphodel isn't dedicated to anyone. Reckoning will be dedicated to my Latin teachers Grady and Kaye Warren and my English teacher/mentor the late Kitty Savage. I'll tell you more about them tomorrow. Temptation will be dedicated to my husband, of course.

But Apostolate? That dedication will go to my mom. Finally, I think I have found the peace I've craved for nearly a decade.

Awards? Moi?

Okay, it takes a lot to truly shock me. No, really, it does. Getting nominated for awards manages that.

Asphodel was nominated for Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel of 2007 by both LoveRomances&More and Preditors & Editors.


To makes matters even more interesting, LR&M reviewers also nominated me for Best New Author of 2007.

To say I'm in shock is a mild understatement. I will state for the record, however, that I'm not stunned that I can't promote this aberration for all it's worth. So, if you click on the links, it'll take you to a place where you can VOTE FOR ME! With LR&M, you'll have to join their Yahoo group for the LoveRomancesCafe in order to cast a vote... Please join and vote...don't let my bubble burst publicly and in grief!

Thunder is Rumbling Again

Once again, the family has a health crisis. My father-in-law is having triple bypass surgery today. It seems like we get past one hurdle only to find another one right on the horizon. I'm the central communication hub, excused from hospital duty because my back is in particularly nasty shape. Shannon is there with his mom and I'm keeping the other, widespread offspring up to date.

Right now all the up to date is: still in surgery. Try back at 5.

It's strange how the wheels of life turn sometimes. It actually can work like some of the plots I concoct with hills and plateaus--and cliffs-- in the action topography. Sometimes, as in the Summers' households this year, it's all cliffs. We've been rock climbing and rappelling like crazy this year just trying to keep one turn ahead of the twist in the road.

Four sixteen.

I start a submission orgy on January 2nd. I'll be querying two different novels (Requiem and Terella) to as many agents as possible. I've been polishing the hell out of them for a month and I finally wrote the last chapter of Terella this week. I'd been putting it off because I knew how I wanted it to end but couldn't quite wrap my fingers around how to portray it. Sort of a Jesus meets Carrie (Stephen King) image had wandered around my mind and I finally figured out how to create that feel. I am eerily optimistic about it. Requiem is paranormal romance, pure and simple. It will be nice to see what it can do.

Four twenty one. Time sure is moving slowly. I think I'll let the dogs out, smoke a cigarette while sheltering from the rain on the deck, and think about maybe taking a long, hot bath. Then I'll go back to the computer and pound my query letters into shape. Four twenty two.

A Gift for Christmas

We went home to Tennessee for Christmas. This year was different from so many others because on the 23rd, I had a reunion with my Latin class. I’ve spoken before of my teacher, Grady Warren. This year, the students that he and his wonderful wife Kaye taught over the course of 3 decades came together to honor them. It was fabulous: we had pictures from old Junior Classical League conventions and got to try and figure out who was who. Great fun.

And, it leads me to a story…

Once upon a time, I was a toddler who lived in a tiny house on old highway 79 in Oakwood, Tennessee. Because it was a highway, the only little girl I was allowed to play with was the one who lived three houses up: Tammy Milliken. She was smaller than me, a tiny little thing with a mop of brown curls and big, sweet eyes. She was the only child that came to the Millikens, who were a hard-working farm family. My mom would take me over to her house and we were allowed to play sedately in her fenced-in back yard. Eventually, we moved. I didn’t run into Tammy again until high school.

When we met up again, we were rivals. In Latin, we both studied mythology; I beat her at all the conventions. In forensics, we both competed in extemporaneous speaking; she beat me soundly for four years. We hung out together at conventions, where we became great friends. I hooked her up with her boyfriend, who went to my school. When she turned 16, she bought a car with money she’d saved for years—picking tobacco for her father. In every way, Tammy was a model student, daughter, and friend. Except for the fact that she beat the tar out of me at every debate tournament, she and I grew closer every year.

Our senior year, we’d decided to both go to Austin Peay State University. We had agreed to be debate partners—after all, how could anyone beat us? It was going to be fabulous.
We had it all planned out.

Two weeks before we started school, Tammy was killed by a drunk driver. What makes her case so different(odd? horrible? sad?) is that the man who killed her was driving a dump truck at 7 a.m. while still inebriated. He crossed the median and hit her head-on. She was one mile from her house, on her way to see her grandmother. Her funeral was the last time I had seen most of the people I saw last Sunday. We’d huddled together in great clumps at the funeral home, shocked, dazed and angry. Long lines of adolescents filed in front of her coffin, to take one last look at Tammy, whose face was miraculously intact, and to hold the hands of her stunned parents. I remember leaning over to kiss her and then saying to her mother, “You know Tammy was like a sister to me, Mrs. Milliken…” before choking up and moving on.

So on Sunday, as a group of Latin geeks from the 80s found themseleves in the same place at the same time, we all took a moment to remember Tammy and to honor her place among us. She was the first, and the hardest, loss to our number. For a little while, it was like she was there with us, laughing and falling back into the old jokes.

Strangely, I didn’t see a picture of her. I don’t know if I just missed it or if there really wasn’t one. It didn’t matter; her face has swum before my eyes pretty consistently over the last few days.

Yesterday, I went with my father to visit my grandparents’ grave. While I watched my aunt adjust flowers on their headstone, I looked around. Fifteen rows from my grandparents, I saw two headstones that read “Milliken.” One was a dual stone, only one side filled for Mr. Milliken. Mrs. Milliken lives alone now, on a farm not far from the cemetery. But next to him was Tammy’s grave. I hadn’t been there since she’d been interred. There were fresh flowers there, and it was there that I saw her picture. She smiled out at me from the headstone, the braces she’d been buried in glinting slightly from the flash. I smiled back, and laid a single flower on her grave.

There really isn’t a point to this story, unless it's that I’ve noticed lately that graves have become associated with holidays. I paid my pilgrimage to my mother’s grave this morning as we were leaving town. Tammy's was the first grave to bring pain and confusion to my life; it was fitting that I should remember her along with this last, more vicious pain. Perhaps you, who are my friends and peers and audience, would like to know that once upon a time in a tiny hamlet buried in Tennessee, there was a girl named Tammy Milliken who was everything that I am not. And twenty three years after her death, a group of 30- and 40- and even a few 50- and 60- somethings that gathered together in a church hall in Tennessee who remembered, and missed, her still.

In this season of resolutions and gift exchanges, it may help to know that you don’t have to be great, or successful, to make an impact on this world. Consider that my gift to you.

Merry Christmas.

Upsizing and Downgrading--or Why The Holidays Suck

Wow, have I been busy. Not only have I been too busy to blog, but I juswt checked my email accounts and had ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TWO new emails.

Of which 90 were spam.

So, I've been getting the antique shop through the holidays (traffic is up, business is down--go figure), rapping out a mess of rewrites, bartending for special holiday parties *rolls eyes* and doing sporadic Christmas shopping (I'm still planning my annual December 23 2 a.m. trip to get it all done) and...not content with my normal chaos...have decided to upgrade and move to a bigger house.

Yeah, I know. The last chick is flown from the nest and now I want a bigger house? Go figure. So in the midst of holiday madness and still under a work restriction from my latest back fiasco (did NOT go well, but thanks for asking!) I am now packing up my house.

What an idiot.

So anyway, here's what I figure: if I can make it past January 7th (Ohio State in the national championship game playing against LSU in what is essentially a home game for the SEC champ---have to love the 'fairness' of a system like the BCS) then I can get back some semblance of my normal compartmentalized life. Won't that be nice?

AND DIFFERENT?

*thinks for a minute*

Yeah. I agree. Bah humbug.

Keeping the Flame Hot

No, this isn't a post about erotica.

Thanks to real life (evil bastard) I haven't been on track with TGTD. Oh, sure, I'm sitting over 60k now, but that's more to do with tuning out my relatives than any real intensity on my part. Today, however, the wheels are turning. I rediscovered my drive for the story and I think it's coming along fine.

Did I mention that I managed over 50k in 11 days? I'm a little smug, yes, but there are others who wrote more than I did.

I've noticed that my writing is a lot sharper these days. I eliminate most of my grammatical penchants before I make them. Even the comma count is down, which is a good thing. (don't crit my blog, damnit--it's where commas are allowed to roam freely without fear of molestation--and adverbs too so nyaaaaaaah.)

At any rate, it is hard sometimes to get past the first few chapters when you start a new project. I am not a compulsive planner when I write; I have an idea of where the story will end, but how I get there and most of the plot turns are accidental. Usually I stall and sputter (remember Requiem?) until I figure out how best to get the story moving along. Terella has a fairly straightforward plot intention, but the road is twisted and gnarly and oh so deliciously indecent! My heroine begins as fairly sweet and naive and morphs through the story until she takes over the page and stomps all over it.

Killing superfluous dialogue tags as she goes.

For example, this is how we meet Aleira:

Aleira liked the rain. It slanted from the thickening sky as slashes of lavender. Overall it was, particularly at this time of year, a beautiful and relaxing thing to watch. She had heard rumors that in places across the great Mneosta Sea the rain was as silvery as the clouds that brought it. She didn’t necessarily believe it. For her, it was incomprehensible that rain could be anything other than the watery purple-hued streaks she loved. She let the hood fall back from her face, glorying in the feel of the water against her skin. For a girl with many problems, the rain was a wonderful thing.

Aleira was alone. She liked being alone. For as long as she could remember,it had always been thus. No matter what town she walked through, or what inn she entered in search of food and drink, she was the lone person in her life. It wasn’t very bad; it gave her time to think. Most of that thinking time she spent asking herself the selfsame question repeatedly.

Who am I?

She knew her name. She retained that one thing from ‘before.’ “Before’ referred to the time of darkness. ‘After’ referred to now. ‘After’ began when Aleira opened her eyes a month ago and found herself standing alone in the middle of a large field. She knew absolutely nothing about her origins: where she’d come from, who her family was, what she was doing or where she was going. The only clues she had were her name and the few possessions she owned.

Later on, she's more like this:

“Tell me, Rudianos,” she began softly, as the king stiffened into renewed fury at her use of his name. “Do you think I can’t see that makings of your past? Your father was a cruel man too, was he not? Didn’t he torture you and your younger sister, to mould you into what he thought royalty should be? Wasn’t it difficult for you as a child? All you wanted to do was run to your mother and weep, but you couldn’t because then he’d beat her too.”

The words came faster now, brought up from some well of information that she’d never known she possessed. “I always wonder what the product of emotional cruelty was. I see it now, enthroned and enriched by the suffering of those who don’t even know they are your victims. Your son stands behind me. He is a good man, a patient and gentle man who you ignored when he was growing. You had two older sons; he was unimportant. This son you left alone, spared the incessant brutality you spent upon his brothers as you tried to make them in your image. When they died, you
were left with him. He’d grown up in a different fashion, left to his tutors and beneath your notice. Now you’re frustrated because he isn’t as easy to shape as your other, maltreated, bestial offspring. He has a mind of his own, and prowess that you fear. Tell me, Rudianos: when you lie in your cold bed at night, whose face do you see before you go to sleep? Is it your own face, wreathed in glory and might? Or, is it the face of your son, above a sword that whistles for your throat?”

She smiled again, a sweet, innocent smile that belied the harsh impact of her words. “I know what it is you see. I know what it is that you fear. It is the usual thing for mortals to fear their own mortality. I will say this and no more: the death you receive, King of Vegoia, will be the death you have earned.”

It took her about 75 pages to reach that point. And just afterwards, she finds herself caught up in a war that she cannot stop. It's then that her atheism is confirmed; nothing quite like a moral crisis to give a girl doubts about the gods whoever they are. Oh, yes. And Ugarit? Poor fellow. I torture him in my inimitable mean fashion, but he keeps coming up the stronger for it.

*grin*

I may have to kill him to prove a point. Wouldn't that be a nice twist?

That's one of the great things about keeping the flame of your story hot--taking out your frustrations (or your joys) upon a helpless character who lives and dies by the power of your pen. Wow. What a feeling! It gives me the goosebumps just thinking about it.

I think a nice, prolonged, lovely death scene is just the ticket. Excuse me while I run to the thesaurus to find more synonyms for blood, guts, and disembowelment. This may be more fun than torturing Elves.

Goshdarn Scam Agency Rant Alert

Get ready. This is going to be evil.

So...my mother-in-law informed me yesterday that she had an agent.

After picking my jaw up from the desk, where it lay for some time in utter disbelief after hearing that she had queried one (1) agent and had been offered a contract, I started to think about it. Now, I've read some of her work and while it is good, I thought it was a bit of a stretch to find the perfect agent that quickly after one try. So I started asking questions.

Who was her agency? Although I thought she said Rider, it turns out she said Writer. Writers Literary Agency, to be precise, which has been discussed on numerous well-respected writers' sites: Absolute Write, Writers Beware, Preditors & Editors, and Making Light--among others. Although I didn't initially recognize the name, it did set off alarm bells. So, when I got home I googled it.

You've all heard me talk about the fine art of googling before. Use it. Embrace it. Revel in it. Because when you google Writer's Literary Agency, the very first thing that pops up is NOT their website. Oh no. It would be the sites listed above.

Never a good sign. More not good signs:

--Click here for a sampling of the positive emails that we receive on a regular basis. That's it? Emails? No, I want to see sales--whose books you sold, to which publisher, for how much. So let's go look there next.

--Ooooooooookay. Not a single NAME listed. Fair enough.

--Why don't we check out their marketing plan for their authors.

And that's where I get mad, because that's where my mother-in-law got snagged. What a lovely photograph of a green WL Literary sign at the 2007 Book Expo in New York. It's rather interesting though that all of the other signs are purple. And in not a single picture, which could have been taken by any casual visitor to an open event, was there ONE INSTANCE where you could see a WL Literary rep with an editor from any of the big houses....or an author....or even at the dinner...

So, she signed. She then paid sixty bucks for a 'critique' of her novel. Amazingly, in a 118k manuscript of a first-time, never previously published writer, there was only ONE misspelled word. The 'critique' was a rave, detailing how saleable the book was with a few cut and paste snippets from the manuscript.

So now I'm seeing red. I put all the pieces together and found myself in the unenviable position of informing my mother-in-law, business partner, and friend that she had been the victim of a well-tried and more successful than it should be scam. Let me just state for the record that this is NOT a comfortable place to be.

The public record on this company is long and it's discouraging. If you follow the links I've posted in this article, you'll be able to untangle it for yourself. I am posting this from Ann Crispin of Writers Beware--she added her full permission to copy and paste the alert wherever writers gather:

NEW ALERT FROM WRITER BEWARE: Writers’ Literary Agency & Marketing
Company (formerly The Literary Agency Group) The Literary Agency Group, a
business owned or controlled by Robert M. Fletcher of Boca Raton, Florida,
changed its name in February 2007 to Writers’ Literary Agency & Marketing
Company (a.k.a. WL Writers’ Literary Agency).
This umbrella group includes or has included the following agencies:
* Christian Literary Agency* New York Literary Agency* Stylus Literary Agency (formerly ST Literary Agency, formerly Sydra-Techniques)* WL Children’s Agency (a.k.a. Children’s Literary Agency)* WL Poet’s Agency (a.k.a. Poet’s Literary Agency)* WL Screenplay Agency (a.k.a. The Screenplay Agency)* Writers’ Literary & Publishing Services Company (the editing arm of the above-mentioned agencies)
Since this company began operating in 2001 under the name Sydra-Techniques, Writer Beware has received hundreds of complaints and advisories of fee-charging, editing referrals, and other questionable practices. We’re not aware that the company has a significant track record of commercial book sales under any of its names, despite its claims to the contrary. Writers who have had trouble with Robert
M. Fletcher or any of the above-named companies, and who are or were residents
of the state of Florida, please get in touch with Ann Crispin at anncrispin@aol.com (or beware@sfwa.org , if the AOL address bounces), even if you have previously contacted her. Please provide complete contact information.

And so now you know. I cannot stress enough how important it is to thoroughly research ANY agent or publishing company before you submit. Love your Google button and use it. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to compose a lovely registered letter on behalf of my mother-in-law. It is a painful lesson for anyone to learn. Try not to let this happen to you.

Insomnia and Market Research

So, it was a bad day yesterday. Family situations abounded...never a good thing...and I'll be away from my computer pretty consistently over the next couple of weeks. *sigh* Unfortunately, whenever crap happens to me or mine, I stay awake and stew about it.

And stew.

Unless I distract myself. I made some LOLCatz earlier; that was fun. I also started doing market research. It's been a while since I have done so, and I thought I'd see what's up.

What's up is I found a whole slew of new places to think about sending my stuff to so that it can be rejected. I also found some great blog posts, new information, and a growing certainty within the market that 'things they are a changin' ...

My question is simple: where?

Where is the market changing? What is the next big trend? Who knows what it is, and how much do I have to pay them to get in on the secret?

Okay, let's say that it's a minimum of two years from contract signing to pulbication with a major house. That means that to be the 'next big thing' you have to be TWO YEARS beyond the other people writing in your genre. Otherwise, if it's too similar, you might be pegged as derivative.

The world might be different today if Harry Potter had come out six months after a wizards' school book from another author. Think about it. Remember the post-DaVinci Code swarm of lookalikes? What if...and it's a big what if...a publisher thinks Darkshifters is the next big thing? Unbeknowst to them, or me, another writer publishes something similar a few months before. Does that negate Darkshifters' chances? Perhaps not entirely, but still.

Speculating on the nature of public taste is hard. When you write stories that are out-of-date does that make them any less viable? And who decides that? Publishers? Editors? Agents? Or is it the intern stuck on slush pile detail....a scary thought indeed.

Unfortunately, I have no answers. I only have questions. And even after a long night of LOLCatz and NaNo writing and market research, I can't find the place TO get the answers. So for the time being, I'll just have to assume that what I'm doing can be the next big thing.

And hope for the best.