Adventures in Querying...

"All right, I'm ready!" ~ Anastasia
in the song "Learn to Do It" from Anastasia

Yesterday I had the oh-so-fun moment of "Oh crap, how do I calculate my word count? And format my manuscript? And... and... and...?"

So I went to Google and started searching. Word count came in pretty simply with only two methods dominating the search: Whatever Word tells you OR 250 x # of pages (either way rounding to nearest 1000). Right now I'm going with Word, but I might switch if I'm told to do otherwise (until then, I almost feel like I'd be lying!). They're somewhat close, but not exactly the same.

Formatting, however, was so much more fun to research because everyone seems to have a different formatting pet peeve that someone else says is how you're supposed to do it. Ah, how exciting. Underline vs. italicize? # vs * * * vs white space for breaks? Bold anything ever? How to indent paragraphs? Where to put the word count? How much white space starts a chapter? *twitch*

Now, before any of you swoop in with "Oh, no, calm down! It's okay!" and other such comments... I'm not freaking out (at least, about that stuff!). Actually, some sick part of me finds all these contradictions highly amusing.

After reading about a zillion "articles" and random blog posts on every topic, I think I've got the basics. And I know when something doesn't look professional. So I'm not particularly worried on those fronts. I'd love to do everything "right" the first time, but that doesn't necessarily look possible. So I'm going to do the best I can, using as much information as I can find.

Next up, the query letters! I've got three at the point where I'm going to have to call them done or drive myself crazy rearranging commas. I'm planning on always having five out at a time (we'll see how that goes...), so that means two more!

Except... I'm having some trouble "personalizing" some of the queries. I really want to show people how I have done my research (seriously, chime in if you've seen my querying research binder- my thesis adviser said it could be a book itself!), and that I'm not just querying them because they're an agent. I'm querying people who I genuinely feel I would work with well. Who rep what I write. Who seem to have similar tastes to my own. I want an agent, yes, but not just so I can say I have one- I want a professional, working relationship with someone who can sell my book.

Alas, my Google skills are somewhat failing me. There are a few people who I can't find quite enough information on for me to feel like I'm truly personalizing the letters. This frustrates me. In fact, a few of them I'm thinking of switching who I'm querying in their agencies because of this*.

Well, I've been at this research & query-writing for about four or five hours now, so I think I'm going to take a reading break.

Anyone want to chime in with their current or past querying adventures? No names, no bashing of anyone, please. I'm trying to keep this somewhat light and I'm not locking this post. (If you have anything you'd like to share privately, you can email me at kathleenfoucart at gmail dot com)


*This is only in agencies where I'm so torn btw. 2 or 3 agents that it was sort-of arbitrary which one I decided to go with. Why are so many fantastic agents in the same agencies? So hard to choose!

Yikes, it's been a while!

I just realized I never posted the winner of the contest over here... So sorry about that! The winner was LJ User "Hinode" and her books are on the way!


x-posted from my LJ
Hey all, I'm still alive, just trying to get a lot of random bits of life back in order. Nothing terrible going on, just still playing catch-up from last month- and it's almost July! Ugh!

Anyway, I'm really only popping in to promo a contest I meant to mention (and, uh, enter) when she first posted it... Tiffany Trent is having a "Favorite Strong Female Character" contest on her blog (enter here), and you could win a hardback omnibus edition of Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness! So head on over and join in the discussion about your fave strong females. She's picking on July 1, so hurry!

I decided to go with Katsa from Graceling (Tiffany S. I swear I will get to Fire ASAP!), but as I was thinking about it, I realized a lot of my favorite strong women characters actually come from TV, not books- like Sarah from "Chuck" or Fiona from "Burn Notice." I'm pondering pondering over this in a blog post soon, but even if that isn't the topic, I promise there will be more posts coming up! I just need to get a few of these "to-dos" off my plate!

Last Day for Contest Entries!

Today's the last day to enter my Readerly/Writerly Influences Contest. The winner will be chosen tomorrow by The Dane. Still not sure how, exactly, but I'm thinking note cards and a large enough basket for her to get her nose in...

Also, still looking for questions for interviewees. The questions will be going out by the end of this week. I got a few general ones via facebook, but if you want to ask anyone anything specific, now's the time to get your question in!

Contests, Discussions and Questions!

So this week I'm finally starting to feel better, but instead of having time to catch up, I've been swamped planning a friend's bridal shower for this Saturday, and doing a ton of agent research. And I just realized I, uh, have no synopsis to send to said agents. Better get on that...

Anyway, I've got a bunch of things I wanted to mention, so here goes:

- My "Readerly/Writerly Influences" contest is still going on here until midnight (Eastern time) June 15, so get your entries in! Two free books to the winner.

- The wonderful Jen has posted a very interesting question for adult readers of YA . What do you think makes a good book?

- I've got a great list of people lined up to interview this summer! But as I was writing out my interview questions, I realized I was only asking things I was curious about, and well, I'm hoping more people than just me will read the answers! So what do you want to know about these fantastic people? Here's a list of those that have thus far agreed to the interviews:
Tiffany Trent,
author of the Hallowmere series beginning with In the Serpent's Coils
Karen Mahoney,
whose first published short story will be out this summer in The Eternal Kiss
Emily Adamo,
creator of the webcomic "Fun in Jammies"
Sarah Prineas,
author of The Magic Thief and The Magic Thief: Lost
Carrie Jones,
author of Need, Girl, Hero, Tips on Having a Gay (ex)Boyfriend and Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape)
Amie Rose Rotruck,
aka R. D. Henham, author of Bronze Dragon Codex
Hillary Homzie,
author of the Alien Clones series and the upcoming Things Are Gonna Get Ugly
A. LaFaye,
winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical fiction for Worth, her newest novel Water Steps is out now!
Stephanie Burgis,
author of the upcoming YA Regency fantasy trilogy The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson, beginning with Book One: An Improper Magic (2010)


So if you have any questions for those listed above, please leave them in the comments! I might not get all of them in the interviews, but I will certainly do my best. (I'm going to try and ask a few more people, but getting sick kinda threw off my groove, so if I get anyone else, there will be a similar post for questions for them.)

I think that's all for now... Don't forget to enter, discuss and question! :)

Musings on Subconscious Writing

"An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought." ~ Mignon McLaughlin

I've had a few odd experiences with my writing lately, and I've started calling it my "subconscious writing work" for lack of a better term.

One thing I've been doing a lot of lately is side-story (as my friend Tony calls it). I've been writing pieces of Arion from other characters' points of view or scenes that are completely off-camera. I've done this for a while, and while it's fun for me, I've always thought it was... not a waste of time, but not always the best use of my time. Why, exactly, am I playing with a scene from Isis's point of view when it will never be in the book?

The other day I realized exactly why I wrote a particular scene between Isis & Josephine, and it wasn't what I thought. I thought I was writing it to explain to myself what Josephine knew & didn't know about the relationship between Arion & Isis. I didn't realize it actually told me something very important about Isis, something I need to know to write Mordagrin, until a few days later when I re-read it and noticed her reactions.

Another side-story scene I wrote is something that had basically been there from the beginning, but 1) I hadn't wanted to go there and 2) Mordecai wouldn't exactly let me until recently. I think part of it had to do with some comments I got back from Tiffany Schmidt and Melissa Joy Adams about Arion's emotional life, and I knew there was an "answer," I just hadn't figured it out yet. Then I realized what Mordecai had actually done in that library and, well, it just came together. I think I actually smacked myself in the forehead over that one...

But it isn't even just this kind of thing that's been fascinating me lately. My playlists are becoming more and more where I'm finding character motivations. Not so much for Arion, because that was really the first one I made and I'd chosen most of the songs for very specific purposes. But when I listen to the songs on the Mordagrin and Wings & Fangs: Bewitched playlists, where often I just throw songs on a whim, sometimes I get a little freaked out by how well they fit before I've even written the scene.

For example, I started adding songs like "I Just Can't Live a Lie" by Carrie Underwood, "Driftin' Away" by Garth Brooks (Chris Gaines CD) and "Cry" by Kelly Clarkson to Mordagrin before I had any idea about the emotional conflicts I was going to find in certain relationships. And then there's songs in the Wings & Fangs: Bewitched list that have let me actually get to know David, who has to be one of the quietest MCs I've ever had. And these are songs that have been on this list over a year, ones that I thought I added more in relation to D than David, but now David's owning them.

I've posted this quote before, but I wanted to throw it up again, cause it's part of where I got my terminology and oh-so-fitting:
"...I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together -- often doing things far more complicated and sophisticated than I could with brute conscious effort. I would have ideas for 'nodes', as I think of them -- story or character details that have lots of potential connections to other such nodes -- and even though I didn't quite understand, I would plunk them in. Two hundred pages later, everything would back-fit, and I'd say, "Ah, that's why I wrote that." ~ Tad Williams


Anyone care to share anything they've found this way? Just typed something & had it work itself out or in or whatever? I know a lot of people on my friends list are more pantsers than plotters, so I figure some of you have got to have good stories!



Contest Reminder: You have until June 15 to get your entries in for my Readerly/Writerly Influences Contest. Only three entries so far, so the odds of winning two free books are pretty good!

Contest Update!

Since I've done next-to-nothing to promote my contest this week I've decided to extend it another week. So you now have until Monday, June 15 to enter to win free books! And remember, even if you have these already, maybe your bff doesn't? So enter & spread the joy of free books :)

The contest details & comment thread for entries are here.

Readerly/Writerly Influences Contest!

x-posted from my LJ- you can respond here, there or on myspace.

Hi all! To kick off my summer blogging extravaganza*, I decided to have a contest! But what to do and what to give away... I have no book of my own to give away yet. I have no highly-anticipated ARCs lying around at the moment (in fact, I think every ARC I have now has a corresponding 'real book'). So I've been thinking long & hard (as much as possible w/ sinus issues & a head cold) about what to do.

So here's the deal. I want to know about the book(s) that made you a reader or a writer. In return, I'll give away the first two books in the first two published series' by my biggest writerly-influences.

So here's my story...
Between the ages of five and eighteen I moved exactly once, and that was to the other side of town. So let's just say that moving four hours away to go to college was... a bit of a shock. I sorta retreated into myself, but, for company, I brought along a friend named Harry.

Back up a few years- I was often scribbling. I had tons of "storylines" in my head all the time- from mysteries to fantasies to time-slips to slasher films- but I'd never considered writing to be the be-all, end-all of what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a number of things, most music-related, but I'd gone to that particular college thinking I wanted to be an English teacher. Er, English 101 sorta changed that. And so did Harry Potter.

It was actually my third time through the HP series (1-4 at that point) and I found myself thinking more and more about writing. I always just wrote to write. Not necessarily to share it with anyone (god forbid!) or for any reason other than if I didn't I'd go crazy. But This was the kind of thing I wanted to write.

Of course, at the time I discovered this I was also 1) seriously depressed and 2) had decided to move back home and 3) desperately wondering where I'd go next.

Flash-forward to the following fall where, once more, I'm four hours away from home and banging my head against those hideous cinder-block walls because why-oh-why was I so stupid as to do this to myself again?

But this time I was a little better, and though I still read to escape (though with my "Medieval English" class, it, uh, wasn't always easy reading!), but also writing. I worked on a few stories I'd started pre-college and the semester before, but wrote new things as well. I wrote a few short-short stories, which a friend of mine said were good, which was encouraging. Anyway... I was still not always in good shape and one day, anxious for the 5th Harry Potter book & tired of waiting for it, I found myself searching fan-fiction sites and happened on one which purported to only link to "the best Harry Potter fan-fiction." Yeah, yeah, don't believe everything you read on the internet, right?

Well, this stuff was good. I enjoyed a story about what shaped Tom Riddle and then went to the link to some novel-length fics about Draco Malfoy. Yup. Cassandra Clare's stuff.

I don't want to get into the kerfuffle about all that, because honestly? I think it's silly. But I will say I adored the Draco trilogy, and found myself drawn into the plot twists and turns as much as I was with the canon.

Around the same time I started to write two stories I knew would be novel-length. The first about a girl named Jora, in a historic-adventure-story. And for the other? A boy named Arion who, originally, drove a black sports car.

Now, technically, there's a lot more to my story. But as far as I'm concerned, Rowling and Clare will always remain two of my biggest writing influences, the ones whose words really caught me and spun me around to face the "writer" direction.

And for that, I'm giving away a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and a paperback copy of City of Bones, which is the first book in Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments trilogy**.

Here are The Rules:
1) You get one entry for commenting here and telling me which book or books really made you think you could be a writer, or, if you're not a writer, what book really turned you into a reader. Or, heck, if you've always been a reader, your favorite book. I'm not picky. :)

2) After following Rule #1 you get one additional entry for each of your blogs/facebook pages/MySpace Accounts/Twitter linking back here. Leave a comment (replying to your original if possible) with your link(s), so I can verify. (If you post on Facebook, you'll need to Friend Me) for verification.
Please do not spam other people's blogs, listservs, whatever- I will not count those entries!

3) For this particular contest, I will ship anywhere, since it's my first. But if shipping winds up astronomical, I'll probably restrict in the future (sorry).

4) I'm leaving this contest open for a week, so please respond by midnight (Eastern time) on Monday, June 8 for a chance to win! Winner will be chosen by The Dane.



*I'm horrible at titles. Seriously. So if anyone can come up with something better than "Summer Blogging Extravaganza" or "Summer Blog-a-thon" I'd be eternally grateful.
**I realize a lot of people already have these books. Especially Harry. But I figured the hardback might be enticing and either way, free books!