Writer's Weekend--Day 2
Jul. 23rd, 2004 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIt has been a very productive, fruitful day, and although the programming is not yet done, I am exhausted. So here I am documenting today in an LJ post that'll probably not get online until Sunday, but hey. I came in kind of expecting the whole flavor of a science fiction convention--partly, I suppose, because of just being so physically near the Norwescon hotel, but also because of knowing that several fannish types would be here to as writers wanting to break into those genres. But unlike with Norwescon, where my experience has to date been that the panels they have are much more geared towards folks with the Newbie sorts of questions, the programming thus far has been much more focused and much more presented with the expectation that the audience is composed of people who actively wish to make writing their career.
Accordingly, it's been that much more useful. I've already come out of today with a couple of really useful pieces of advice that have altered my game plan about what I want to work on for the next few months--and what, specifically, to do with Faerie Blood. The biggest thing I've learned today has been that with that rejection letter I got, the next good step will be to revise the submission and send it back, and more importantly, how to craft the query letter to reflect that I have taken their advice into account and would appreciate a second look at my chapters. And the second biggest thing has been how to prepare a query for The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk--one big story that requires three books to tell and which are not standalone volumes--vs. Faerie Blood, which is a standalone book with two probable sequels in a story arc of three related but independent novels.
Scattered throughout the rest of the day, though, have been any number of little gems of wisdom as well as delightful quotes.
Michael Chiu of the Bellevue Police was our first speaker this morning. He's the PR guy for the Bellevue Police Department, and came to give us a talk about topics of interest to the folks who are wanting to write about cops and crime in their novels. One of the first things he stressed was that law enforcement is a different beast region by region all over the country--and even down to city by city. Seattle's police department is a different beast from Bellevue's, and much will depend upon whether a police force has the active support of its city council and its constituents.
Bellevue, for example, has a well-paid force that demands a minimum of two years of college for its officers--and because they have a strong budget, they can afford luxuries like a nifty new machine that sprays gold and zinc onto items placed into it and pull fingerprints off these items. The scenario he proposed to us involved a hypothetical gun being flung into water, being submerged for a month, and only recently finished out; this device, apparently, can pull off fingerprints. There are only a couple of these machines in use in the country, and the FBI has the other one--that's the caliber of technology we're talking about here. Bellevue can solve crimes with this thing that other jurisdictions won't touch. Similarly, he touched upon digital clarification technologies, where you can pull a bloody handprint off of fabric; we've seen versions of this all over the media, with people feeding blurry pictures through a computer and pulling out details that you wouldn't get by looking at them without technological aid. An interesting point he stressed here was that this is not modification or enhancement of the image: you're just clarifying what's already there. It is also a very slow process.
He told us interesting things about fingerprinting as well, such as what AFIS stands for: Automated Fingerprint Identification System. And that these days, arrested felons also have the knife edge of their hands, the bottom edge of the hand that runs along the pinky side, printed as well as their palms and fingertips.
The talk got really interesting, though, when he told us what his other job with the Bellevue police force is: sniper. And, it turns out, the primary job of a sniper on a police force is not actually to shoot people: it's to provid detailed observation of a house or building which will then be employed by a SWAT team who has to go into that space. With the training he has received, he can tell just by looking at the roof line of a house what the layout of that house is, what kinds of rooms are where, and how they are used.
He touched on some of the popular themes of cop fiction: high emotional turmoil, alcoholism, marital stress, and burnout. These things, he informed us, do certainly happen, especially when a cop has to deal with life-threatening situations. Some officers can do it. Some can't. And he used a particular description of different kinds of cops, major carnivores vs. minor carnivores, where the differentiation lies with whether the cop is someone who can immediately and without hesitation address a potentially lethal situation with the aggression it requires. He presented the example of a SWAT team member yelling for a civilian to get down on the floor, and not being immediately obeyed; the minor carnivore would say it again. The major carnivore would put that person down by executing a move that spins the head and disorients a person, and move on, letting the person behind him deal with the person.
Anita Blake and Eve Dallas both struck me as examples of major carnivores in fiction.
An interesting dichotomy that comes up in SWAT team situations is whether you're going to take a polite, civil person and teach them to be mean--or take a thug and teach them to be politically correct. Definitely an either/or situation, and one which could provide interesting team dynamics in an appropriate story. He mentioned, furthermore, that the "rogue SWAT team member" archetype that you see a lot in movies just would not happen in real life; SWAT team members, like many big carnivores, are going to be very strongly pack-oriented.
There is, apparently, no real difference between a male and a female when a cop is in the situation of having to subdue a suspect. If you aren't obeying police commands, you are a potential threat. If you are proven to be an innocent afterwards, that's okay--but until that's proven, you can't rely on gender to get you better treatment. Important to note for a story.
And he went on to describe, touching back on the whole differences in regional police forces thing, how in some jurisdictions it used to be customary to try to bribe your way out of a speeding ticket; this happened with his father in Chicago in the 50's. Now, not so much. Neither will gender necessarily get you out of a speeding ticket, if the officer is one who has made a conscious, deliberate choice to not be swayed by any such thing; he described for us that if you try to pull that kind of thing on him, he will make that ticket absolutely airtight. ;)
All in all a very entertaining talk. I don't know how much of this data I will ever actually use, as I am writing SF and fantasy--but who knows. It may come in handy somehow. And his entire physical presence was noteworthy as well: this large, well-built Chinese guy in a tie and slacks and a buzz cut, making jokes to us about how he used to be a "jack-booted thug" in his days as a motorcycle cop in Bellevue. Which was another entire entertaining story--as motorcycle cops have to have hair-trigger reflexes when zipping off after a car that's just run a red light. Because if you don't time it right, you WILL BE KILLED. He added wryly, furthermore, that motorcycle cops in Bellevue do in fact hide under every bush. Hee.
I had to skip out partway through John Junker's talk--not because I wanted to, really, because he too was interesting. He started off talking about popular misconceptions about police and crime in media, and one of the biggest ones he touched on was that "when you're arrested, you have to be read your Miranda rights". This is apparently not true. You get the Miranda only if a) you have been taken into custody, and b) you are going to be interrogated. And there are interesting nuances of what "taken into custody" means as well; a pretext stop (which he called a Terry stop; this is its formal name, apparently after a court case that dealt with this issue) does not count as taking you into custody. It's just detaining you. Similarly, he went into what qualifies as an interrogation, and the working definition generally applied is that "if the officer has the reasonable expectation that their questioning will elicit an incriminating response, it's an interrogation".
As with Michael Chiu, a lot of information here I'm not sure I'll use--but you just don't know where novel ideas might come from. So.
But I did have to skip out of Professor Junker's talk early. I did not include this in my writeup for last night, but in the middle of one of the big random chats we all got into, I actually got a phone message from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird conveyed to me--telling me that Norm at Adobe Systems had gotten my resume and very much wanted to talk to me. :D Very, VERY surprising but pleasing bit of data! This was for the application I'd done on their site only this past week for a new position they've had come up for testing digital media software--which I've just spent a year doing at Borg. ;D
So I stole an opportunity to come back up to the room and call this gentleman back. It wasn't even a phone interview, more a sort of "preliminary information gathering" kind of thing, but it felt like a hope-inducing conversation for two reasons: 1) he told me they'd be in touch, and 2) he actually asked a personal question about me, which was "So you're a musician?" And that was surprising and pleasing as well, because when I asked him, he told me that he had in fact gotten that from my web page.
Which means, "HOLY CRAP, a prospective employer DID IN FACT look at my web page." Who knew? And what this tells me is, I'm damned glad I did that last round of revisions on my site, because it's a site I'd be quite happy to have a prospective employer looking at. So!
But I'll have to wait till next week, most likely, to see if I get called in for a round of interviews. I did also tell him up front that I have upcoming surgery and an expected week of recovery time that I'll have to deal with--so I'm sure that even if they do become actively interested in me, I may not actually start any sort of work for a while. But here's hoping!
And, as an added bonus, I can use this as a job contact for my unemployment job log, too. ;D
Russell Davis's panel was next, and this was where I got the aforementioned incredibly helpful advice that YES, if I've gotten back a form rejection that has any kind of handwritten feedback on it, rework the submission to address that issue, and send it back.
But he was chock full of a bunch of other useful insights, starting with "What do guidelines really mean?" One needs to learn the unspoken differences between "chiseled in stone" and "sorta kinda chiseled and you can get around them if you know how". For the latter, he provided the example of how, when he was taking submissions at Five Star Publishing, their guidelines said that they rarely took time travel books--but what this actually was was code for "I'll be a really hard sell on this kind of book". It didn't mean "don't send it".
He strongly, vehemently stressed that following the business is of paramount importance, urging us to regularly look at publishing houses' sites to check on what their guidelines are, for you cannot rely on a printed Writer's Guide--it is often out of date! So one must instead go to the source, and, if necessary, ask for the current guidelines. Sometimes web pages don't get updated in a timely fashion either. Further, he stressed one of the tenets that has been a big theme of today: going to conferences, networking, talking to people.
He touched on some things that will get you instantly rejected:
1) Obvious failure to follow their guidelines (e.g., not using proper manuscript format)
2) Errors and mistakes in the first ten pages, including your query letter and synopsis--these pages, even more so than the rest, must be absolutely clean. Fix your typoes.
3) Ideas that have been done to death. He urged against writing to trends since, due to the lag time in the publishing world, by the time a book hits the shelf the trend may already be winding down.
4) Don't send bribes, candy, or photographs of yourself begging the editor on your hands and knees to publish you. It won't help, and it will in fact scare the editors.
5) Badly written query or cover letters.
He went further into query letters and what to include in them--and here, too, I had the pleasant experience of realizing that I'd already begun to learn some of this stuff. What I hadn't known, though, is that more and more publishers are moving away from the old formula of word count calculation and it is becoming more and more acceptable to round off a word count out of Word to the nearest hundred. But I'd already known about what data to include: if it's not immediately relevant to your book, don't include it. All they want to know is your genre, your title, what the book's about, and biographical data if and only if it is immediately relevant to that story.
He urges using Word just because most publishing houses will in fact be using Office, and if you're asked for an electronic copy of your manuscript, you do not want to force them to have to convert it.
And, he emphasized that manuscript format is vital. If you format your manuscript professionally, you will already have differentiated your submission from 98 percent of the submissions received. Fancy paper is not necessary, but white paper is. And it must be dark print and legible. If they can't read it, they won't read it.
Big question he addressed: revisions of your draft. "Why do you revise? Because your first draft sucks." Important truth for a fledgling writer to know. Also, he stressed avoiding over-revision. You have to eventually learn to let it go, and get it out the door. And yet another thing he touched on that I'd already heard frommizkit is that once you finish a story, take some time to step away from it and get distance from it--because until you do that, you will be too close to the story. You won't be able to edit it. Moreover, don't let people critique you till you're done. When you are ready to go in and revise, pretend you're a reader who's just paid $26.95 for this thing in Barnes and Noble; you've just put in a substantial monetary investment for this book. So it damned well better be good. Go through it, stick a post-it on all the parts that make you stop or hesitate at all.
More truths he touched on that I already knew:
1) "Money flows to the writer."
2) Write and edit your own work. Freelance editors and book doctors will very likely get you nothing except poorer.
3) Best way to get an agent is to sell a novel.
4) You don't have time to not send your novel out everywhere, regardless of guidelines that say publishers don't take simultaneous submissions. So he was sort of with Liz Wolfe on this, though she was more circumspect about it.
And if you get a contract, don't just automatically sign it. Read it, and get advice on it from a lawyer or an agent in the publishing field.
Accordingly, it's been that much more useful. I've already come out of today with a couple of really useful pieces of advice that have altered my game plan about what I want to work on for the next few months--and what, specifically, to do with Faerie Blood. The biggest thing I've learned today has been that with that rejection letter I got, the next good step will be to revise the submission and send it back, and more importantly, how to craft the query letter to reflect that I have taken their advice into account and would appreciate a second look at my chapters. And the second biggest thing has been how to prepare a query for The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk--one big story that requires three books to tell and which are not standalone volumes--vs. Faerie Blood, which is a standalone book with two probable sequels in a story arc of three related but independent novels.
Scattered throughout the rest of the day, though, have been any number of little gems of wisdom as well as delightful quotes.
Michael Chiu of the Bellevue Police was our first speaker this morning. He's the PR guy for the Bellevue Police Department, and came to give us a talk about topics of interest to the folks who are wanting to write about cops and crime in their novels. One of the first things he stressed was that law enforcement is a different beast region by region all over the country--and even down to city by city. Seattle's police department is a different beast from Bellevue's, and much will depend upon whether a police force has the active support of its city council and its constituents.
Bellevue, for example, has a well-paid force that demands a minimum of two years of college for its officers--and because they have a strong budget, they can afford luxuries like a nifty new machine that sprays gold and zinc onto items placed into it and pull fingerprints off these items. The scenario he proposed to us involved a hypothetical gun being flung into water, being submerged for a month, and only recently finished out; this device, apparently, can pull off fingerprints. There are only a couple of these machines in use in the country, and the FBI has the other one--that's the caliber of technology we're talking about here. Bellevue can solve crimes with this thing that other jurisdictions won't touch. Similarly, he touched upon digital clarification technologies, where you can pull a bloody handprint off of fabric; we've seen versions of this all over the media, with people feeding blurry pictures through a computer and pulling out details that you wouldn't get by looking at them without technological aid. An interesting point he stressed here was that this is not modification or enhancement of the image: you're just clarifying what's already there. It is also a very slow process.
He told us interesting things about fingerprinting as well, such as what AFIS stands for: Automated Fingerprint Identification System. And that these days, arrested felons also have the knife edge of their hands, the bottom edge of the hand that runs along the pinky side, printed as well as their palms and fingertips.
The talk got really interesting, though, when he told us what his other job with the Bellevue police force is: sniper. And, it turns out, the primary job of a sniper on a police force is not actually to shoot people: it's to provid detailed observation of a house or building which will then be employed by a SWAT team who has to go into that space. With the training he has received, he can tell just by looking at the roof line of a house what the layout of that house is, what kinds of rooms are where, and how they are used.
He touched on some of the popular themes of cop fiction: high emotional turmoil, alcoholism, marital stress, and burnout. These things, he informed us, do certainly happen, especially when a cop has to deal with life-threatening situations. Some officers can do it. Some can't. And he used a particular description of different kinds of cops, major carnivores vs. minor carnivores, where the differentiation lies with whether the cop is someone who can immediately and without hesitation address a potentially lethal situation with the aggression it requires. He presented the example of a SWAT team member yelling for a civilian to get down on the floor, and not being immediately obeyed; the minor carnivore would say it again. The major carnivore would put that person down by executing a move that spins the head and disorients a person, and move on, letting the person behind him deal with the person.
Anita Blake and Eve Dallas both struck me as examples of major carnivores in fiction.
An interesting dichotomy that comes up in SWAT team situations is whether you're going to take a polite, civil person and teach them to be mean--or take a thug and teach them to be politically correct. Definitely an either/or situation, and one which could provide interesting team dynamics in an appropriate story. He mentioned, furthermore, that the "rogue SWAT team member" archetype that you see a lot in movies just would not happen in real life; SWAT team members, like many big carnivores, are going to be very strongly pack-oriented.
There is, apparently, no real difference between a male and a female when a cop is in the situation of having to subdue a suspect. If you aren't obeying police commands, you are a potential threat. If you are proven to be an innocent afterwards, that's okay--but until that's proven, you can't rely on gender to get you better treatment. Important to note for a story.
And he went on to describe, touching back on the whole differences in regional police forces thing, how in some jurisdictions it used to be customary to try to bribe your way out of a speeding ticket; this happened with his father in Chicago in the 50's. Now, not so much. Neither will gender necessarily get you out of a speeding ticket, if the officer is one who has made a conscious, deliberate choice to not be swayed by any such thing; he described for us that if you try to pull that kind of thing on him, he will make that ticket absolutely airtight. ;)
All in all a very entertaining talk. I don't know how much of this data I will ever actually use, as I am writing SF and fantasy--but who knows. It may come in handy somehow. And his entire physical presence was noteworthy as well: this large, well-built Chinese guy in a tie and slacks and a buzz cut, making jokes to us about how he used to be a "jack-booted thug" in his days as a motorcycle cop in Bellevue. Which was another entire entertaining story--as motorcycle cops have to have hair-trigger reflexes when zipping off after a car that's just run a red light. Because if you don't time it right, you WILL BE KILLED. He added wryly, furthermore, that motorcycle cops in Bellevue do in fact hide under every bush. Hee.
I had to skip out partway through John Junker's talk--not because I wanted to, really, because he too was interesting. He started off talking about popular misconceptions about police and crime in media, and one of the biggest ones he touched on was that "when you're arrested, you have to be read your Miranda rights". This is apparently not true. You get the Miranda only if a) you have been taken into custody, and b) you are going to be interrogated. And there are interesting nuances of what "taken into custody" means as well; a pretext stop (which he called a Terry stop; this is its formal name, apparently after a court case that dealt with this issue) does not count as taking you into custody. It's just detaining you. Similarly, he went into what qualifies as an interrogation, and the working definition generally applied is that "if the officer has the reasonable expectation that their questioning will elicit an incriminating response, it's an interrogation".
As with Michael Chiu, a lot of information here I'm not sure I'll use--but you just don't know where novel ideas might come from. So.
But I did have to skip out of Professor Junker's talk early. I did not include this in my writeup for last night, but in the middle of one of the big random chats we all got into, I actually got a phone message from
solarbird conveyed to me--telling me that Norm at Adobe Systems had gotten my resume and very much wanted to talk to me. :D Very, VERY surprising but pleasing bit of data! This was for the application I'd done on their site only this past week for a new position they've had come up for testing digital media software--which I've just spent a year doing at Borg. ;D So I stole an opportunity to come back up to the room and call this gentleman back. It wasn't even a phone interview, more a sort of "preliminary information gathering" kind of thing, but it felt like a hope-inducing conversation for two reasons: 1) he told me they'd be in touch, and 2) he actually asked a personal question about me, which was "So you're a musician?" And that was surprising and pleasing as well, because when I asked him, he told me that he had in fact gotten that from my web page.
Which means, "HOLY CRAP, a prospective employer DID IN FACT look at my web page." Who knew? And what this tells me is, I'm damned glad I did that last round of revisions on my site, because it's a site I'd be quite happy to have a prospective employer looking at. So!
But I'll have to wait till next week, most likely, to see if I get called in for a round of interviews. I did also tell him up front that I have upcoming surgery and an expected week of recovery time that I'll have to deal with--so I'm sure that even if they do become actively interested in me, I may not actually start any sort of work for a while. But here's hoping!
And, as an added bonus, I can use this as a job contact for my unemployment job log, too. ;D
Russell Davis's panel was next, and this was where I got the aforementioned incredibly helpful advice that YES, if I've gotten back a form rejection that has any kind of handwritten feedback on it, rework the submission to address that issue, and send it back.
But he was chock full of a bunch of other useful insights, starting with "What do guidelines really mean?" One needs to learn the unspoken differences between "chiseled in stone" and "sorta kinda chiseled and you can get around them if you know how". For the latter, he provided the example of how, when he was taking submissions at Five Star Publishing, their guidelines said that they rarely took time travel books--but what this actually was was code for "I'll be a really hard sell on this kind of book". It didn't mean "don't send it".
He strongly, vehemently stressed that following the business is of paramount importance, urging us to regularly look at publishing houses' sites to check on what their guidelines are, for you cannot rely on a printed Writer's Guide--it is often out of date! So one must instead go to the source, and, if necessary, ask for the current guidelines. Sometimes web pages don't get updated in a timely fashion either. Further, he stressed one of the tenets that has been a big theme of today: going to conferences, networking, talking to people.
He touched on some things that will get you instantly rejected:
1) Obvious failure to follow their guidelines (e.g., not using proper manuscript format)
2) Errors and mistakes in the first ten pages, including your query letter and synopsis--these pages, even more so than the rest, must be absolutely clean. Fix your typoes.
3) Ideas that have been done to death. He urged against writing to trends since, due to the lag time in the publishing world, by the time a book hits the shelf the trend may already be winding down.
4) Don't send bribes, candy, or photographs of yourself begging the editor on your hands and knees to publish you. It won't help, and it will in fact scare the editors.
5) Badly written query or cover letters.
He went further into query letters and what to include in them--and here, too, I had the pleasant experience of realizing that I'd already begun to learn some of this stuff. What I hadn't known, though, is that more and more publishers are moving away from the old formula of word count calculation and it is becoming more and more acceptable to round off a word count out of Word to the nearest hundred. But I'd already known about what data to include: if it's not immediately relevant to your book, don't include it. All they want to know is your genre, your title, what the book's about, and biographical data if and only if it is immediately relevant to that story.
He urges using Word just because most publishing houses will in fact be using Office, and if you're asked for an electronic copy of your manuscript, you do not want to force them to have to convert it.
And, he emphasized that manuscript format is vital. If you format your manuscript professionally, you will already have differentiated your submission from 98 percent of the submissions received. Fancy paper is not necessary, but white paper is. And it must be dark print and legible. If they can't read it, they won't read it.
Big question he addressed: revisions of your draft. "Why do you revise? Because your first draft sucks." Important truth for a fledgling writer to know. Also, he stressed avoiding over-revision. You have to eventually learn to let it go, and get it out the door. And yet another thing he touched on that I'd already heard from
mizkit is that once you finish a story, take some time to step away from it and get distance from it--because until you do that, you will be too close to the story. You won't be able to edit it. Moreover, don't let people critique you till you're done. When you are ready to go in and revise, pretend you're a reader who's just paid $26.95 for this thing in Barnes and Noble; you've just put in a substantial monetary investment for this book. So it damned well better be good. Go through it, stick a post-it on all the parts that make you stop or hesitate at all.More truths he touched on that I already knew:
1) "Money flows to the writer."
2) Write and edit your own work. Freelance editors and book doctors will very likely get you nothing except poorer.
3) Best way to get an agent is to sell a novel.
4) You don't have time to not send your novel out everywhere, regardless of guidelines that say publishers don't take simultaneous submissions. So he was sort of with Liz Wolfe on this, though she was more circumspect about it.
And if you get a contract, don't just automatically sign it. Read it, and get advice on it from a lawyer or an agent in the publishing field.