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Hot New Release: The Accidental Apprentice by Anika Arrington
COMING OCTOBER 4, 2014
Nations rise and fall by the power of magic and the wizards who wield it.
Editor’s Notes: Words We Use
BY TERRI WAGNER
What Did You Mean?
An editor and a writer go into a bar . . . Heard that one yet? It ends badly for both. Why? Irony. The two people most likely to have appropriate, effective words at their disposal, don’t! They make rookie mistakes.
When the editor says the sentence is “all wrong,” the writer thinks “ok, so I made a grammatical error, fix it.” The editor hears “fix it,” and does so. The writer explodes with “that’s not right. I’m not making that change,” and thinks the editor is an idiot. The editor thinks the writer is “difficult.” Communication had broken down.
The editor and writer complain to family, friends, anyone who will listen, and they wonder, if editors and writers cannot work together, who can? And, by the way, where do you put that comma? Sound familiar? It should. Google “writers complaining about editors” and visa versa, and prepare to laugh and cry, and agree.
Why should the two people most likely to have an arsenal of highly effective words not be able to communicate? There are reams of papyri, velum, scrolls, ancient script, paper, and now digital sources that can shed a lot of light on the subject. But it really comes down to one gigantic simple thing: perspective.
Years ago, I had a wonderful friend who wanted me to read a religious book that was electrifying his church. He used a terminology that confused me, as my religion did not use those words. Being the concerned person he was, he called his pastor, called me back, and gave me a different word, one most every Christian uses. Voila! We had a communication breakthrough. (Side note: I did read the book, and liked it.)
So, when your piece is accepted by Hamilton Springs Press (aka Xchyler Publishing), it has already been deemed publishable by a group of individuals, some editors, some marketeers. And they have provided some comments through our manuscript submission evaluation. We also require authors to go through the same exercise for every manuscript. I have urged (we as a group have urged) our writers (new and established) to please read the comments and take them into consideration as a content editor is assigned and editing work begins.
I have discovered that many times, the writer and the content editor have read the same words and reached different conclusions. So when the editor says at the beginning, “great piece can’t wait to work with you,” the writer hears “all is good, just a few minor things, and off we go.” So the writer says, “great, let’s get started,” the editor hears, “I stand ready and willing to make significant changes.” And already there is trouble in paradise.
So what can we do, as a publishing company, to hit the right note? Nothing beats the phrase, “what did you conclude about the evaluation comments?” Followed by, “which comment(s) did you understand? Or not understand?” and “how did your answers compare to ours?” And more follow-up questions, until both the writer and the newly assigned content editor are on the same page. Trust me, things will end badly if this starting point gets muddied up.
My day job involves “fixing” computers for middle school students. The students walk in my room and start with “my computer won’t work.” And we have to go through a series of questions so that I can at least pin down what might be happening, and fix it.
Don’t start off in a train wreck, make sure that, as an author, you know exactly what your editor is saying. After all, editors and writers are wordsmiths, let’s prove it to each other.
Terri Wagner lives, writes, and edits from her home in Alabama. Her most recent project, Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology, was released in May 2014. Her next project, The Mage and the Magpie by M. K. Wiseman, will be released in 2015.
Other works to Ms. Wagner’s credit include Shades and Shadows: A Paranormal Anthology, Mr. Gunn and Dr. Bohemia by Pete Ford, and Conjectrix (Vivatera Book 2) by Candace J. Thomas.
Editor’s Notes: Getting Past the Words
BY MERILYN OBLAD
My high school English teacher liked shocking her students in any way that she could. She was an ardent KISS fan (picture a five foot nothing 56 year old woman dressed in full KISS regalia and makeup for Halloween). But that was just for physical effect. She enjoyed throwing mental conundrums our way, too.
The little gem I’ll never forget: language is a barrier to communication. I really think she liked the head-scratching this elicited as much as the attempt at thoughtful response that came after it.
Much to my surprise, she wasn’t the only teacher I heard this from; my choir director later corroborated the same idea by quoting to us statistics about how people communicate ideas and thoughts. Words alone come way down the list at some ridiculously low percentage like 10- or 15%. The rest of verbal communication is conveyed by facial expression, tone, and body language.
I’m sure both teachers would be shocked to know that I still remember those brief lessons, never mind that I’ve processed them and am now using them here. But that’s beside the point. My point is that language actually can be a barrier to communicating our thoughts in the way we intend them to be communicated. I’m certain you all have experienced this, though you may not have put it precisely that way, because let’s face it, we all think differently. And therein lies the problem.
Miscommunication happens most frequently on social media, but it isn’t the only place where written shenanigans abound. Your stories, your creative babies, are also misunderstood. How do you take the vision in your head and effectively put it on paper? Start by asking yourself some questions: what emotional atmosphere am I trying to convey? What are the goals of my characters? What do I want my readers to take away from this particular scene?
Make sure you have a good beta reader with whom you can hash things out. In order to really get your point across, you must have feedback from another person. One of the traps of writing is that you know what you mean, but other people do not know what you mean, making it difficult for you to see where the holes in your work are. They see your story through their own life experience, which means they interpret your words differently than you do. So, check with your beta readers on how they perceive some of the sticky scenes and passages you’re stumbling over.
Don’t be afraid to embrace descriptors, for they make all the difference. “The mouse ran across the road,” has no particular feeling to it, but, “The mouse bolted across the hot asphalt in a desperate attempt to outpace the voracious cat stalking it,” gives the sense of urgency I want to you to feel, with some nice undertones of futility and time of day for added measure. The first is technically correct, but the second is emotionally evocative. If I wrote the first, but meant the second, then my very words have become a barrier to communicating what I really mean to you, my audience.
Some of you more experienced and talented writers may be rolling your eyes at all of this because it’s all old hat advice. But I have two very particular reasons for exploring the idea of breaking down the communication barriers.
First, I just finished my part of the judging of our recent fantasy anthology competition. One of the trends I noticed is that we had several technically correct submissions that were not as well-told as they could have been. In other words, the writing was excellent but the storytelling was lacking. Flat characters and stilted action do not a good story make. I want to see in my mind what you writers see when you envision your tales. I want to feel what you want me to feel.
And I don’t mean just lovey-dovey girly feelings. Fear, anxiety, stress, anger, bewilderment, frustration, hatred, and anticipation are as much a part of the human experience as love and loneliness. Your characters ought to be dripping with humanity, tangible examples of what we all face, feel, and endure. The settings might be extraordinary, even impossible in real life, but your characters should have all the multifaceted complexity of a real person.
And second, even experienced writers fall into dull and repetitious traps. I have a weakness for Pride & Prejudice variations. Some are beautifully written tales that do justice to Austen’s immortal characters, offering insight into the originals while weaving a masterful new tale. Others, not so much. One well-established author in particular frustrates me with her inability to explain/show stress and frustration in more than one way. She has her characters constantly grabbing, pinching, or touching their temples. I want to yell at her, “There are a MILLION different ways to say that! Get a thesaurus, for Pete’s sake! ARGH!!!!,” in my more calm moments.
Her repetition thus becomes another barrier, because that’s only one way to describe frustration. It ignores the nuances of helpless, angry, bemused, or end-of-your-rope frustration that all evoke different feelings entirely and create a richer story, even providing a turning point to move the plot along. (Think angry frustration leading to a passionate determination to do something about whatever situation is causing the frustration.)
Be imaginative when you want to repeat an idea. I know you can, because you’re a writer. And for the sake of my judging sanity, PLEASE invest in a good thesaurus. Synonyms are our friends. Do not shirk them. The Emotion Thesaurus and its companion volumes The Negative Trait Thesaurusand The Positive Trait Thesaurus, all by Angela Ackerman, are excellent resources.
So if your readers are tripping and falling on communication hurdles, please take a step back and examine your language. You may be underselling your ideas through your word choice, not delving into your personal bag of human experience enough, or laying on the repetition too thick. In spite of what my English teacher told us, language can be a glorious gateway into another reality and not an impossible to overcome obstacle. So leave the barriers behind and tell me what you really mean. I promise I’ll understand.
A lover of all things historical, MeriLyn Oblad (pronounced Mary Lynn) has both a BA and MA in History, the former from the University of Nevada, Reno and the latter from Brigham Young University. She brings more than a decade of document analysis, an eye for fine detail, and seven years of writing local histories to the Xchyler table.
MeriLyn’s first project, Legends and Lore: An Anthology of Mythic Proportions, will be released October 18, 2014.
Featured Friday: Steaming Into Print
GRAPHICS BY MCKENNA GARDNER & HEIDI BIRCH
TEXT BY PENNY FREEMAN
Editor’s Note: As an increasing number of staff members and authors of The X are appearing on panels at conventions and other events, they have been requested to make their presentations public. To that end, we will be adding them as part of our regular Featured Friday content. Please comment below.Tell us what you think of what we shared, what we missed, or maybe even what we got wrong, so our next presentations will be that much better.
This presentation was part of an author/editor panel at Salt City Steamfest in August of 2014, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
What about your work is going to really make the screener sit it up and take notice? An original plot? An intriguing mystery? Characters that step out of the stereotypical molds or challenge preconceived notions of what they should be? Vivid imagery? Rich, detailed world-building? Ideas to challenge conventional wisdom and/or popular opinion; that demand introspection of the reader? What about your work will make the publisher want to put their imprint on the spine?
Do you have a fantastic idea that just needs fleshing out? Do you have a few chapters and an outline for the rest? Or, do you have a completed, well-researched, and polished manuscript? If you have a great idea, try submitting to one of our short story competitions. If you win, if we prove to each other the worth of the relationship, we just might help you turn your ideas into a full book. However, the manuscripts that really get our attention are those that are completed and polished to a high sheen before we ever see them.
An original plot, real characters, and deftly crafted prose will get the reader’s attention, but the writer’s storytelling abilities will allow the mundane world to drop away as they immerse themselves in the tale. The best authors are those that disappear into the aether of the worlds they build.
Make sure that the agents you submit to know the genre, especially what readers and publishers are looking for. It’s important that you both ‘speak the same language.’ This especially true of publishers. If your speciality is Chicago Red Hots, chances are you won’t be hired at Chateau le Snoot. But you might be a perfect fit at Wrigley Field.
At The X, we accept speculative fiction (Steampunk, paranormal, fantasy, and science fiction) and mystery/suspense titles. Please refer to our submissions page for restrictions.
Each publisher and agent demands a different constellation of requirements for submission, but you can bet their guidelines have everything to do with their production processes. Give your work a fighting chance. Respect the process.
The production of a book (turning it from a submitted manuscript into a published work) requires team effort, from the person culling the slush pile to the graphic artist illustrating the cover to the marketer recruiting book reviewers and bloggers, and every point in between. An author’s willingness and/or ability to comply with our submission requirements tells us the value they place on that team effort. Because we prefer to reject a work based on its actual merit, rather than its typeface, we have provided a webpage, a YouTube video, and a follow-along download explaining our requirements.
Unsolicited submissions are the least likely to survive the slush pile. The absolute best way to survive it is to never get into it. Cultivate your social media contacts by participating in online forums and groups. Attend conventions and conferences. Connect personally with publishers, editors, and agents, polish your elevator pitches, get invited to submit your manuscript. Get bumped to the head of the queue.
What’s your elevator pitch? Your one-second catch phrase? If you were at a convention and a customer passed by your table, how would you get them to pause? How would you get them to buy? With a bizillion things going on around them, competing with you for their attention, what would you say to get them to spend their mad money in your stall, rather than the one across the alley?
Remember, in such a situation, you don’t have time to tell them the story or expound on the characters. All you have time to do is grab their gut and hang on, so much so that they have to take home that book. They have to read it. Pitching your book to an agent or publisher, whether in person or through email, is exactly the same. Practice your pitch on people you know and people you don’t. Then, when you feel confident you’ve figured out the best angle, write the blurb for your query letter. Sell, don’t tell.
Claims: if you tell a publisher or agent that you have an impressive fan base, or that you’ve made it to the top of a best seller list, or received some prize or award, you can bet they are going to check up on that claim. Be confident and positive, but be realistic. The only way anyone is going to believe you’ve got Chris Hemsworth lined up to play the lead of your book-to-film is if they actually sit down and have lunch with the man and walk away with a signed contract. So, if you and Chris have an understanding, keep it to yourselves until you can make that rendezvous happen. Otherwise, the claim is going to cast doubt on everything else you assert.
Demands: know the industry. Know what is reasonable to expect in a contract. Remember that agents and publishers have ways of doing things, and writing is not brokering deals or selling books. If you have an artist you would like to use, say so, but don’t make signing them a deal-breaker. The publisher just might have someone else who would work even better. Make the broader perspective of your publisher and agent an ally, rather than an adversary.
Be educated and informed, be an integral part of the process, but be teachable and a team player. By all means, be the quarterback, but all quarterbacks need coaches, especially someone up in the box who can see the whole field and the patterns in play. And, there’s a word for quarterbacks without an offensive line: toast.
Make yourself accessible to your agent and publisher. Provide at least a phone number and an email addresses (alternates are even better), as well as your shipping address. If you have an email that you use specifically for your writing (such as for your pseudonym), check it regularly. Even if you have a nom de plume, correspond with your agent and editors as yourself, the real, live person who is going to sign the contracts.
Now, what questions can our authors and editors answer for you?
Editor’s Notes: The Right Stuff
BY PENNY FREEMAN
How many times have you said this to yourself (or someone else): I just can’t write today. I’ve got stuff going on. And you can’t—not really. You can’t work on your current project when your whole mind/heart/soul is consumed with your stuff. So, don’t. But neither should you let it go to waste.
And, then there are all those movies and TV shows where the writer is sitting before their keyboard, hammering away, going 90 miles a minute, with tears streaming down there faces. (They’re out there. I promise, but I couldn’t find one to share). Maybe someone else comes into the room and says, “Hey. Are you all right?” And they sob, “I’m just writing.” Then, every once in a while, they’ll wag their head and wail, “Oh, this is good. It’s so good.”
Admit it. You’ve done this. You’ve made yourself cry. Or, you’ve made someone else ask you why you’re so angry or depressed, and you say, “I’m just writing this scene . . .”
Writers who are guilty of this—or lucky enough to experience this—are doing one thing right: they’re using their stuff. They’ve dug down deep within themselves and found those raw emotions that they have experienced and perhaps suppressed, but are allowing themselves to express through their writing. Now, this is no guarantee that their writing won’t be overwrought and florid, that readers won’t be able to choke it down with a spoon, but, they’re making it real.
So, back to those days when you’ve got stuff and you’re sure you can’t write. Fine. Don’t work on your WIP, but do write. Even if you just scrawl a few lines in a journal or notebook, write it down enough so you remember the edge later. “Ergh! My boss is such a jerk!! I can’t stand that she . . .” You get the idea. Usually, because you are a writer, once you get started, it takes a while to peter out. And, more often than not, when it does, you feel better and more able to deal with your stuff.
True confession: sometimes writers tell me about their stuff. That’s good. I don’t mind. The den mother in me empathizes, commiserates, wishes to high heaven they weren’t going through this rough patch, and sometimes offers a bit of advice, or at least a virtual pat on the back and a hug. The editor in me turns into Snidely Whiplash, dry-washes my hands, and chortles with malevolent glee, “the better to write stuff with, my dear.”
Finally, a real-life example (and more true confessions): my mother and I had a rocky relationship, falling out on more than one occasion. So, when she died at the age of eighty, I went dry-eyed for days—and felt guilty about it.
My siblings asked me to write her obituary, and that was fine. I can put names and dates together in an entirely clinical and emotionally detached fashion. Just don’t ask me to write her eulogy. I told them specifically, I don’t want to write her eulogy. So, of course, they volunteered me to write and deliver her eulogy.
Long story short: after wrestling with it literally down to the hour of her funeral, I wrote what I wanted to write, not what others wanted me to write or say, and got up to deliver it in defiance. I didn’t cry when I wrote it. I haven’t cried since, but up there in front of one hundred people, reading what I wrote aloud, I blubbered like a baby. I very nearly shoved the paper at my husband and sat down. But, I didn’t.
Funny thing. Nobody got angry. (Dang!) Everybody loved it. Everybody told me it was exactly what needed to be said. And, it’s probably one of the better things I’ve written. If you really want, you can read it here.
Can I write about troubled parent/child relationships. Ummm, yes. Been there. Done that
Moral of the story: write down your stuff, even your most painful stuff. The events, relationships, and sensibilities that you personally experience and write about are those which will ring most true to your reader. That doesn’t mean to say you have to air all your family’s dirty laundry, but utilizing a tidbit here, a circumstance there, a universal emotion that you might not realize is so, you can create your world of fiction and populate it with people that become real.
Editor-in-chief Penny Freeman lives, writes, edits, and markets from her home in southeast Texas. She currently supervises several editorial projects. Her next release, Legends and Lore: An Anthology of Mythic Proportions, is slated for release October 15, 2014.
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