bookcharactersthough:

danielle-writes:

Some advice for when you’re writing and find yourself stuck in the middle of a scene:

• kill someone
• ask this question: “What could go wrong?” and write exactly how it goes wrong
• switch the POV from your current character to another – a minor character, the antagonist, anyone
• stop writing whatever scene you’re struggling with and skip to the next one you want to write
• write the ending
• write a sex scene
• use a scene prompt
• use sentence starters
• read someone else’s writing

Never delete. Never read what you’ve already written. Pass Go, collect your $200, and keep going.

This is the literal best writing advice I have ever read. Period.

maggie-stiefvater:

I’m asked at least once a week how to get published. Once upon a time, this was a very straightforward answer:

1. Write a novel.

2. Write a query letter.

3. Send the query letter to agents or to editors.

4. Rinse and repeat until said agents and editors ask to see the rest.

5. Rinse and repeat until they see the rest and ask to buy it.

5. In the case of multiple offers, speak to all parties on the phone and see which one makes you feel like the prettiest pony. 

Here were things you did not do:

1. Pay to be published.

2. Pay your agent anything besides 15% of the sale price of your book and your royalties.

3. Pay for any of the costs associated with being published such as cover design, editing, printing, hiring of performing bears, etc.

4. Do anything other than write and be paid for writing.

But now there are many ways to be published. Self-publishing and small publishers no longer have the same stigma attached to them. It is no longer the most obvious thing to say: to get published, write a query letter and submit it to an agency or a publishing house, DONE.

Instead, you must ask yourself: what is my goal in publishing?

If your goal is to write a book that you hope will appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble, CostCo, and supermarkets everywhere, you still need to follow the first set of steps. A traditional publisher is still your only way to get into all of those places. And if you really do have your eye on stands in supermarkets and Sam’s Club and airports, you not only need a traditional publisher, but you need a large traditional publisher of the sort that generally exists in New York and is called something like Little, Brown, or Scholastic, or Random House. You will also need an agent.

You will need, as I said before, to do all of the steps I first listed.

If your goal is to write a book that you’d like to see on shelves but are fine with those shelves being the ones in specialty stores or libraries or schools, a smaller traditional publisher might be a good option for you. This is especially true if you’ve written a less commercial book. (here is a good way to judge if something is commercial: can you imagine your mother, your hair dresser, your veterinarian, and your brother in law all reading it? if so, it is super commercial. Commercial =/= good. It merely means many people will pick it up). 

These smaller houses will carry the burden of editing and printing and marketing for you, but they won’t always have the clout to get your book into major stores. They are, however, often less competitive than the larger New York houses, and they will often give you more personal attention and promote your book for longer. You don’t always need an agent to submit to them either, though I recommend an agent if you’re pursuing a full-time career in writing.

But if your goal is only to be read, or to if you have a keen marketing mind and want to represent yourself, self-publishing is an emerging option. You’ll have all of the control, and there will be no rejection letters in your future. But you’ll also carry the entire burden of cover design, editing, printing, formatting for digital distribution and, most importantly, marketing and publicity. I was a self-representing artist, and success is possible, but it will look different than success at a traditional larger house, and it will ask different things from you. You will not, at this point, ever walk into a Sam’s Club and see a self-published title sitting on the table out front. It is very possible to be a writer without Sam’s Club. But it’s important to keep that in mind if a big commercial career is what you long for — the book on that table bears the logo of a large traditional publishing house.

A note: There are several companies that offer to help you with self/ digital-only publishing at the moment, but I’m not convinced of their usefulness at this point. I think it’s a little too soon to see how they’re anything but a middle man at this stage. My feelings are if you’re going to dive into the digital world, you should be doing it because you want the freedom and control in your own hands.

What it comes down to is that you need to be honest with what you need out of your publishing experience. Unhappiness comes from wrong-headed expectations and targeting the wrong house. If you long to see your book at O’Hare airport, you’re going to have a miserable experience self-publishing. If you want to publish a serial story in ten parts over two years, you’re going to have a hard time pitching it to a traditional house. Don’t expect a small house to suddenly change its stripes and drop a quarter million marketing budget on your novel.

DO YOUR RESEARCH.

Make a list of books and careers that you admire and would like to model, and then work backward to find out how those authors ended up where they were. And if something sounds too good to be true, it is. Consider suspect any option that seems like it doesn’t require rejection and work and practice and polish and scrabbling of your hands and teeth. This is the best job in the world, which means there are a lot of people who are fighting for it. If you really want it, you’ll fight alongside with them.

It’s very worth it.

Further reading:

A Rather Longer Post on My Self-Publishing Thoughts

Publishing Does Not Want To Eat Your Heart

A Proper Education: What To Study to Be A Writer

Ten Rules for Query Letters

(all of my writing posts here)

AgentQuery

jewishtonystark:

• Deafness and being Hard of Hearing encompasses a wide range of hearing loss, and d/Deaf/HoH people communicate in different ways. Whether a person sees themselves as deaf or Hard of Hearing is a very individual thing. Being deaf does not mean you can hear no sound at all, and very few people have this level of hearing loss. The distinction between deaf and Deaf is that deafness is an audiological condition, while being Deaf is a cultural and personal identity based on shared experience, language, and history. Not all d/Deaf/HoH people know sign language, and may use a variety of methods to communicate, which may change given the situation or whether they are speaking to another d/Deaf/HoH person or a Hearing person.
• Hearing aids and cochlear implants are not like “glasses for your ears.” For the vast majority of people who need vision correction, glasses or contacts can help them see just as well as people who don’t need correction. But hearing aids aren’t like glasses–magnification of a sound doesn’t work in the same way as magnification of an image. Cochlear implants can help someone with severe hearing loss hear, but the hearing these implants provide is completely different from what a Hearing person experiences. These devices merely help a person with hearing loss hear better than they could without them, and what that means varies quite a bit from person to person. In addition, not everyone gets much help from these devices, and many people are not good candidates for cochlear implants or find them controversial.
• Hearing aids and cochlear implants do not make a d/Deaf/HoH person Hearing. As soon as the person takes out their hearing aids or other assistive device, the challenges associated with their hearing loss are just as they were before. People don’t generally wear their hearing aids or the outer portion of cochlear implants all the time. This could mean they only take them out to sleep and shower, or it could mean that they only wear them when they most need them. When a person is wearing them, they are still deaf/HoH, and will likely still experience problems associated with that.
• Deaf and Hard of Hearing people often hear better in different situations, and hearing loss varies widely between d/Deaf/HoH people. People who are d/Deaf/HoH may hear better in small group situations, when their conversational partner is facing them, and may have trouble with certain frequencies of sound more than other frequencies. For example, they made have trouble understanding conversational speech because most of their hearing loss is high frequency, but be able to hear lower pitched sounds with less difficulty. Other factors that can impact a d/Deaf/HoH person’s ability to hear something include crowded places with lots of background noise and walking on narrow sidewalks where their conversational partner is walking in front of them and facing away. 
• Lipreading isn’t easy or accurate. Lipreading can help a d/Deaf/HoH person understand what is being said, but it’s not easy and many people either cannot do it or aren’t that good at it. Lipreading works best when good lighting is available, the speaker enunciates clearly and does not mumble, and is facing the lipreader. Even people who are skilled at lipreading will still struggle with understanding what is being said, and have to use clues about context and word order to piece together speech. This can be exhausting to do constantly, and generally isn’t enough on it’s own. Not understanding what the people around you are saying can be very isolating.
• Sign language isn’t a visual form of English, and there isn’t just one sign language. American Sign Language is not a a way to speak English with your hands. ASL has distinct rules that do not correspond to English grammar, and ASL does not correspond to the geographic locations where English is spoken. American Sign Language and British Sign Language are distinct, not mutually-intelligible languages, and there are many others around the globe. If your Deaf character grew up and lives in Russia, they probably use Russian Sign Language, not American.
• You don’t need to write out the gestures and motions of a character speaking who’s speaking sign language. If your character is communicating in sign language, you may not be sure how to best transcribe what they are saying. Some people will translate the speech into English and italicize it to show that it is a translation. Some people will communicate the meaning of what was being said, rather than writing out any explicit dialogue. But trying to write out the actual physical gestures and adequately describe what a sign or string of signs looks like is just unwieldy and is rarely as clear as you think it is. Not only is this frustrating for actual users of the particular sign language, but most of the people reading your story are probably not going to be sign language users.
• Avoid simultaneous communication in both vocal and signed language. Simultaneous communication, or sim com, is a system that people sometimes use, but it doesn’t actually make for very good communication. Hearing users of sim com will often forget to sign certain parts of what they are saying or will sign in the grammatical structure of the vocal language rather than the signed one, making their use of language inaccessible to the deaf/HoH person that they are trying to communicate with. Many deaf/HoH people cannot hear or struggle to hear vocal language, which means that they are getting no benefit from their conversational partner using both languages.