Why You Need Expert Representation Before You Sign a Contract

This is the shortest of shorthand and is only meant to serve as a single example of the minefield that awaits you.  It should be a launchpad for your own research.

But this is what happened last week, summed up (with links) in three short posts.

How Random House wanted to take advantage of writers' desperation to get published and ignorance about the business: 

Random Hydra and the Terrible, Horrible, Awful, No-Good, Very Bad Contract

How writers and writers' orgs stepped up to the plate to scream bloody murder so that Random House backed away in less than 48 hours:

Update on the Random Hydra Affair

Why what Random House did still left contracts no writer should sign.

Random Hydra Rides Again: Or, Why Better Isn’t Always Good Enough

A LIST OF ATTORNEYS THAT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BUT WITH WHOM I HAVE NO EXPERIENCE.

Have fun!

When Writing Is Hard

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Two blogs crossed my radar today. I don't know either of the bloggers but their points were interesting and I wanted to share with you.

Janice Hardy says: "I've been working on a novel for a while (okay, two years, ugh) that's a growing pains novel. I'm stretching myself, trying new and challenging things and half the time I want to toss the manuscript out the window and work on something else.

"But I can't, because I love this story and want to write it the way it deserves to be written.

"Which means I need to grow as a writer and master some genre aspects I've never done before."

And she goes onto to discuss the painful process and how she is approaching it, complete with advice on how you can approach it as well.

Laura Lee writes: "I know I run the risk of offending indie authors when I say this but here it goes: most self-published books are not novels but drafts of novels." 

Why? Because the authors call it ready before they've gone through the hard work. Why? Because they can. I can assure you that I knew my books were better than most of the books published when nobody would buy them.  I was wrong, of course. I can see that now, just as I can see that the books that did make it through the hurdles of finding an agent and then a publisher have their flaws. But at the time I wrote them I didn't see it.

Because it's now such an easy thing to turn a manuscript into an ebook or POD book, writers no longer are forced to get better, to grow and learn and put in the hard work. The fact that there are successes in self-published books that go onto sell well and lift their authors above the crowd simply means that these authors were ready for the marketplace when most aren't.

I love Laura Lee's comment: "To jump to yet another metaphor (really where are those editors when you need them?): As stones are polished by the friction of ocean waves, novels are polished through resistance."

Writing when it's hard and rewriting when it's tedious are part of the process, part of what will ultimately make your writing worth someone else's money, time and imagination.

But ore importantly, it will make it worth YOUR time, imagination and passion. Your story deserves the best you have to give it. Your dreams, your goals, your passions deserve your best efforts.

Go for it.
 

Tarot for Writers

Diane Patterson [author of You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries)] noticed my entry on ideas and shared this book with me:

Tarot for Writers, by Corinne Kenner.

From a review of the book: Corrine Kenner, author of “Tarot for Writers”, explains that well-known writers, such as John Steinbeck and Stephen King, have used tarot cards for inspiration. She adds that Italian novelist Italo Calvino went so far as to call the tarot “a machine for writing stories.”

Really? I had no idea. But I'm not surprised.

In our class we just used the images themselves to inspire a 3-sentence story. This article delves more deeply into the meanings and symbolism of the cards, which can be interesting but isn't necessary.

To my astonishment, I find that there is a Tarot of Jane Austen Deck.

And a The Zombie Tarot.

The Science Tarot. (Is that an oxymoron, or what?)

I'm going to stop now before I spend the entire morning surfing the web looking at weird and wacky tarot decks and leaving evidence to prove I did so.

Where do ideas come from?

Good answers are here. Go read. Then come back. Or read here first, then go read there. I'll let you choose, because I'm easy like that. Bossy, but easy.

My good friend Carol Jerina wrote a book, Tropic Gold, inspired by a half-inch news story buried in the back of the Dallas Morning News about an heir being found by an heir-hunter.

Really, it was that one word--heir-hunter--that grabbed her attention.

That book had one of the greatest covers EVER.  My copy is in a box somewhere. Damn, I'm going to have to hunt down another copy of that book just because.

My western, now titled La Desperada, began when a sentence popped into my head: "Once there was a woman who was so desperate to escape that she held a cold-blooded murderer at gunpoint and said, take me with you."

I have an idea for a writing exercise for class about ideas.

I hope nobody is offended by the use of tarot cards for a writing exercise because this should be fun!

When I spoke about cover design in class...

I had no idea that Dave Smeds was going to single out La Desperada in his blog entry on the same subject.

And speaking of cover design, my friend Diane's new murder mystery, You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries)has a great cover.

It's also a lot of fun and a very twisty tale. Check it out!