Category Archives: Writing

Lit fight! Lit fight!

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Via novelist Lauren Baratz-Logsted, The Huffington Post has published two bits by Rachel Sklar on the dueling anthologies This is Not Chick Lit and This is Chick Lit. Baratz-Logsted has a piece in the latter.

The “not chick lit” HuffPo piece is here. The “is chick lit” piece is here.

If you haven’t had a peek at this debate, the second post in particular will catch you up nicely. Hint: the divide is deep, and writers who think the genre is beneath them really, really hate it.

(And in case you didn’t catch this when I first linked it a couple months ago, see also this post at 2Blowhards: a transcription of a talk by writer Richard Wheeler on the divide between literary and genre fiction.)

From my blogroll: Language Log, again

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Had too much fun reading this morning to write a blog post myself.

Over at Pubrants, agent Kristin Nelson has posted a query from one of her writers, Lisa Shearin, along with comments about what it was about the query that worked. Nice contrast to Evil Editor, whose material is drawn from queries that don’t work quite so well.

I’ve also been looking through the archives at Language Log, a blog I added to my blogroll yesterday after my eggcorn post. What a pleasure. I love the ‘net!

UPDATE: Mark Liberman has collaborated with Geoffrey K. Pullum to publish a “best of” Language Log as a book, Far from the Madding Gerund :)

Eggcorns, hooray!!!

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Here’s a fun read: Mark Peters in The Chronicle of Higher Education, writing about eggcorns.

So what’s an eggcorn? Originally, the word “eggcorn” was just an amusing misspelling of “acorn.” Linguists — especially those on the Language Log blog — noticed that “eggcorn” made a kind of intuitive sense and was an apt guess if you didn’t know the real spelling.

. . . All eggcorns makes sense on some level. For example, the eggcorn “girdle one’s loins” is far more understandable than the archaic “gird one’s loins.” “Free reign” — an extremely common misspelling — expresses a similar laxness to “free rein,” and there’s a kind of exclamatory kismet between “whoa is me!” and “woe is me!” Another eggcorn, “woeth me!” makes an old-fashioned-sounding word even more so. And since a rabble-rouser may eventually cause some rubble to exist, “rubble-rouser” is a nifty invention.

Lots more examples in the article, plus the delightful revelation that one Chris Waigl has an Eggcorn Database.

I know a fellow who used to coin them on purpose. Two of my favorites: “get to the crux of the biscuit” and “low dog on the scrotum pole” :-D

The great divide

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I haven’t been reading much nonfiction lately (although my dad has given a copy of Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf by Ben Hogan, which I’ll be looking at after work today, lol) but The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine sounds way too interesting to pass up:

“The Female Brain” weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

Although I’m wary of over-intellectualizing my fiction writing, I have another motive besides straight curiosity for my interest in the book: in my current WIP I’ve moved to third person, so instead of a first-person female narrator observing men (something I’ve spent some time researching, ha ha) I’m going to have to hover a bit within a man’s head — oooh, scary!

(Or maybe not. According to the article on Brizendine’s book, “Thoughts about sex enter women’s brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.” So to make my guy authentic, all I need to do is have him think about sex all the time! How hard can that be? :-D)

You’ve probably also caught the AP story on the recent RWA conference by Kate Brumback, which reports that a growing percentage of romance readers are male (22 percent in 2004, up from from 7 percent in 2002).

That article includes a bit about Don’t Look Down, the “military romance” collaboration between Jennifer Crusie and former Green Beret Bob Mayer.

I read the book on Friday (staying up until waaaay past my bedtime to finish it btw — when will I learn?) If you want to write commercial fiction, this is a great book to mull over — the characters are so quickly drawn, the pacing triptrops along–and then there’s the link-up between Lucy & J.T., crafted with its built-in reality check:

Mayer and Crusie met at the Maui Writers Conference three years ago. Both were looking to do something different, and they decided to collaborate. Crusie writes the parts that come from a woman’s point of view, while Mayer weighs in with the male perspective.

“Usually, you have women writing the male point of view, too. I read some sometimes and go, ‘No, that’s not what the guy is really thinking,’ ” Mayer said.

“He’s actually thinking about sex.” ha ha ha Mayer didn’t really say that :-)

I plan to read the book a second time as a writer, just to pick apart the male female stuff. For example, when the narrative follows Lucy, that’s how she’s referenced — by her first name. When it follows J.T., he’s referenced by Wilder, his last name — the only time he’s called “J.T.” is in dialogue, or when Lucy is thinking about him. It’s a subtle thing but it alone really masculinizes his piece of the story. How cool is that?

“Don’t call us . . .”

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Sugarloaf ear worm alert.

I got your name from a friend of a friend
Who said he used to work with you
Remember the all night creature from stereo ninety two
Yeah I said could you relate to our quarter track tape
You know the band performs in the nude
He said uh huh don’t call us child we’ll call you . . .

Listen kid you paid for the call
You ain’t bad but I’ve heard it all before
Don’t call us, we’ll call you . . .

Happy background music for cross-checking the list of agents I’ve queried for WHEN LIBBY. It’s been five weeks now since I sent my first batch of queries, so I’ve been going back to the websites of agencies that haven’t answered to see what they estimate as their response times.

I was surprised, in reading the fine print, how many state they don’t respond to e-queries at all unless they are interested in seeing more. About a third of the agencies I’ve e-queried have that policy.

I’ve decided that for those agencies, three weeks of silence means a definite “no.” Since I’m trying to send out new queries at the same rate that I get back “no’s,” this helps ensure that I always have about 20 active queries in the queue (including the ones that have resulted in requests for partials or fulls — up to five of those, now . . .)

Something else I’ve noticed, too. “No answer means ‘no thanks'” is apparently acceptable for email, but it raises eyebrows when applied to snail mail queries, as per this note on Preditors & Editors referencing one of the agencies listed there:

A writer reports they “can no longer guarantee to respond to unsolicited queries. Include a SASE only if you have no phone or email address at which you may be contacted if we should wish to see more of your material.” P&E finds this disturbing.

Different standards for different media?

The funny thing is, it probably takes more time & effort to stuff a form rejection into an envelope & mail it than to paste a form rejection into an email and hit “send.”

Heck, you wouldn’t even need to cut & paste. Just have a default sig line that is actually a form reject note:

Dear author. Thank you for your query, but I regret to say I feel no stir of enthusiasm for your project, and therefore if I represented you your career would likely plunge over the nearest cliff of doom. And neither of us wants that, do we. Fortunately this note liberates you from that possibility. Best of luck as you forge ahead, still alone. Signed, top-notch agent.

Just hit “reply,” the email is populated with your sig line/reject, and you’re done.

Of course, if you forget to choose a different sig line when requesting partials, it could be a bit embarrassing :-)

Take that. And that.

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Wordcraft’s theme this week is insult words. Hooray!

Yesterday’s was troglodyte, which I already knew — one can’t read too many political blogs without encountering that baby, sooner or later. Usually delivered as a left jab :-D

Today’s was new to me: “excerebrose” brainless; having no brain.”

(I expect that’s what Barney’s handler called him after he discovered the shredded teddy bears.)

Would you want this agent?

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Found this tonight via Booksquare: The New York Observer‘s got a feature by Sheelah Kolhatkar about literary agent William Clegg who, in 2005, “suddenly stopped coming in to his office or returning phone calls.”

Here’s how Kolhatkar describes Clegg:

[His] reputation in publishing circles is as an attentive agent who garners significant (sometimes inflated) advances for his authors, but who was perhaps less focused on the nuts and bolts of his writers’ careers. (“Sometimes they were better-known for the advances they got than for their sales,”  joked one editor.) One of Mr. Clegg’s former authors described him as good at “holding your hand, calling you and telling you you’re fabulous and that no one’s more talented than you … he was almost like a personal manager. He was a cheerleader. I think that’s what a lot of people miss.”

He is described as a charmer who could be very aggressive in business dealings and who was, at one time, a fixture on the social circuit, known for hosting parties at the apartment he lived in on lower Fifth Avenue.

Okay, so imagine this. You have an agent. He’s brilliant. He tells you you’re fabulous. He’s gotten you an advance that would make other writers in your genre roll over & wet themselves.

You’re an active client, so maybe he’s got your latest book out with publishers, or maybe you have a contract that’s being negotiated.

And suddenly, with no warning, your agent just vanishes.

Would you want this type of agent?

If he reappeared months later and called you, would you go back to him?

:-)

An “accidental memoirist”

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Over at Bibliobuffet, Daniel M. Jaffee has an interview with Samantha Dunn. Dunn began her career as a novelist (Failing Paris) and magazine writer, but after she was badly injured falling from a horse she found herself writing her first memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life. She’s since written another, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation.

Of memoirs, she says,

I’ve come to realize that . . . one of the things that makes memoir writing unique . . . is the level of direct self-inquiry that is not demanded in other forms. That’s why I don’t call it ‘creative nonfiction’; to me that label goes to great reportage, in the school of Wolf or Capote.

She found her home, as a writer, in this genre.