The Enchanted Writer

"Outcast" is online and free to read. If you're interested, go to http://chizine.com/ and follow the fiction link.

w00t!

"Outcast" to Chizine.

Yay!

Electric Velocipede # 14 is available.  It debuted at WisCon -- where better to debut an all-female contributors issue?  And an awesome list of contributors it is! 

For the interested, it includes my story "Your Blood."

Issues are only $7.00.  Go here:  http://www.electricvelocipede.com/htm/shopping.htm if you want a copy. 

Happy reading!

I spent the first week or so of May on the Oregon coast to attend a week-long marketing intensive.  Very good stuff.

Lectures focused on the history of the publishing industry, the economic model and how the writer fits into it, understanding the market and how to sell goods into it, how to anticipate editors' needs, how to write proposals of the length in current vogue and where to send them, how to stay abreast of the ever-changing business, when to step outside the economic model/guidelines, and fear and personal issues/roadblocks to marketing your work.  We also spent two full days on agents.  And we talked a lot about the fear of mistakes and the necessity of making them.

Five proposals and several query letters written to deadline, and several hours of reading on top of all that.

I'll be remedying that.

I'm working on novel revisions, and on a way cool homework assignment for an upcoming writing intensive -- to read three very different books and write mock proposals for them, as if I were the author and trying to sell the books to an editor.  There's one action-adventure chase, one young adult romance, and one gothic novel.  I'm enjoying the reading, of course.  And the mock proposal writing is fascinating.

None of these books is written in the style in which I write and none of them are particularly the kinds of books I'd write either -- gothic excepted.  A good proposal needs not only to match the style of a book but also evoke the mood and pace.  The exercise of capturing all those things on the page is stretching my comfort zone quite a bit and it's also just damned fun.  With just this one exercise -- not to mention a week-long intensive writing tons of proposals -- I'll be looking at my own proposal writing very differently.  Which is A Good Thing.

In other news, I turned 40 on Monday and am really happy about it.  I feel wiser than I did on Sunday.  Or more full of crap.  Or both.

Next up in the new fiction department is a sequel to HUNT that really wants out of my brain.  Working title: The Bone Door.