Nicole Kimberling's Blog, page 6
November 20, 2012
Over at Reviews by Jessewave Today
April 17, 2012
One Man's Treasure
For those of you unfamiliar with that series, it follows investigative reporter, Peter Fontaine as he shines a light on the people and peculiarities of the City of Subdued Excitement, while simultaneously attempting to forge a lasting relationship with painter, Nick Olson.
Here's the thrilling blurb!
"Four years ago, Peter Fontaine made a name for himself as Bellingham, Washington's premiere investigative reporter. Since then he's got an award, a cat and good-looking artist to come home to every night.
Nick Olson, Peter's long-suffering lover has a lot of reasons for wanting Peter to stop investigating the many and varied crimes committed in the City of Subdued Excitement. Peter's nasty habit of getting held at gunpoint by lunatics has Nick wondering if any story is worth losing the man he's decided to “everything-but-marry.”
But when a famous ceramic artist drops dead at the Bellingham Farmer's Market, Nick agrees to help Peter dig deep to unearth the secret rivalries and dirty deeds done at Green Goddess Farms. And then they're going to have another long talk about these bad habits of Peter's."
March 20, 2012
Talking about how much it costs to make print books today!
November 2, 2011
June 17, 2011
Blogging at Jessewave's Today!
February 18, 2011
Ginn Hale available for preorder on weightlessbooks.com
The Rifter is a 10 part serialized novel. We will release one episode per month from March until December 2011. You can either preorder the first episode, The Shattered Gates for 3.99 or subscribe to the entire event for 29.95.
We're really excited to be able to bring this wonderful romantic epic to our readers.
Cheers!
February 2, 2011
Editor Seeking Writer
Today we’ll be talking about my needs. Here they are, in a nutshell: I need a book.
Which is to say that I, Nicole Kimberling, editor of Blind Eye Books, need to acquire a manuscript for publication in 2012. This manuscript must be between 70 and 120K words long, be science fiction, fantasy or paranormal romance and have a gay or lesbian protagonist. It must also contain a positive overall message. In addition to that, this mysterious book needs to be absolutely complete by January 1, 2012.
Where, I wondered, will I find such a book?
I thought here might be a good place to start looking, since any writers following this blog are already familiar with our line.
And because I am notoriously picky about stories I just thought I’d include some hints and tips about stuff that I’m interested in seeing and stuff that I’m not.
The kind of stuff I’m not interested in at the moment:
Vampires/Werewolves--I think that the market reached saturation on these guys a while back.
Sex Magic—I prefer almost any other form of magic.
Irish Fairies and Greek or Egyptian Mythology—Again, these have been kind of played out at the moment.
Single Gender Societies: It would be hard to beat Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite for this one. And male single-gender societies always involve mpreg which I’m just not a fan of at all.
Urban Fantasy set in North America or London—I don’t actually have anything against this, but I’ve just acquired a different book about that very same thing, so for the diversity of the line, I shouldn’t really buy another one.
The kind of stuff I really want to see:
Urban Fantasy set anywhere else in the world BUT North America and London: Beijing? Rio de Janeiro? Oslo? Heck, what about the United Arab Emirates? (How weird would it be to have an urban fantasy set in Dubai?) I really loved Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series, partially because it’s set in Russia and deals with Russian mythology. How fresh! How new! Howzabout some of that?
Space Opera: I really don’t think there’s enough space opera in the world. I would seriously consider purchasing a story that could be described as “Gay Star Wars” so long as it wasn’t just thinly disguised fan fiction. (I don’t want George Lucas’ lawyers to come looking for me.)
High Fantasy: While I could do without elves and dwarves or anything resembling an orc (especially all in the same story) I really do like Sword & Sorcery stories. I mean, that’s why I bought Ginn Hale’s Lord of the White Hell.
Genuine Cyberpunk & Future Dystopia: Oh, how I love Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer wins my vote for best death scene speech ever. “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Wow! Gives me shivers every single time.
Secondary World Stories of all kinds: this just means “Not Earth.” Not future Earth, not past Earth. Not Earth At All. Hardly anybody ever sends me these. But when they do, I almost always find them worth a read.
A couple of other things to keep in mind if this call for submissions interests you:
I cannot acquire any MS that has previously appeared online in any form, ever. The publisher just simply does not allow me to do this, period. And it’s too bad, because there have been things that I was interested in that authors have posted sequentially on their websites as they were being written. But previously released material is a dealbreaker for us, I’m afraid.
This last part is a little confession: I am a very demanding editor. There! I’ve said it. I ask for things like complete scene rewrites. I request the summary deletion of whole pages of text—sometimes even into the double digits. I have asked authors to change the whole beginning of a story and other authors to change the entire ending. (Though never both.) If the idea of revision of this sort makes you want to barf with anxiety, then we might not be a good match for each other. That said, most authors who work with me still like me (I think) and once their books were finished, and they could once again happily engage solid food, they seemed pleased with the end result.
So after that fair warning, here’s what Blind Eye Books offers: a nationally distributed offset print book that looks pretty enough to be suitably displayed by your mom. We pay 10% of cover on print and 50% of net on digital sales.
And because I have recently decided that I care about trees, I am now allowing electronic submissions, which I’ve avoided in the past. So, if you would like to submit a story, please send me an email containing salient information about yourself, including previous publication history, and a short synopsis of your manuscript. Then attach your manuscript to this same email and send it to me. (Keep in mind that I use a mac so you’ll need to send an .rtf file or I won’t be able to read it.) My address: editor@blindeyebooks.com
January 16, 2011
Congratulations to Josh Lanyon!
Over and out.
January 8, 2011
Thinking About Mixed Reviews
December 31, 2010
TED Lectures
Today (among others) I watched Brene Brown speaking about The Power of Vulnerability, and about the paradox of how the most connected people are the ones who are able to tolerate vulnerability.
While I can usually find an oblique way to relate anything to either selling books or writing, I found this particular lecture to be particularly applicable to writing.
Back when I was at Clarion in 2004 I had a one-on-one meeting with Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Wait... That sounds kinda weird. I should explain.
The way the Clarion workshop works is that around 20 of you go hang out on a university campus for six weeks and in between cocktails and impromptu soccer drills, you try to write the masterpieces that will jump start your writing career. Every day you rise at the fiendish hour of nine a.m. to sit in a critique circle talking about the various manuscripts that had been turned in the previous day. In the afternoon, you read other new manuscripts for the following day and then attempt to write your own during the down time after dinner. Every week or so the instructors get switched out. And every week each student gets a one-on-one with each different instructor where they can talk privately about their work. This is why I was in a meeting with Gordon.
He wasn't into my stories. I wasn't that surprised. But the great thing about a really good editor is that even if they aren't into your stories, they can usually tell you why and that's always helpful if your goal is publication. In my case, Gordon told me that he felt like I was hiding from him inside my prose. He also paraphrased Chip Delaney remarking that, "if you're going to screw the pooch, you might as well put it all the way in."
It took me a long time to figure out what that meant. Not the pooch part--I got that right away. I even understood what he was saying about hiding inside my prose, but understanding how to connect with readers more authentically took a long time. Not only did I have to figure out how exactly to stop hiding, but I had to figure out why I was hiding in the first place.
Two years of pulling my hair and howling into the dark and unforgiving night and driving my wife crazy with questions that she could not answer ensued.
Then, as with most quandries of this sort, once the answer was found it seemed simple. I could not be authentic because I did not want to be vulnerable.
Writing unique fiction is a vulnerable-making activity. If you put your writing out in the world, everybody's got an opinion about it and not all of them can be good--that's just a mathematical truth. So being the ambitious--yet still defensive--writer that I was, I unconsciously hit upon the strategy of not writing about my actual thoughts or beliefs. I wrote about what I thought might be true to some abstract and amorphous "reader," not what I knew to be true from my own life.
I'll tell you right now that this is the road to nowhere, authenticity-wise.
Writing about your own truth is not the same as writing any old self-indulgent text you want. There is still the craft of writing to consider--things like pacing, conflict, resolution, character development. Those quantifiable elements should be included in any piece. Writing about your own truth pertains to the takeaway of the story. The message. It pertains to who you cast as your villain and who is your hero. Who wins and who loses and most importantly, why the villain deserves to lose and the hero deserves to win.
That's where authenticity shines through. If your writing contains personal truths, you probably won't connect to everybody--but you will connect to the readers who "get" you. And isn't that who you're writing for in the first place?
