Minerva Spencer's Blog, page 15

Chicken art and more

Several months ago I promised a friend I would email her pictures of my (very few) paintings. Since I still haven’t gotten around to that, I decided to just post them here.

I decided to try my hand at painting when I wanted a mural around one of our fireplaces. I decided to start with the fireplace in our kitchen, a very small kiva fireplace we use often.

 

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I didn’t want to waste a good paintbrush on my experiment, so I used a .49 cent chip brush from the hardware store. It actually worked out pretty well, in my opinion. You can see a little of the flame details in this picture (you can see the Sharpie lines on the bottom right of the drawing, where I couldn’t get the outline of the flame quite right), I thought they ended up looking very smoke-blackened and I really like it.

After that, I thought I’d try my luck with some chicken portraits. . .

Here is the first one, which is a painting of Zsa Zsa, who is a somewhat crazy bird:

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I then painted Cordelia and Bernard on these two old Adirondack chair backs:

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Here’s a better photo of the Bernard chair:

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Right now I’m working on a “barnyard” mural, but finding chickens in action are a lot more difficult to paint than my portraits…

 

The Query Letter that Snagged Me a 3-Book Contract

On March 8, 2017 I received a three-book offer from Kensington Press for my Regency Era romance trilogy, The Outcasts.

Here is a bit of background on my query letter. I started writing in 2013 and finished my first novel that December. And then I started another and another and another. Over the next three years I sent out a total of three query letters. All three letters received a polite “no thank you.”

Needless to say, I did not spend much time querying. It was not until I had entered a dozen contests, and either won or was a finalist in several of them, that my husband and beta readers pressured me to begin querying in earnest. In the Fall of 2016 I promised I would begin querying in the new year.

Hello 2017.

Not until late February did I get my act together and begin the agonizing process of writing a query, a horrific ordeal I had endured again and again over the prior 3.5 years. Each time I began a letter I’d end up overwhelmed and, ultimately, put the letter aside. I had tried writing queries for at least five of the books I’d written, thinking it might be easier with a different book. Nope.

And I wasn’t attempting these letters without doing my research, either. I read and re-read every damned entry on The Query Shark. While I didn’t submit a letter to The Shark I DID learn a lot from reading her comments. I highly recommend going to her website and doing what she tells you to do.

But the person who really gave me the kick in the pants I needed was Sherry Thomas. Ms. Thomas posted two real-live query letters back in 2006–two successful query letters.

Her letters were punchy and gripping. I don’t know if it helped me because I had read both books in her queries (I suspect it might have), but reading those letters was a serious light bulb moment.

Anyhow, it took me a good two weeks of writing and re-writing and critiques from three people I trust (huge thanks to Brantly, George, & Marla, my patient critique/beta readers) before I produced something I liked.

Here is my letter with comments following:

Dear Ms. Editor:

I was thrilled to see Kensington and Lyrical are both looking for historical romances with unique settings and unusual characters.

Dangerous is part of my Regency Era series, The Outcasts, which features non-traditional protagonists. I believe Dangerous would appeal to readers who enjoy the uncommon heroes/heroines of Sherry Thomas, Lisa Kleypas, and Elizabeth Hoyt.

Lady Euphemia Marlington hasn’t made her own decisions since she was captured by Corsairs and sold into Babba Hassan’s harem. Now the sultan is dead and every decision Mia makes leads to another, and another—until she ends up back in London facing her first Season at the age of thirty-two.

Dangerous opens with Mia’s father, the Duke of Carlisle, forcing her to make yet another decision: marry a man of his choosing or spend the rest of her life on a secluded rural estate.

After Adam de Courtney’s first two wives die under mysterious circumstances there isn’t a peer in England willing to let his daughter marry a man the ton calls The Murderous Marquess.

Nobody except the desperate Duke of Carlisle.

The two outcasts strike a deal neither intends to honor: Mia will get a marriage free of traditional restraints and Adam will get an heir. But deceit takes a back seat to desire and the scheming lovers learn that what they bargained for wasn’t what they wanted at all. They’re on the brink of leaving past disappointments behind them and embracing a future together when Mia’s biggest secret surfaces and threatens to tear them apart.

Now they must make the most dangerous decision of all: When to trust their own hearts.

In 2016 Dangerous and The Outcasts books won or placed in the following:

RWA 2016 Hearts Through History Contest:

1st Dangerous

2nd Scandalous

3rd Barbarous

RWA 2016 Beau Monde

2nd Dangerous

RWA 2016 Hot Prospect Contest

2nd Dangerous

RWA 2016 Windy City Contest

1st Dangerous Moonlight

3rd Dangerous

RWA 2016 Beacon

1st Dangerous Moonlight

3rd Dangerous

RWA 2016 Joyce Henderson Contest

1st Scandalous

3rd Dangerous Moonlight

RWA 2016 Fool for Love

1st Scandalous

RWA 2016 Houston, The Emily Contest

3rd Dangerous Moonlight

Thank you for taking the time to read about my book and please let me know if I can provide any other information.

First off, (and I know you’ve read this before ) do your research before querying. I had been researching for at least a year and Kensington Press was my top pick (yes, “go big or go home” is my motto).

I decided I would send off query letters in five-letter batches. In my first batch I sent one to an editor and four to agents. I am disorganized in many ways, so I made a calendar so I wouldn’t end up embarrassing myself a year down the line by re-querying the same person twice.

The part of Ms. Thomas’s letter I liked the most was the structure. It seemed a lot more useful to impart a bit of background and then tell where the book actually began.

I didn’t include my word count because I was using an online submitting program that already gathered that kind of information. Because I feel brevity is the key to getting a foot in the door, I felt I could create a little more white space by leaving it out.

I dithered and dithered about listing my contests. I finally decided to list all my historical romance placements, but leave out my spec fiction. The list looks a bit unwieldy, but my contests were the only writing-related credits I had.

So, there you have it. I hope this helps somebody out there as much as Ms. Thomas’s query letter helped me.

Book Review: The Hot War, Harry Turtledove

Armistice by Harry Turtledove

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First off, this is my first novel by Turtledove, who I’ve heard about for years. I used to teach US history, so I really got a kick out of the deft blending of actual historical actors/events with fantasy.

I greatly enjoyed almost everything about this book. The only reason I am at 4.5 stars is because I just can’t make the jump to 5 because of the dialogue, which I thought was far less “masterful” than the rest of the book. For whatever reason, the dialogue often pulled me out of the story. Not because it was anachronistic, just because it often felt a little clunky. I think it was even more noticeable when compared to the rest of the book. The author’s ability to paint a picture and scene with words is amazing. His alternate vision is also chilling and makes for a page-turning read. If this were a first or even second or third attempt, I would probably bump up the half star. However, it seems like somebody who has been writing this long might offer more compelling and smooth dialogue. The dialogue made the novel feel”distant” to me, if that makes any sense.

All in all, I found the book very enjoyable. The blurb says this book is a good place to start if you’ve never read a Turtledove book before and I have to agree as I had no problem getting into the swing of things right from the first page. The author is great at pulling the reader in without devolving into heavy backstory or resorting to annoying info dumps (well, not any that I noticed, but I suppose my opinion might be different if I had read the prior 2 books.

I would read another book by Turtledove, but probably not the first 2 in this trilogy

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Book Review: Impala by Andrew Diamond

Impala by Andrew Diamond

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s always a good sign when I can’t stop reading. Well, a good sign for the book, but a bad one for my own schedule. That is what happened with Impala. I started reading it yesterday afternoon, stayed up late, and then started right back up this morning–in spite of the many things I was supposed to do…

I have to admit the book was so good it actually surprised me. (And I’m sure I’ll take a lot of flack for the next few sentences…) I don’t usually read indy authors just because it is so hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. But I took a chance on this book because the blurb was well-written. Well, so was the whole book. Just on a technical level alone it was clean and I didn’t spot a single typo. Or maybe I didn’t spot any because I was too riveted by the story to notice or care. Either way. . .

Anyhow, this is Diamond’s second book so I always like to provide some comparisons when I’m reviewing a relatively new author. The first 2/3s of the book, especially, reminded me of some of my favorites: Palahniuk, Gischler, Neil Stephenson, and even a little of Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko. Yes, I thought Impala was THAT twisted, hip, smart, clever, funny, and readable.

Over and over and over I laughed out loud– the bicycle scene and “Who Killed the Mockingbird” being two of my favorites. Mixed in with all the humor was some truly beautiful prose–Mr. Diamond does an excellent job of painting pictures with words.

I also greatly enjoyed the entertaining lessons on programming and hacking, not that I could follow a lot of it (reminded me of Stephenson’s discussions of high tech-ery and The Calculus in Cryptonomicon). So, it’s not too bad when you can amuse a technical incompetent with computer-speak.

Russ is the main character and we see things from his POV. Ah. Russ, Russ, Russ. Where do I start with Russ? He is, as my mother used to say, his own worst enemy. He is clever, funny, thoughtful, and often a jerk. However, Russ and I share one important characteristic: he HATES discourtesy. Yes, and he does something about it, too…

Russ’s unwillingness to give ground even when faced with guns and muscle-bound goons reminded me of Arkady Renko, another guy who is his own worst enemy. Like Renko, Russ does not always choose the path of least resistance. Or even a path at all. And boy, does Russ take some beatings for his decisions. Seriously, I felt as if somebody had beaten ME at certain points in the book.

Two of my favorite parts of the book were Russ’s internal monologues (love his chats with the FBI) and his ability to turn his scorching IQ on himself from time to time. He knows he has the makings of a very bad man, but he isn’t going to submit to that side of himself without a struggle.

It really is hard to put the book down because there is always something going on. It’s often difficult to know where things are going next because Russ is out of control. Which makes it exciting. And fun.

I would ding this book half a star for length because I thought it could have been longer. I would have LIKED to read more, especially when it came to the events of the last 1/4 of the book. But because it hardly seems fair to drop a rating a full star because you liked the writing so much you want more, I’ve given Mr. Diamond the full 5.

This book was a blast and I’d read another by this author in a heartbeat.

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