Sage Collins's Blog, page 5

Pretend to be an Agent (30 Covers, 30 Days)

First some news.  Tomorrow I will host a giveaway for Love Sucks!  Tune in tomorrow for details.

Now onto my regularly scheduled programming.  Two years ago, the NaNoWriMo gurus chose my novel, Nano Kid, to receive a cover from a professional artist for 30 Covers, 30 Days.  Since then, I’ve been very interested in the nomination thread.  Last year I didn’t qualify because I was doing a series of chapter books instead of one novel, but it was still fun to read the nominations thread.

In the nominations thread, each poster shares a synopsis for a novel that they hope will get a cover.  This is not synopsis like the 1-5 page thing everyone dreads.  It’s basically a query letter.  The nomination can be for their own or someone else’s.  I nominated myself two years ago, and a friend nominated me this year.  So fingers crossed.

But these synopses range in quality and size.  I find that key words can sometimes draw me in.  Formatting can make a difference.  Certain phrases or descriptions can lose me.  Some seem too similar to a bunch of others I had seen.  Some are totally unique.  Voice can be a turn on or a turn off.  An interesting title might make me give more patience to a slow-starting synopsis.  Very short synopses might catch my attention due to brevity, but I usually find I want more.  However, longer synopses have better have hooked me from the first sentence or else it’s time to skim.

What’s interesting to those querying authors out there is that you find out really quickly how easy it is to decide what you’re passing on and what you want to read more of.  Don’t hook me right away, and I start to skim.  Now, I might be drawn back (one last paragraph really caught my interest on one I was skimming), but usually I can tell right away when I’m not going to be interested.  When I am interested, I want to read more (but I can’t, ‘cuz, hey, these books weren’t written yet).

So it’s an eye-opening exercise for all those authors out there who are wondering how an agent turned around a rejection (or request) on your query in under a minute.  You just know if you want to read more.  I commented on every synopsis that sounded remotely interesting to me.  Something that makes this different from, say, critiquing in Absolute Write’s Query Letter Hell or Query Shark is that at no time did the “rules” of writing a query letter occur to me.  I never once thought, “Oh no, a rhetorical question. Next.” All that mattered was whether I wanted to read more.  And so that’s the second lesson that this experience can teach you.  Yes, it’s worth it to learn the rules of query writing, but in the end, all that matters is that you hook the person reading the query.

So I suggest that anyone interested in getting a taste of what it might be like to go through the slushpile should go check out the 30C30D thread.  And then comment on the ones you like.  It gives you that request vs. reject feel.

Lots of love,

Sage

P.S. I assumed you knew what NaNoWriMo is because most people who would follow my blog would, but just in case, NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month, and is a crazy event where a bunch of authors try to write a 50K or more novel in 30 days.  There’s a link above if you want to check it out.

Leeloo Dallas Multitask, part 2

Ever feel like you just want to do everything at once?

I’m working on an R&R, so every free moment feels like it should be doing that.  But I’m pretty excited about my NaNo project, and I’d rather be spending time working on that (plotting, playing, making a soundtrack).  Of course, I should also be blogging.  And probably should put some work into promotion for Love Sucks.  Oh, and then I should take advantage of it being October and should watch some scary movies.  Or read some scary books.

Speaking of books, I only have 6 of them that I’m currently reading.  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (that’s a mouthful) by Catherynne M. Valente is a book that I picked up ages ago and started, but even though I had been in the mood for a book just like it a month before I got it, I wasn’t in the mood when I started it.  I’m slowly reading it.  Small Favor by Jim Butcher is my current audiobook.  The Gypsies by Jan Yoors is a book I’m reading for research for a book I’m going to write next year probably.  I started Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff before October started but put it aside to read Halloween books.  The Diviners by Libba Bray is a book I downloaded the first 11 chapters of for free, and now that I’m over halfway through those, I’m thinking it’s a good Halloween read, but I’m actively reading The Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake, which is definitely a Halloween read.  It’s also a library book, so it has a bigger deadline than the rest.  But, really, I’m just like, “Read ALL the books!”  I want to read for research before NaNo.  I want to read scary books for Halloween.  And there’s just not enough October left to read everything I want.

Then there’s my time when I could be listening to my MP3 player.  Do I want to listen to Halloween music?  Do I want to audition songs for my NaNo novel’s soundtrack?  Do I want to listen to songs I’ve already put on that soundtrack?  Or do I want to get through my audiobook so I can listen to the next one on my list?  This dilemma is made more annoying by the fact that instead of spending 8 hours in the lab listening to my iPhone, I have to make phone calls during work, which is not music/audiobook-friendly.

And of course, all this ignores those things you have to do, like working or cooking or cleaning or going to the doctor or whatever it is.

So, what about you?  Ever feel like you have to do ALL the things?

Lots of love,

Sage

It’s October!

*grabs handfuls of leaves and tosses them into the air like confetti*

It’s October, huzzah!

I love October.  Halloween is my second favorite holiday.  ‘Tis the season for reading scary books and watching scary movies.  For finding huge bags of candy on sale (to give to my coworkers, of course ).  For seeing people in costume…oh, wait, I did attend a SFF convention last weekend, and that might account for some of those costumes.  And for plotting for NaNo, yay!

So I have some plans for October.  A giveaway.  A giveaway?  Of one of my own books?  That’s right.  A Love Sucks giveaway is on its way.  Keep an eye out for it.

Meanwhile, I’m working on an R&R for Taylor-Made.  And I’m doing that plotting thing.  NaNoWriMo is around the corner.  I’m also researching for a novel that I might do in the future.  Research? What’s that? I know, right.

Okay, so there’s my “Sorry I haven’t posted in a billion years (okay 4.5 months)” status update.  I’ll be posting more soon.

Lots of love,

Sage

Workout Wednesday, 7/25/12

My workouts have become more varied than usual, as the rest of my schedule has too.  I’ve moved my Tuesday running to Monday for two reasons: 1) I was exhausted on Tuesdays after a double workout (aqua fitness followed by running) and 2) I want to join a choir and ALL the choirs meet at the same time as my Monday zumba class, so if I switch running to Monday, I can skip Monday zumba and maybe do the hour-long Tuesday zumba class (since I won’t be so tired with no running)

I have paid for the Disney half-marathon, so now I’m committed (or maybe I just should be committed).  Now I have to save for, oh, the park tickets, a hotel, and transportation.  And prepare to run for 2 hours.

My calves are killing me after running, though.  This started up last week.  Before they were just sore, but now there’s a twinge sometimes in the left calf.  My PT gave me some calf stretches, but if anyone out there has some advice for me, I’d love to hear it.  Advice other than, “Let Jezzie walk all over your legs at night to massage them,” because she’s actually pretty good at that.

 

Lots of love,

Sage

Teaser Tuesday – Trouble at the Bake Sale

What is this?  It’s like a post.  In less than week since the last post?  Cuh-razy!

So what did I do since the last post?  Only write an entire book!  Don’t freak out.  It was a Trouble kidlit book.  Okay, freak out a little.  It was 13K.

I also edited Trouble with Pets and had my first beta for it!  She says the voice and language is right for chapter books, so yay, that’s what I was aiming for!  Goodness, there are a lot of exclamation points in this post.  I blame Trouble.

So this book I wrote this week is called Trouble at the Ranch.  It starts off at a bake sale where Bex wins the tickets for horse camp in a raffle.  So here’s some from the beginning.

Trouble stood in the middle of the tent, looking at all the goodies around him.  His eyes were wide, and he was bouncing.

“Bex, I want some cake!” he said.

“You can’t have anything unless you buy it,” I said.  I said “buy” really loud so he would know that it was important.

“Why?”

“‘Cuz these are here for buying.”

“But what about the picnic?”  The church usually had lunch after the sermon.  “The picnic is free.”

“No picnic today.  Today we’re getting money for poor children and schools and Girl Scouts and stuff.”

He frowned.  “But that’s not fair.”

Trouble had a weird idea what was fair.

“Buy me something?” he said.

I had an idea.  It was an idea I got from Mom.  She was always telling me that if I was good, she would get me things.  Trouble got me in trouble too much to get them most of the time, but I thought maybe he’d be good if I offered something to him.

“If you don’t mess anything up, I’ll buy you something at the end of the bake sale.”

“Hmmmm.”  He thought about it, then nodded.

We ran up to my room to get my money.  I had eight dollars and sixty-two cents.  I hadn’t looked at how much things were, but I thought that could probably buy both me and Trouble a brownie or a cookie.

Trouble tugged on my hand.  “I wanna choose now.”  He pulled me back to the tent and looked at every single dessert they offered.  “Oh, I want this,” he said at the carrot cake.  “No, this,” he said at the chocolate fudge brownies.  “No, this,” he said at some snickerdoodle cookies.  “No, wait, this,” he said at a cheesecake.

Some of the stuff, like the cheesecake, was too expensive.  They weren’t selling slices of cake or pie.  They were selling the whole thing.  The cheesecake was twelve whole dollars.  I couldn’t get that.  “Trouble, you gotta choose something small.”

“What about these?”  He pointed to some chocolate candies.  They were chocolate around peanut butter.  It reminded me of how Trouble always said we were like peanut butter and jelly.  Stuck together.

Hope you enjoyed, and have a great Fourth of July tomorrow!

Lots of love,

Sage

Lots of Love Thursday – 6/28/12

So as I sit here, waiting for the A/C guy, I thought I would write a blog post.  If you squint real hard at my last title and this one, you might think that I wrote two days in a row (Workout Wednesday and Lots of Love Thursday).  But, no, I was my usual lazy blogging self and neglected the blog for like a month and a half.  It’s hard to get motivation to write (anything) when I’m baking in the oven that is my house these days.

I am cursed.  This is my ninth summer in Ohio, and for eight of them, I have had a broken A/C.   This spans three different places I’ve lived and five different A/C units.  Last year was the only year I didn’t have to get the A/C unit fixed or replaced (it had been replaced the year before…for free, but apparently with a broken model that started leaking coolant…last year).  It’s been a hot spring and summer, but today is supposed to get into the 100s, so I start off LoLT with:

My A/C is getting fixed!
Which also means that our windows won’t have to be open all the time, which means fewer bugs and fewer allergens in the house
I went to check out a choir (for joining) and had a great time
I rediscovered what a joy it is to read on my Kindle
I read THE SELECTION like I was addicted to it, which is pretty exciting since I never feel that need to read books by people I don’t know anymore.  I’m not saying it’s great literature or anything, but I could not put it down.
My parents got back from their cruise and I wowed my dad with his Father’s Day gift
My Dear Teen Me letter is up.  You can find it here
My friend Suz’s book, A WANT SO WICKED, is available (our indie bookstore should have it in today or tomorrow).

Since I last was on here, tons of stuff has happened, but this was just the love for this past week (which was pretty nice).

Writing stuff:

I’m working on my Trouble kidlit, although I’m having trouble (haha) deciding where to start the series.  I thought Trouble at School was logical, but it makes the timeline of the series awkward.  I did, however, print out Trouble with Pets, which I wrote in November, and I’m highly enjoying editing that.

I wrote the Dear Teen Me letter.  Dear Teen Me is also doing an anthology, in which the lovely Hannah Moskowitz participated.  Her letter is a tear-jerker, trust me.

I’m waiting on betas for Taylor-Made, but my first beta gave me lots to think about already.

Anyway, that’s all the love for now.

Lots of love,

Sage

Workout Wednesday – 5/9/12

This week I did:

Thursday: Aqua fitness, followed immediately by jogging three miles (this, btw, led to my best times ever, whether it was due to a great warm up or because I was wearing my wet swimsuit and was cooled off as I ran)

Friday: Last week’s PT routine – weight lifting

Saturday: I decided to rest due to the heat

Sunday: Jogged 4 miles

Monday: Last week’s PT routine – weight lifting.  Then after work I did 35 minutes of Zumba on the PS3

Tuesday: I was out all day and had planned to stop at the gym on the way home, but I had forgotten my sneakers, so I did nothing.

Wednesday: New PT routine – more weights this week

—

So I had this crazy idea of doing one of the Disney half-marathons this winter.  Crazy because I just started this running thing recently.  But I think it would be kinda fun.  My only concern these days is who would be able to go with me.  I could do the one at Disneyland, near my family, but it happens right after Christmas, which makes it tough to schedule.  Still I’m excited by the prospect.  I keep expecting someone to tell me that it would be crazy for me to do it.  I mean, like a month ago, I didn’t even know I could run one mile, much less 13.1 miles.  I think back to all those mile runs in middle and high school and what torture they were.  What a difference an inhaler (and 3 years of strength and cardio training) can make.

Anyway, so that’s my crazy thought for now.

Lots of love,

Sage

Sixth-Year Potions Class at Work

Today I did one of my favorite things at work.  I got to do potions class.  Here’s how I took ordinary tap water, made Felix Filicis, the Draught of Living Death, and then back to water.

(Note: the real ingredients and end product are actually very dangerous and should not be touched with your bare hands or drunk)

So first I started with plain old water, which must be rushing from the tap when you fill the bottle.

I added some powdered moonstone (Manganous sulfate) and crushed scarab (alkaline iodide-azide reagent). This turns the water into an orange floc which settles eventually.

To finish the Felix Felicis spell, you must add the dust of a fallen star (sulfamic acid powder) to the floc.

Ta-dah! Felix!

But the magic isn’t over.  Next up was to make the Daught of Living Death, a potion you certainly don’t want to mess with.

First I transferred my Felix Felicis to a new flask.  Then, of course, I need to add some valerian roots and the juice of the sopophorous bean (starch indicator).  By now your Draught should be pretty dark.

This is all pretty cool, but my favorite part comes next.  Now’s when we take this deadly Draught and turn it back into water.

To do that, you need the liquid from a phoenix egg (sodium thiosulfate in liquid form).  You drip this slowly into the flask until it turns blue…

…and lighter blue…

…and then, finally, until it turns clear as water once more.

Hooray, you have done magic!

And in real life, this will tell you the dissolve oxygen in your water.  The magic trick as a whole is called the Winkler titration.

Hope you enjoyed today’s potions class.  Tomorrow, perhaps, I will teach you how to find the antidote to an unknown poison  (We call this a Toxicity Identification Evaluation in the lab).

Lots of love,

Sage

Haustor/Haustoria

So way back when I was writing Love Sucks (a million years ago, I think), I was looking for a name for my love/lust/inhibition drainers.  If it had just been love, I probably would have been find with “love drainer” or something, but for some reason “drainer” or “sucker” didn’t really appeal to me as an all-encompassing title for these demons.  This was before vampires were impossible to sell, but “vampire” didn’t quite seem to fit.

I turned to my writing buddies and asked for suggestions.  One had been taking Latin, and together we came up with “Haustor” or “someone who drains.”

Today I was working on a report that summarized major threats to different species.  Imagine my surprise when I came across the word, “Haustoria.”  Obviously, I couldn’t let that go without looking it up.  It turns out that the haustoria (haustorium = singular) are the part of a parasitic plant or fungus that draws nutrients from the plant.

Of course, it makes perfect sense that Haustores and haustoria have similar names and do basically the same thing–drain food from a host with a touch.  They were both named with the same Latin root (“to drain”). But it was cool to have my work and writing worlds collide with the chance encounter with a word I basically consider to be mine.

Do you ever have your writing world intersect with the real world in a weird way like this?

Lots of love,

Sage

Teaser Tuesday – Finding Trouble

So once the book is published, you don’t just stop!  You have to write more, of course.

This week I worked a little on my kidlit series Trouble.  This is from pretty much the beginning, so all you need to know is that Rebecca is a good girl, and she hears crying in the rain.

The solid, wailing thing shrieked and pulled away from me.  He flailed his arms as he went slipping in the mud and ended up on his butt.

It was a boy.  A boy with blue skin and white hair and pointy ears.  He was the strangest-looking boy I had ever seen.

“I’m sorry,” I said, twisting my hands together.  I hadn’t meant to scare him.

His eyes were huge.  Like a cartoon character’s.  He shot off the ground and grabbed the front of my coat with his muddy hands.  “You can see me?”

“Of course I can see you.”

He let go of me and started bouncing around the yard.  Like he was the Easter Bunny, I guess.

“Why were you crying, boy?” I said.

He stopped bouncing.  “I was lost.”

I felt so bad for him.  He had been so sad, and sometimes people are mean when you look funny, and he did look funny.  I held out my hand.  “Do you wanna come to my house and have some food?”

He grabbed onto my hand like it was saving him from water that was too deep.  I pulled him to the house, then we washed off his hands and bare feet with the house on the patio.  I left my galoshes on the patio and hung my jacket up inside the door.

The blanket he had tied around his neck dripped on the floor.  “Why are you wearing a blanket?” I asked.

“It’s a cloak!”

“What’s a cloak?”

He held out his cloak and shook it around, sprinkling the house with water.  “This is a cloak.  It keeps me warm.”

He didn’t look warm.  He was shivering.

“What do you want to eat?”

“I dunno.”  He was looking around at everything in our house with those wide eyes again.

“I’ll make you a sandwich.  Do you like peanut butter?  Are you allergic?”  My friend Kermit was allergic.

“Don’t think so.”

Good, ‘cuz peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were my specialty.

I pulled myself up onto the counter to get a plate down from the cupboard, pulled bread from the breadbox , peanut butter from the pantry, and jelly from the fridge.  The boy watched me put together his sandwich.  I cut the crusts off and cut it diagonally.

“Here you go.”

He stuffed one sandwich triangle into his mouth, then sat there chewing for a really long time.  I wanted to ask him more stuff about himself, but I couldn’t while he was eating.  It’s not good manners.

His mouth was full of the second half when my mom came in.

“Rebecca Kincaid, what do you think you are doing?” she demanded, her hands on her hips.

I look at the sandwich, then at the boy, then back at her.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

“You know that we have a humongous lunch as soon as your father’s sermon is over.  A sermon he’s starting in five minutes, and there’s no sign of you anywhere.  And here you are, making yourself a sandwich and ruining your appetite.”

“But Mom…”

“No buts.”

“But it wasn’t for me,” I said.  “It was for the boy.”

“What boy?”

I look at him, all blue-faced, his cheeks full of sandwich.  He swallowed hard and said, “Trouble.”

Hope you enjoyed!

Lots of love,

Sage