Martha Wells's Blog, page 164

Writing Question

I'm answering questions in the order they showed up in my inbox, from this post and the Dreamwidth mirror post:

Vaughn Roycroft asked: How did you land Ms. Jackson? Was it a blind query, referral, had you met her? Is she as great to work with as I imagine?

I had never had to look for an agent before, because my first agent found me when I was writing The Element of Fire (he was referred to me by another writer). So when I started writing The Cloud Roads in 2007, and I was looking for a new agent, I really didn't know where to start. I put together a query package (the first two chapters, synopsis, and a letter) and sent it to an agent who had contacted me about the time City of Bones came out. He had been interested in representing me then, so I thought I'd check with him first and see if he still was. I waited a couple of months, still working on the book, then finally got an email from an agent in his office expressing interest in the book. So I emailed her back, and then waited and waited and waited. A couple of months later, I finally got an email from the agency, but from someone else, who told me the agent I had been speaking to had left the agency and that they were "only interested in established authors." (Yes, I had listed my past published books in my original query letter, and also mentioned them in the email I had sent.) So that was a combined punch in the face/huge waste of my time.

So then I emailed Rachel Caine to cry on her shoulder and ask for help, and she gave me a referral to her agent. I queried her agent, who got back to me in a couple weeks but didn't want to represent the manuscript. Rachel had also recommended Jennifer Jackson. So I looked up the Donald Maass website and found the query instructions, and sent a query to Jennifer. I heard back from her right away, and ended up sending her the first half of The Cloud Roads (it was December of 2007 at that point, and I had about twelve chapters of the book finished.) She liked it, and signed me up, and when the book was finished in early 2008, started sending it out to publishers.

Is she as great to work with as I imagine?

Yes!

Taking Questions

I want to do a post on editing and why good editing is a good thing, but I'm honestly too brain-dead this morning. I think it's sinus issues, since it's in the low 40s and raining. Tomorrow it's supposed to be back in the 70s.

Anyway, let's do this instead: Ask me questions, about writing in general, about publishing in general, about my books, about whatever, and I'll try to make some coherent answers, either here or in a later post.


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The Element of Fire was reviewed on Heroes and Heartbreakers.


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con_or_bust 's fundraiser auction started on Saturday, and it helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF conventions. Bidding ends Sunday, February 25, 2012. There are tons of great items up for auction here.

There are tons of signed books, jewelry, knitting, homemade cookies, and more. My auction for signed trade paperback copies of The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea is here.

Make sure you check the dates and that you're bidding on items for the 2012 auction, and not items listed on previous years.

For my post here, photos from Sherwood Forest, from befor...

For my post here, photos from Sherwood Forest, from before the camera died:





The Raksura claw, with my hand for scale:

Sherwood Forest and the Lucky Car Accident

We had a great day at Sherwood Forest Faire yesterday, though it was kind of cold. After days in the 60s or lower 70s, it was in the 40s with a very chilly wind. The sun was bright all day, which helped a lot, and the site is mostly covered in trees, with more forest surrounding it, which made a good shelter from the wind most of the time. But the parking lot was out in the open and probably about ten degrees cooler than the rest of the park.

We supported small businesses to the best of our ability by buying a lot of handmade soap, some honey made in Austin, incense, a bottle of mead, and I got a new knitted hat from a weaver. Troyce also got me a big resin claw as a present for finishing the new book. I'll post a picture of it later, but my camera battery died mid-morning and it's still recharging.

One of the things I really like about this fair (beside the fact that the way the site is arranged makes crowds sort of vanish into the forest) is the food is really good. The steak-on-a-stick place cooks the steak to order, for instance. I had a beef-onion-rootabaga pastie with gravy the steak place, and a chicken kebab from the Jerusalem Cafe (which also has dolma, hummus, falafel and other tasty stuff), and tea drinks from all over the place. The best one was the spiced ginger chai from the Circa-Paleo Hookah Bar.

Weird thing: when we first got there, we saw there had been a huge accident at the gate. We couldn't quite see how it happened, just that there was a car that had been hit at high speed and pieces of it were still scattered all over the road. Then later that day, we ran into some friends and it turned out they were the ones who had been in the accident. They were coming from Austin, and making a left turn into the fair entrance, when some guy decided the line of cars must be stopped for no reason and moved into the ONCOMING TRAFFIC LANE AND TRIED TO PASS THEM ON THE LEFT. I KNOW. This was with an open right hand passing lane. He was moving at high speed and ran smack into them as they were turning, air bags deployed, the front end of the car was knocked to bits, but fortunately nobody was hurt. Also fortunately one of them was visiting from another state and they were using her rental car.

So basically it was a very lucky, lucky day all around.

After we got home we watched Dragonage: Redemption. It's a six part fantasy web series based on the game, but you don't need to know anything about the game to enjoy it. It's produced by the Knights of Good (the people who do The Guild) and stars Felcia Day. It's a sword and sorcery story with two kickass women characters, and I just wish it had been longer. I hope they do a sequel with Tallis and Nyree. (and there's a gag reel on The Guild site here below the link for episode 6.)

Con or Bust Fundraiser Auction

Today starts con_or_bust 's fundraiser auction, which helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF conventions. Bidding starts today, February 11, 2012 and ends Sunday, February 25, 2012. There are tons of great items up for auction here. There are tons of signed books, jewelry, knitting, homemade cookies, manuscript critiques, etc.

My auction for signed trade paperback copies of The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea is here.

It's cold and rainy here today, but that's good, because ...

It's cold and rainy here today, but that's good, because we still need the rain. It would help the second summer of firey death we're probably going to have to be able to start it with all the lakes and rivers at capacity. I'm working on getting a stiff neck from sleeping weird, but I'm hoping going to aerobics class will take care of that.

I'm linking to this again because I can: I was interviewed at the Terrible Minds blog, where I talk about the time I almost got eaten by a tornado.

Other good things to read:

An article by N.K. Jemisin, on being a black woman writing genre: Dreaming Awake
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.

Kameron Hurley, on Because unless you get hit by a bus, life goes on
We just keep hearing the same mantra. "Just do good. Work hard. You'll get everything you want." When really, what they mean is DEAR GOD KEEP GOING OR YOU WILL GET EATEN BY SCAVENGERS.

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Tomorrow starts con_or_bust 's fundraiser auction, which helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF conventions. Bidding in its annual fundraising auction starts Saturday, February 11, 2012 and ends Sunday, February 25, 2012. There are tons of great items up for auction tomorrow. There are tons of signed books, jewelry, homemade cookies, etc.

My auction for signed trade paperback copies of The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea is here. Remember, bidding doesn't start until tomorrow, Saturday, February 11th.

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If you're on Twitter (I'm @marthawells1) Night Shade Books is giving a free book to a Bay Area public library for every ten followers they get. They're @NightShadeBooks.

Interview at Terrible Minds Blog

There is an interview with me here at Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds Blog. You will probably find out more about me than you want to know.

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The Serpent Sea also got listed here on Tor.com, as one of the staff picks at Bakka Phoenix, the big SF/F bookstore in Toronto. It's in very good company.

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I don't have much else to report. What I'm mostly doing is trying to figure out what book to write next. Plus trying to think of a title for the third Raksura book. Plus trying to finish up a prequel short story for The Cloud Roads about Chime.

Notes about buying stuff: Amazon and Barnes and Noble online seem to be having some sort of weird .10 increment price war over The Serpent Sea trade paperback. Right now B&N is winning at $9.29, so if you wanted to get it cheap, this might be a good time.

Also, my second Stargate Atlantis novel Entanglement is now being sold on the B&N Nook. It's been available on Kindle, but this is the first time I've seen it on Nook, and it's cheap. (I don't know if Reliquary will also be on Nook; I have no control over it so if you want it your best bet is to email the publisher and ask.)

Conventions and More

This weekend we'll be going to Sherwood Forest Faire outside Austin, in Lost Pines. It's one of my favorite renfairs, and one of the two that almost burned down during the summer wild fires.

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Beth Bernobich said really nice things about The Cloud Roads!

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Next weekend (17-19) I'll be at ConDFW in Dallas, Texas, and my schedule is:

Saturday:

Panel Room 1 – Warwick
10 am – Shutting Out Distraction: How to Create a Good Workplace
Panelists: Cherie Priest, Martha Wells, Michael Ashleigh Finn, Sue Sinor, Michelle Muenzler (M)
The hardest thing to do is start your epic novel, or canvas masterpiece. But it is even harder to start when you have things distracting you – the phone, loud neighbors, or the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

Signings:
11 am – Stina Leicht, Melia Dawn Newman, Martha Wells

Readings:
1 pm – Ciara Gold, Martha Wells, Sue Sinor
(It's only a 20 minute reading, but I'll be doing a bit from the third Raksura book.)

Panel Room 1 – Warwick
4pm - World-Destruction 101: Destroying What You Created
Panelists: Martha Wells, Teresa Patterson (M), P.N. Elrod, Paul Black, Michelle Muenzler
It's one thing to build a world, with fluffy bunnies and majestic unicorns. It's another thing entirely to destroy it without losing your audience. There is a fine line between pointless destruction (which an audience dismisses) and gratuitous destruction (which may ick the audience away), and our experts at written devastation tell you where it is, how to travel it, and what details may need to be left out along the way.

Panel Room 2 - Manchester
5pm – Flying the Friendly Dirigible Skies: Steampunk Aviation
Panelists: Cherie Priest, Martha Wells, Julie Barrett, Lou Antonelli, Shanna Swendson (M)
One of the traditional views of the steampunk genre is the dirigible, or the zeppelin. In fact, it is often used to illustrate to modern audiences that they are in an alternate reality – if they see a dirigible, they know it's not their world. For examples, look at Blade Runner (dirigible ads floating 24/7), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Zeppelins docking with the Empire State Building), etc. So, let's fly a floating flammable gas bag and see what the future really is!

There's an article on Smart Bitches Trashy Books on reade...

There's an article on Smart Bitches Trashy Books on reader shaming in response to a Guardian article, which featured statements like these: Their shelves still boast classics and Booker winners. But inside that plastic case, other things lurk. Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls. OH NOES!!1!1! Dogs and cats, living together!

The only thing I can say is that when you're a SF/F fan, reader shaming is the norm for you. It's shocking when you encounter someone who doesn't try to shame you. But we know shamers have to have something to feel fake-superior about, since they're generally ignorant asshats.

Some links:

No History is Illegal As a network of Teacher Activist Groups (TAG), we believe that education is essential to the preservation of civil and human rights and is a tool for human liberation. In alignment with these beliefs, TAG is proud to coordinate No History is Illegal, a month of solidarity work in support of Tucson's Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program.

I wanted to also recommend again Cynsations, Cynthia Leitich Smith's LJ, for all the great info on MG and YA releases.

C. Lundoff did a writing income and book sales post for small press sales.

Art article from the Weird Fiction Review: The Strange Creatures of Artist O.L. Samuels. I really want the Lottery Flamingo.

This is the last day for Worldbuilders and it looks like it might raise $300,000 for Heifer International.

Finished!

I finished the third Book of the Raksura on Friday, which was a huge relief for me. This book took much longer to write than the first two, and was just difficult all the way through. It still doesn't have a title, or a publication date. I'll post more about it as I know. But yay, finished!

(If you're new to this LJ, info on the first book (reviews, sample chapters) The Cloud Roads is here and The Serpent Sea is here on my web site.)

Also that night, there was a huge thunderstorm with tornado warnings and a little hail. A restaurant in town was hit by lightning and burned down (fortunately it was empty at the time), a friend's house flooded a little, we had leaks and there was a debris line across our porch where our house nearly flooded, and police and the fire department had to do a water rescue of a woman and two kids trapped in a car. Fun times.

Saturday I slipped in the mud, fell off the curb, and almost did a face-plant on our mailbox. I caught myself just in time, but had condensation from the mailbox on the right lense of my glasses.

I'm braced for what might happen today.

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This is the last few days for Patrick Rothfuss' Worldbuilders Fundraiser for Heifer International. For a donation of $10.00 to Heifer International through the Worldbuilders team page, you get a chance to win one of hundreds of great prizes, plus helping to help people all over the world. Instructions on how to donate are here. You can also buy something directly through the The Tinker's Packs store, where all the proceeds go to Heifer International. There's merchandise from Pat's books, plus foreign language editions from a variety of SF/F writers, including me.