Bid on an Awesome Package from our Operatives!

For this year's Pens for Paws Auction, our members are offering an entire package that includes:

From Karen McCoy:
Signed ARCs of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, The Marvels by Brian Selznick, and Winter Falls by Nicole Maggi

From Katrina Lantz:
 $15 gift card for Amazon.com

From S. L. Saboviec:
E-books of Guarding Angel and Reaping Angel (books one and two in the Fallen Redemption series)

PLUS A Critique of your first chapter 

From Kara Reynolds:
Critique of Twitter pitch, query, and synopsis (between Kara's crits and Samantha's, you could have an entire submission package ready to go!)

From Angelica R. Jackson: Signed paperback of Crow's Rest plus swag

This item will close on May 8, 2016, at 9:00 PM EST, so hurry over and get your bids in!

Writing Series: Querying - How many queries should I send?

You've got your polished novel. You've got your query letter. You've got your heart held out, warm and beating in your hands. How many agents do you offer it to before you call it quits?

Querying is a frustrating, exhilarating, soul-sucking experience. The hardest parts are the beginning, after you send that first one, and the end, when you're not sure if you should stop querying or just keep going.

I'm here today to talk about the end. This is a painful thing to contemplate, so I'm sorry for that, but pretend I'm the lawyer you hired to write your will or the financial advisor whom you've contacted about life insurance.

We all want to believe that we're going to find an agent with the novel we're querying. Otherwise, why are we doing it? But sometimes, it doesn't happen and querying ends. You want the end to come when you've rationally decided it, not when you're crying into your second bottle of chardonnay and lamenting the frustrations of today's publishing industry.

So let me sell you some life insurance.

The answer for when to stop querying is different for everyone, but my advice is this: make your decision now, before you hit the send button on your first one, and stick to your plan.

In previous posts, Melinda talked about querying resources, Kara talked about how to use social media to find agents, and Wendy talked about how to organize your querying. Your job, now, is to use those resources to decide how many agents to query.

It could be ten. It could be twenty. It could be one hundred. It could be all the agents that rep adult fantasy and historical fiction as listed on QueryTracker.com. I don't care what your list is, but set yourself a goal, decide how many you'll send per week, write it down, and follow it until every single agent on your list has your submission package in his or her inbox.

A few years ago, I decided to become a direct salesperson for jewelry. (Direct sales being Arbonne, Partylite, Scentsy, Jamberry, etc.) Extra money seemed like a good idea, but I'm an introvert so, long story short, it didn't turn out well. However, I did learn something invaluable that I want you to apply to your writing life. They told us this:

For every yes you will receive, you will get nine no's. So set yourself a goal to get to a certain number of no's, and ignore completely the yes's.

Unfortunately for writers, the odds seem worse than 10%, but the principle is the same: Don't let a request for a partial stop you from querying. Don't get three full requests stop you. Don't even let an offer stop you--make sure you send out "offer of representation" follow-ups to the agents you've got materials out to. If you get a "yes," that's cause for a chocolate cupcake, but it's not a reason to stop gathering more no's.

So what's the answer for you? How many agents are you going to query? You decide that now, and you query all of them.

Do you need an accountability partner? You can find me on Twitter. I'm not kidding about this. I'm about to go into the query trenches myself mid-January (by the way, don't start querying right now because it's the holidays). My goal is at least one hundred Canadian/US agents who rep adult SF.

We can do this.

Guest Post: S.L. Saboviec on Growing Your Character Relationships to Grow Your Character!

 

Hello, everyone! This is S. L. Saboviec, and I’m pleased to be a guest today on Operation Awesome. I’m author of the Adult Paranormal novel Guarding Angel, and I’m here to talk a bit about my writing process.

When I first started writing, I knew very little about it. (I know, shocker!) I tried different things to flesh out my characters—character questionnaires, interviews, analyzing their personalities, taking online quizzes—but only when I evolved a character development method did I started to become comfortable. In addition to analyzing their personality traits, I examined their relationships with one another.

Let me explain.

Character Growth: Not Just For Characters

The books we most engage with are ones where characters grow as they overcome challenges. But the characters themselves don’t just grow—their relationships with everyone around them grow. Maybe they meet someone new and fall in love. Maybe they love someone but end up divorced. Maybe they have a strained relationship with their child and mend it, or have a great one and ruin it. These relationship changes are what make up good stories.

(I’m not saying you can’t have a character grow without other characters, but it’s much more interesting to see your character grow against their relationships.)

Not only that, but these growing relationships are the stuff of delicious sub-plots: the man who launches a friend’s rescue saves the world from evil aliens (Chronicles of Riddick) or the mother who struggles with her son’s heinous crime comes to terms with who she is as a person (We Need To Talk About Kevin). Chuck Wendig states it even stronger than I have: Character relationships are what makes your plot, not just your sub-plots.

How to Make Your Character Relationships Grow

When getting ready to write a first draft, I have a spreadsheet I call my “Book Map.” Yeah, I’m a plotter… But don’t run away if you’re not! Besides my plot outline, which is totally optional in this method, I keep detailed character information that I refer back to as I write.

In particular, I have a matrix of relationships. Along the top and the bottom, I have each character’s name. Where each character meets, I write about how their relationship grows:

·         How Character A sees Character B in the beginning of the novel

·         How Character A sees Character B at the end of the novel

·         Notes about their growth arc

An example of this would be one I would have done between Enael and Kaspen for Guarding Angel:

·         At the beginning, Enael sees Kaspen as: mysterious, intriguing, and more committed to his Wards’ development than any other Guardian she’s met.

·         At the end, Enael sees Kaspen as: worth fighting for, her soul mate, and strong for having struggled through so many hardships.

·         Growth arc: When Kaspen makes a poor decision because he wants to protect humans, Enael fights for him. (I’m being vague here so I don’t spoiler anything—in case you decide you’d like to read my novel—but when plotting, I would point to specific actions she takes and how it connects to my overall plot.)

I would do a similar one for how Kaspen sees Enael, which would explain why he falls in love with her. And so on, throughout all the major characters. One of my current works-in-progress has twelve major characters, so that’s 12 x 12 = 144 character opinions of other characters to consider. It was a time-consuming exercise, but I usually don’t do every single one, since not all the characters meet or have strong opinions about one another.

And it’s useful in more than one way:

·         It highlights possible sub-plots.

·         It allows me time inside the head of each character, which allows me to understand each one’s motivations more.

·         It highlights redundant or one-dimensional characters.

Hopefully this insight into a small part of my writing process has been useful. For me, the “hair color / eye color / mannerisms” character sheet lists don’t cut it. I need to get into my characters’ heads and really understand what they think of each other. Hopefully I gave you some things to think about and perhaps even strengthen your next revision.

About Me:

I’m a self-published author whose dark, thought-provoking science fiction & fantasy contains flawed, relatable characters and themes that challenge the status quo. Guarding Angel is on sale for $0.99 right now. You can find it at several major eBook retailers and on Amazon in paperback. The sequel, Reaping Angel, will be released in early 2016.

·         Kindle

·         Kobo

·         Nook

·         Google Play

·         Paperback (Amazon)

·         Goodreads

You can also follow me on social media, check out the other stops on this blog tour, or if you like my work, sign up for my newsletter:

·         My newsletter (No spam!)

·         July 2015 Guarding Angel Blog Tour

·         Twitter

·         Pinterest

·         FaceBook

Thank you, Operation Awesome, for having me here today!