by john | Aug 5, 2016 | Appearances, Business of publishing, Writing
Since opening up Falstaff Books, I’ve been dealing with more submissions than ever. This is awesome, because submissions, particularly unsolicited submissions (or “slush”) is how we build anthologies and a catalog. I, just like every editor and publisher I know, am excited every time I open a query letter and start to read the attachment. I want to find the next amazing book or story, because if I publish it, not only do I get to help bring an amazing book to life, but we all get paid. Remember, a reputable publisher doesn’t make any money unless you make money. Unfortunately, most of what comes in on submission gets rejected, and I want to touch on some of my personal top reasons that your story or novel gets rejected. Some of these are pet peeves, and in a world where my time is incredibly limited, it only takes hitting one hot button to get your book or story rejected. So here, in reverse order, are John’s (and John’s alone) Top 5 Reasons I Will Reject Your Book or Story. I’ll bring you Part 2 next week, because this is running long.
5) Bad Timing – sometimes you honestly just get screwed, and you submit a story or novel (for here on out, I’m just going to call them books) that is too similar to something we just acquired, or too much like something else on the market. For example, if you have a great idea for an urban fantasy series about a male wizard for hire in Indianapolis named Barry Teasden who has a spirit trapped inside a gargoyle on his desk, I’m probably going to pass. Frankly, if you have any kind of urban fantasy detective story, I’m probably going to pass unless it’s 100% goddamn amazing, and there’s something to set it apart from any of the dozens of urban fantasy detective series out there. Including the ones written by the publisher.
But a lot of times you can’t know that we’ve just bought a story in the same genre as yours, or have something on the docket that hits many of the same check marks. For example, it would be hard to know that we aren’t the place to send your “changeling travels to Fairy in search of her absentee parent – hilarity does not ensue” novel, because Changeling’s Fall hasn’t released yet. But it will come out late summer/early fall, and it is the first in a series of four novels about that set of characters. So that’s great for us, because it’s an amazing book, but it’s not great for writers of similar books, because that market is now closed to them.
4) Didn’t Follow the Guidelines – When I worked in the lighting business, I was a middle manager. I had a dozen people that reported to me, and I was responsible for hiring and firing them. One thing I was always looking for in people was a college degree. Not that I thought you needed a degree to do the job, because you certainly don’t. But because having a degree was a shortcut to show an employer that you are capable of sticking with one task for a long time and completing it. Submission guidelines are the same thing.
What am I saying? I’m saying that I’m perfectly capable of quickly reformatting your submission into the typeface, font size, and spacing that is easiest for me to read. Take me less than a minute. And that’s not the point. The point is – are you someone who pays attention to detail, or are you a pain the ass? Do you understand that this is a business relationship, and as such there are ways to do things and ways not to do things, or are you a special friggin’ snowflake that I’m going to have to remind to do everything and hound about missed deadlines?
Submission guidelines are a test, like Van Halen’s green M&Ms. The band never gave a single shit about the color of the M&Ms, but a venue that took the time to either adjust the tour rider to take out the stupid line about the green M&Ms, or took the time to pick out the green M&Ms, was a venue that was paying attention to details. And that’s a venue that’s probably going to have the right safety equipment, the right number of backstage passes for family and guests, and won’t have food in catering that the band is allergic to. A writer who follows the submission guidelines to the letter is probably a writer that will respond to edits quickly and succinctly, will get their shit turned in on time, and generally will behave like a professional.
So follow the goddamn guidelines.
3) Book or Story needs work – Nobody’s first draft is worth a damn. Not mine, not yours, not Neil friggin’ Gaiman’s. So polish your work before you send it out for someone to potentially purchase. Have someone help you polish it. There are critique groups everywhere in the world, including online critique groups for people who live in rural areas and don’t have enough people close by. Use one.
Note – I am not suggesting that you pay an editor to polish a book that you want to sell to a publisher. That’s what we do. It’s our job to handle that level of editorial. But I am saying make friends with writers who are where you are in your career, and work together so that all of you get better. Having someone to put fresh eyeballs on your work will help with things like homonyms and words that either aren’t spelled like you think they’re spelled or words that do not mean what you think they mean.
Here are a few things that will kill the submission before it really gets going. Remember, these are things I don’t care for, but they aren’t universal. They’re pretty close, though. Eliminate these things from your storytelling and it will help you make more money as a writer.
Passive Voice – People need to do things, not have things done to them. Brutus needs to stab Caesar, we don’t need to hear that Caesar was stabbed by Brutus. If your POV character keeps having things done to her, then maybe she shouldn’t be your POV character. Or maybe you should write from a closer POV, so we can understand her reaction to these things better. But get rid of passive voice.
“To Be” – It’s really not to be. The more instances of “was, were, are” you can eliminate from your writing, the more immediate you can make it. Use strong, active verbs to tell the reader what’s going on in the scene. I wasn’t standing by the bar watching the room, I stood by the bar watching the room. I am not sitting at my desk writing a blog post, I sit at my desk writing a blog post. The various conjugations of “to be” distance the reader from the action and reduce the immersion of the character into their surroundings. It blunts the edges of your writing, makes it dull.
Adverbs – You get one per every 50,000 words. You can have them back when you’ve published a million words of fiction. Don’t argue with me, just cut out the annoyingly ever-present and ridiculously repetitive adverbs.
That’s enough for Part 1. I’ll come back next week with the next two pieces of the puzzle – Your Story Starts in the Wrong Place, and You Aren’t a Good Enough Writer (Yet). I figure if these didn’t piss everybody off, those certainly will!
If you loved this, hated it, or just want to meet me live and in person, come say hi at the Charlotte Comicon, this Sunday, August 7, from 10AM – 5PM at the Embassy Suites in Concord, NC. More information here.
If you love my work and these blog posts and want to keep me writing, feel free to visit my Patreon page. I give away all sorts of free stuff to my patrons, including autographed books from my collection, free audiobooks, and free ebooks.
Black Knight #6, Man In Black, is available August 15th, just after my birthday! You can pre-order it now!
by john | May 12, 2015 | Writing
I’ve decided to just embrace my role as the Simon Cowell of the writing world. I’m honestly tired of being nice and supportive to everyone who comes up to me with a half-baked idea or worse, a half-baked product, and asks what I think. Because they don’t want to know what I think. They want to hear how awesome they are. And most of the time they aren’t awesome. Most of the time I’d be better off trimming my toenails than reading their godawful attempts at a book or story, because at least that can get exciting if I trim a little too closely. So here goes – unexpurgated Hartness on why you’re not going to make it as a writer.
Let’s start with a definition of “make it.” You’re not going to ever be able to quit your day job and write full-time. If you make $40,000 per year at a nice comfortable job, you’re going to need to make at least $50K as a writer to cover the self-employment tax and other costs associated with being self-employed. And that’s if you live somewhere cheap.
But let’s be honest – that’s not everyone’s goal. Some folks just want to sell well enough to make a bestseller list, or see their book in a bookstore without having to sneak it in under their coat. Some folks want to sit on panels at conventions, and maybe even be a Guest of Honor. Those are also reasonable, achievable goals for a lot of writers.
And here are the reasons you won’t get there.
1) You are Fucking Lazy – If I’m wrong, prove it. Stop whining about how much time you don’t have to write, or how much “real life” gets in the way, or how much time it takes to raise your kids, or work your job, and how you’re too tired after working all day, coming home, fixing dinner, feeding a family, cleaning up after dinner, bathing the little ankle-biters, getting them to bed and then performing your husbandly duties so your wife still loves you. Yeah, shut your cake hole.
Somewhere out there is someone who is doing all that shit while wiping the ass of their Alzheimer’s-riddled father and taking online classes at the University of Fuckstickery just so they can get a $1,500/year raise at their cube farm. And they’re still jamming a thousand words a day. That means that while you’re all caught up on Agents of Shield, they’ve cranked out 250,000 words in a year. That’s not just a novel, that’s a fucking Brandon Sanderson novel.
So before you send me hate mail about how hard you’ve got it, go read this – The Road to Publication. If you read that and have had half the fucked up shit happen to you that Sherrilyn Kenyon has lived through, then you’ve had it rough. If you’ve gone through all that and THEN pulled your shit back together and blown the doors off publishing – then I promise I’ll never call you lazy again. Sherrilyn Kenyon is a motherfucking inspiration to me and I go back through that story whenever I feel like I’ve got it rough. Then I shut the fuck up and write.
2) You don’t want it badly enough – This is tied to the first one, but different. I’ve spent my life in the arts. Theatre and writing are how I’ve made my living, at least tangentially, since I got out of college. I’ve spoken to many high school theatre kids and I’ve always told them the same thing – if there is anything else in the world that will make you happy, please go do that. This (theatre and writing) is a lonely, bizarre, world-destroying, soul-crushing business where you accept rejection as the norm and the tiniest bit of encouragement is like the first rainbow after Noah docked that fucking ark.
A life in the arts will destroy your health, relationships, and any hope of routinely seeing sunlight. It is not a career, it is a calling, it is an addiction, it is my church. If you can imagine yourself doing anything else – go do that. Save yourself the suffering. Because you will get rejected ten or twenty or fifty times for every acceptance, and you will fall down so often your knees will feel like mashed potatoes, and you will spend more time flat on your ass than a Floyd Mayweather opponent. So go do something else – this isn’t for any reasonable person.
3) You have a huge ego – If you can’t accept honest criticism and understand that sometimes your shit just isn’t good enough, then you’re going to be a dick and no one will want to work with you.
4) You don’t have enough ego – If you don’t think you’re fucking amazing and the best thing since sliced bread, then nobody is going to believe in you and no one will give you a shot. I’ve given kind of short shrift to these two points, but the heart of it is that there is a very fine line between confidence and arrogance, and you need to dance along that line. I tend to land a little more on the arrogant side of it (I’m writing a post on how to be a writer, after all), but you should find out what works for you.
5) You don’t know how to write – Let me be clear here – I am not a great writer. I am a very good storyteller, and I have some skill with putting words together for a desired effect, be it humor or horror. But I am not a great writer. I don’t have to be. Neither do you. The world has one Neil Gaiman, one Pat Rothfuss, one N.K. Jamison, one Ken Liu. It doesn’t need more than one. But it does need a cadre of people who understand the basic tenets of storytelling and can string words together in a coherent manner. And that doesn’t come easy to anyone.
Stephen King says you have to write a million terrible words before you get to the good ones. Malcolm Gladwell says you have to spend 10,000 hours working at something to be good at it. Before I wrote The Chosen, I spent five years working for the internet poker industry, churning out roughly 500,000 words of poker tournament coverage. I spent half a million word trying to make the flop, turn and river interesting and trying to find new ways of saying “This jackass got all his money in as an 80% underdog and crushed his opponent’s soul when one of this eight outs came one the river.” I also blogged for six or seven years, turning out another few hundred thousand words.
I wrote my million shitty words, and still there’s a bunch of crap that comes out in my first drafts. I have a degree in Theatre, with an English minor, and a fair number of Creative Writing classes under my belt. I’ve studied my craft. I read books on writing. I attend workshops and panels on writing. I continue to work on my craft. If you don’t know what passive voice is and why it’s bad, don’t waste my time.
You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about talent. I don’t give a fuck about talent. Talent doesn’t do a goddamned thing for anyone that skill won’t do better and more consistently. You want to make it in this business? Then go write. Write a thousand words a day, five days a week, at a minimum. And the comments you send me telling me what an asshole I am to write this post? Those words don’t count.
by john | Feb 17, 2015 | Guest Blogs, Writing
Welcome back Selah Janel to talk about Women in Horror Month! For more Selah, check out her website.
Although I grew up something of a scaredy-cat, admittedly I’ve always been drawn to the horror genre. I was the one always begging friends to tell me blow-by-blow details of the movies I wasn’t allowed to see, the one reading the descriptions of horror movies off boxes in video stores when my parents weren’t looking, the one who may or may not have run an underground library for R.L. Stine titles and urban legend collections out of my locker in Junior High. I think we take for granted that women seem to be designated as chainsaw fodder or final girl in the genre, when there are truthfully a lot of other roles if we keep an open mind and are open to a lot of different titles. I also don’t think it’s that unusual that women make awesome horror authors. I could give you the standard answer of how we’re emotional creatures and at the end of the day we always have to be aware while walking down the street, when we’re meeting someone new, when we have to walk away from a table and leave our drink unattended, when protecting our children, etc.
However, I think there’s another reason women of my particular generation are drawn to horror and happen to be good at it. It’s a little thing I like to call the 1980’s.
Stay with me here. Yes, the eighties were time when slasher films ruled and women’s roles tended to be reduced to victims for the most part, but that’s not what I’m talking about. To really get why my ilk are into the genre, you have to go to a whole other medium entirely: children’s cartoons.
Eighties nostalgia has gotten a lot of flak over the years. Yeah, a lot of the cartoons were made off toy lines and they weren’t always drawn very well. A lot of the Saturday morning installments didn’t even last all that long, if a whole season. What they were, however, is utterly, completely, cracked out.
Let’s just take a look at some of my early influences, eh? The first Care Bears movie features a book that could be considered a riff off the Necronomicon. Heck, the second movie contains shapeshifting demons and a variation on possession. Yes, the villains are either dealt with or reformed, but can you imagine that even existing in a theatre for four-year-olds these days? My Little Ponies had gateways to other dimensions and a dark ooze that nearly destroyed Ponyland. Rainbow Brite had her color drained on at least one occasion, a Lady Lovelylocks villain went into a deep coma-like sleep and nearly died. One of the Misfits in Jem nearly died from strange plant scratches. She-Ra was repeatedly kidnapped, drained of her powers, almost-tortured, and who knows what else. The Ewoks were forced into slavery on their cartoon at certain points, and one of the girl Ewoks learned quickly not to try to play magic to her advantage. Villains and sidekicks alike nearly had their souls sucked out in a few franchises and it was just another Saturday for all us little girls watching. For the puppet crowd, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller featured devils and heroine-beating trolls, and the Skeksis of The Dark Crystal haunted our nightmares for ages because of their soul-sucking abilities and we loved them for it. Disney regularly played cartoons from their vaults, including things like where Pluto dreams he’s been sent to hell and is tortured by a bunch of animated cat devils.
The Real Ghostbusters just plain existed. Seriously, this show was amazing for how bizarre it was until it was dumbed down for little kids. I still remember an episode where the ghostbusters got sent to another dimension where ghosts hunted people and their ghost counterparts chased them down like criminals. It was intense, mind-bending stuff. In short, beautiful.
The nineties tried, but by then everything was either taking existing franchises and turning the characters into children, or trying slightly different variations of the same ol’ same ol’. It was always strange to me that people got so freaked out about Tales from the Cryptkeeper, when things like that had been a part of my entire tender youth, and no one had complained because “they were just cartoons based on toys.”
My point is, those things were considered normal for little girls or for girls and boys alike. I admittedly question some of the gender divide, though, because I knew a lot of boys who collected She-Ra figures along with He-Man and quite a few little girls who could quote you episodes of The Real Ghost Busters. Along with all the sparkly, we regularly got our dose of freaky, otherworldly danger. In some cases, it was like Lovecraft was reincarnated as an animator. Whether this was people groping for a plot or just throwing something out there, who knows, but it gave us permission at a very young age to let our weird out and not be apologetic about it. It was okay to be villains who did whatever was necessary, to be heroes who were kind, yes, but still had to go to great lengths and nearly lose their souls to get their way. Adventures were better the more elaborate and the darker they became.
Yes, there were gender divides in the toy aisle, but in a lot of ways, girly cartoons were pretty subversive for their time, more so than a lot of the things I’ve seen these days. The plots were not always great, the art was eh, true, but the weird factor was amazing. I’ve talked to a lot of women in my age grouping who laugh and remember a lot of those episodes fondly, either because they loved them or because they were traumatized by them and now find it amusing. Some have even passed things like the original two Care Bears movies onto their own daughters. A lot of these girls graduated to appreciate Stephen King and Anne Rice alike, to not just want to be the chick who hangs out with vampires, but who had ambitions of maybe, someday, becoming the head vampire.
These days, yes, women write horror from a female standpoint at times, but I think we don’t take into consideration that that isn’t the only way we can write horror. Maybe, if we started letting our girls get a dose of weird early again, there wouldn’t be such a barrier for them to the genre. It would be just another day at the toy aisle, just another Saturday of cartoons. For those of us already grown up, yes, we definitely have different takes on the genre, and some of them will inevitably have to do with gender. However, we also have a huge universal appreciation for the dark and the bizarre. Why? Why not? After all, we were brought up that way.
by john | Oct 27, 2014 | Real Life, Writing
I know, this year has sucked donkey nuts for blogging. I’m a terrible blogger and a late-ass writer and nobody can find me to buy my shit, yadda yadda yadda.
The truth is, 2014 has sucked ass and I’m ready for it to be over.
As a lot of folks who have followed this blog for a while know, in 2012 I left a job of almost 18 years to write full time. Which worked out fairly well for about a year, then I went back to work.
Which also worked out fairly well for about a year, until it didn’t. Then I left that job at the end of January and started a new one right after Connooga, so the second week in March. And I thought it was going quite well and was just about ready to go into my boss’s office and talk about an end-of-my-first 90 days review and maybe salary bump.
When he fired my ass without any warning. So right before ConCarolinas I was fired, and I spent the next eight week trying to figure out how I was going to live. Because all my savings had been eaten up in that whole “write for a living” year. But I scrabbled through, sold off a bunch of unnecessary shit, dumped a large portion of my Magic card collection, collected on some back pay that had been floating out there, and got another job that started at the end of July.
So that was good. So far the new job is working out well. I enjoy the work, I enjoy the people, and we are beginning to see some results from my labors.
Then I went to DragonCon, knowing that while I was working the con, my mother was dying. I went to see her the day I left for Atlanta. I spent some time in her room, said my goodbyes, talked to the hospice nurse, and spent all weekend in Atlanta waiting for the phone call that she was gone and it was time to come home. She waited until Monday morning, and a part of me will always believe that she knew how important this con was to my career, and she held on for me. I was in the shower Monday morning when she died, and I felt it. I stood there, water running down over my face, and I felt something in my world shift. I got dressed and started packing, and by the time I got my suitcase half loaded, my sister was on the phone.
I expected it to be easier. My mother had dementia, or Alzheimer’s. or whatever. I don’t know the difference, but I know it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I thought I had reconciled myself to her death, because in a way it felt like she was already gone. The part of her that was really my mother hadn’t been there since before last Christmas. Up until then she would have moments of lucidity, flashes of herself. But I didn’t see those at all after Christmas. And I didn’t react very well. I don’t deal well with things I can’t do anything about – helplessness is not a feeling I process well at all. And I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about my mother’s decline, so I stopped going to visit. I couldn’t stand to see her like that, so I stopped seeing her.
So I expected to handle her passing with calm and grace. After all, I had intellectually processed everything and resigned myself to the fact that my mother had really been gone for years. She never really understood that I had written a novel, much less published six of them. The last publication of mine that she really understood was Red Dirt Boy, a collection of poetry I self-published in 2010. I gave her copies of all my novels, but she never read them. I don’t think she read any of the poetry either, but that never bothered me – I swear a lot in my poetry and she wouldn’t have approved. So I had rationalized all that to myself, and I would be able to handle her eventual physical death without any real impact.
I was wrong.
I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but I may have never been so classically, spectacularly wrong about anything before. Even right now, writing this, I don’t understand why it hurts so much. I don’t know if there was some part of me that expected her to make an amazing momentary recovery and we could have some Hallmark movie moment right there at the end where she told me she was proud of me and then slipped away peacefully. I don’t know if it’s guilt because I was working at a con while my siblings sat at her bedside. I don’t know what it is, but I miss my mom. And it hurts more than anything has hurt since I got dumped transcontinentally by the girl I thought I was going to marry.
That one worked out really well in the end, because I married Suzy, but it was pretty fucking gut-wrenching at the time.
So all that oversharing is to explain to you, my fans, why you don’t have In the Still of the Knight, which is Boof 5 of the Black Knight Chronicles, yet. It’s also why you don’t have The Big Bad: An Anthology of Evil vol. 2. It’s also why my editors for a couple of anthologies don’t have Bubba stories and why you haven’t seen very many this year, either.
Because 2014 has been pretty well fucked and it’s made it really hard to write. I’m getting better every day. The new job is stable so far, I’m slowly getting over losing my mom, and I’m back in the saddle writing. I had a meeting with Emily this past weekend to go over layout for BB2, and that should drop in the near future. So both books should be out by the end of the year, with Black Knight 6 hopefully making a summer release next year, because Book 5 flows pretty tightly into 6, so I need to just keep writing and making it all happen.
So I’m sorry that I haven’t been more productive. I appreciate you letting me know that you’re still out there. I appreciate you letting me know that you still want the books, and I promise that I’ll get them to you. I know there has been a little oversharing in this post, and that some of you, and some of my family don’t really approve of such a thing. Too bad. This is what you get with me – I live out loud. It’s the only way I know how to be.
So yeah, 2014 has sucked. I’ll be glad to see it go. But I’m still here. I’m glad you’re still here, too.
by john | Nov 25, 2009 | Real Life, Vegas, Writing
So with Thanksgiving upon us, I guess I’m supposed to list things I’m thankful for.
I’m thankful to be employed. And most days in a job I like. I’d be thankful for a little more freelance work, because that would take a little financial pressure off, but I have limited time to chase that in, so I think I’m good with status quo and a few baloney sandwiches for the time being.
I’m thankful that the reception to our podcast has so far been excellent. With just two episodes released (next one drops Sunday 12/6!) we’re knocking on the door of 1,000 downloads, which is very cool to me. I went into this with no expectations other than to hang with Special K and have a good time, but I think we’re putting a good product out there and providing enjoyment to other folks as well. All that’s thanks to Special K, who does all the editing and the vast majority of the research for our episodes. I’m the funny fat guy on the show, and am perfectly happy to be the dumb one. So far I’ve been amazed at how intelligent he makes me sound, and the bumper at the beginning and end that Tragedy did for us is fantastic.
I’m thankful that my folks are still around, even though it’s less and less so every year. My mom has Alzheimer’s (or dementia, we’re not really sure and I don’t think I care enough to pay attention to the difference) so every year might be the last one that she’s really with us. Who am I kidding? She hasn’t been really with us for several years, but we still get flashes of the woman she used to be now and then, and as long as those flashes keep coming we’ll keep hanging on to them. She’s 76 and my dad is 80, so they’re pretty frickin’ old to have a 36-year-old son, but that’s what happens when you shoot out your last pup at age 40. I think every year that it might be the last one I have with them, so when I get another holiday with them, I’m pretty friggin’ thankful.
I’m thankful that I got Returning the Favor published and the reception has been good from the folks that have purchased it. If you want a copy and will be in Vegas, let me know. I can throw some copies into my carry-on and I will accept casino chips for book sales. A year ago I wouldn’t have considered publishing a book off my old blog posts and poetry, and now I have a copy in my backpack. That’s pretty amazing to me, and something I’m pretty proud of.
I’m thankful that in a couple of weeks I’ll be drinking with some of my best friends in Vegas. I can’t wait!
