The HEA Cafe

Join RWA Online’s Erotic Published Authors for our erotic romance genre chat on Thursday, September 20, 2007, from 9pm to 10pm EST. This chat will be open to the public so feel free to invite your friends! Everyone is welcome!
Here is the link to our public chat room!

RWA Online Public Chat Room!

The chat will feature, Kate Pearce, Cara Carnes, Bonnie Rose Leigh and Monica Burns!

~Marly

Crap! I’m Published! Now What? installment 1

Wow. Exactly 9 months ago today, I got the call telling me that HarperCollins did indeed want to buy my book. (I’m sure they meant me. I didn’t believe it at first, but after having examined the contract approximately 4,000,000 times, I am now convinced they meant me.)  I got the call at 4 p.m. CST on a Friday, on a holiday weekend. I had given up. My editor had said an offer would be coming by Friday, but by my calculations, it was 5:00 in New York and I was gonna have to wait until Tuesday the next week. So I was cleaning off my desk when my cell phone rang.

I guess she showed me. (Not that I’m complaining.)

When the chapter pubs were signing up for blogging dates here at the cafe, I almost didn’t take a slot. I’m still new to this whole thing and it still feels very unreal. My first book won’t even hit the shelves until January 2009! Do you know how fraudulent I feel calling myself a published author when the only thing I have to prove that is a signed contract? (Again, no complaints. But really, I can’t carry around my contract just to make me feel legit. Can I?)

So I decided that my blog theme should be Crap! I’m Published! Now What? Because I’ll be honest, I’m learning as I go. Thank the writing gods I have a fantastic agent who is good at answering questions, doling out advice, and guiding me along the career path I had already started working toward.

Speaking of agent, I think that’s where I’ll start.

I got lucky when I signed with Deidre Knight of the Knight Agency because she is the kind of agent I needed. She is communicative and positive and when I need a nudge, she knows how to push without being obnoxious or offending. I need honesty and guidance and not to feel like my questions are an imposition. So, I got very lucky when I signed with Deidre because frankly, I didn’t know what kind of agent I needed until I had her.

Not everyone signs with their perfect agent on the first go around. And most unpublished authors don’t know what kind of agent would be right for them, so they sign with the first person who offers and then months (or minutes) later, they regret it.

Sit down and ask yourself some questions. How would you like to conduct business? Do you need a little hand holding at times or are you a hands off, only call me with an offer kinda gal? (or guy. Sorry, fellas.) Do you want to know exactly what the editor said, or do you just need an idea? (And trust me, there’s a difference here and you need to know if you can handle the exact wording of a rejection or if you just want to hear, “They passed. We’ll keep trying.”)

Do some research. Ask fellow writers what they know about certain agents you’re interested in. Ask them how their agent conducts business. (Not every writer will open up about this. Some get a little woo-woo weird about these kinds of questions and that’s okay. It takes all kinds. Respect their privacy and don’t take it personally.) Does the agent you’re interested in have a web presence? That’s a good way to find out how professional he/she really is. If they blog, become a regular reader. See how they react to certain questions. Are they impatient or just to the point? Do they have a tone that sends your warning flag a flyin’? Are they warm and friendly but never answer any questions?

Your gut is an amazing tool. Use it.

Make a top 5 list and search those agents out at conferences and just chat with them. Listen to them on panels and mark them off your list if something doesn’t feel right.  Chat with their clients. Don’t just query every agent out there. Be selective and be honest with yourself about the kind of agent you want.

The perfect agent for me may not be the perfect agent for you. That doesn’t mean they’re bad agents. (Well, some are, but hopefully you’ll have done your research and will be well informed.) Finding the right agent is as subjective as this business. I should’ve bought a lottery ticket the day I signed my agent, because it was my lucky day.  Don’t rely on luck and your horoscope to lead you to your future business partner.

Do your research. Ask questions. Read the blogs. Be selective and listen to your gut.  Oh and most of all, write a damn good book so you’ll have your choice.

Peace y’all,

-Mel
My Blog
My Space

Chicago Blog #1
What do you think the invention was that made Chicago the hub of all trade, all railroads in America? Why did all rail-lines lead to Chicago, just as in ancient times all roads led to Rome?
 

In the early 19th century, Chicago on Lake Michigan and St. Louis on the Mississippi River were competing to be the major inland trading center of the expanding United States.  The question was would America’s heartland send everything by rail to Chicago to be loaded onto ships and then to New York via the Great Lakes? Or would everything be sent to St. Louis, put on ships and then sent down the Mississippi River to New Orleans?
 

A warehouse man in Buffalo, New York, Joseph Dart was the man whom you’ve never heard of, but who made Chicago the hub.  He did this by inventing something you’ve probably never thought about very much–unless you’re born on a farm.  Dart invented the grain elevator in 1842.
 

Since I grew up in Illinois and also lived for nearly 20 years in Iowa, I am acquainted with grain elevators.  They are those tall metal buildings near the railroad in small farming communities all over the Midwest.  When I was in college I was visiting a girlfriend whose family (the Browns) were farmers and I actually worked with the mother as she helped her husband harvest crops one fall. The men are in the fields with the combines, harvesting the corn.  Usually their wives drive the grain truck back and forth between the field and the grain elevator in town.  When we would arrive at the grain elevator with another full truckload of grain, Mrs. Brown would drive onto a special plate (or plates) which would weigh the grain (subtracting the weight of the truck) and the bottom of the heavy-duty grain truck would open in the grain would pour out into a grate below. Then it would be lifted up into the elevator.
 

Now what’s the big deal about grain elevators?  The big deal is that St. Louis kept the old system of sacking grain and then shipping the sacks down the river on barges.  But Chicago built grain elevators on the lakefront so that farmers at first could just drive their loaded wagons to the elevator and not have to bag it first or wait for longshoremen to load the bags onto barges.  As soon as the railroads saw that the grain elevator took out the laborious and time-consuming sacking of grain and loading of grain bags, they built the railway lines to Chicago, not St. Louis.  Have you ever heard of Joseph Dart?  Is he even listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica?  No.
 

The effect of his invention in 1842 caused many other American financial institutions to be born.  I will be talking about those on Thursday.
My source is Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon, 1999.

When I volunteered to blog on the 11^th of each month at the HEA Café, it didn’t dawn on me—at that time—that my first blog would be on 9/11. For those of us in North America and in many other countries on this planet, it’s a somber day of reflection and remembrance of the innocents and heroes who lost their lives.

So let’s talk about heroes because this is, after all, the HEA Café.  

Heroes come in all shapes, sizes, genders, race, religions, philosophies and—when you write science fiction romance as I do—species. The firefighters, EMTS and law enforcement officers who took the stairs of the Twin Towers in New York City that day, the military personnel who rushed into the burning Pentagon offices and the flight crew and passengers on the hijacked jets were of no one belief, no one race. And not a one of them, I’m sure, woke up that morning thinking this was the day to play the hero. Their parts were unscripted. There were no first drafts, no cut-and-paste edits to smooth over the rough parts. And the plot was clearly not written by a romance author because the happy endings were few.

But they were heroes, and at times I think it’s the heroism, more than the tragedy, that continues keeps our interest about that day and the days afterwards. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For years, the romance novel industry has written about police, firefighter and military heroes—both male and female.  We’ve written about their fears, their failings, their rewards, their loves. We’ve chronicled emergency room doctors and nurses, and civilian and military flight crews. The books of Suzanne Brockmann, Linda Howard, Lindsay McKenna, Cindy Dees and others brought us in to the lives of “trained” heroes. Unsuspecting heroes are found books by authors too numerous to list.

And more romance authors than you might be aware of not only write about heroes but are military veterans themselves. The impressive list (along with some terrific Then and Now photos) can be found on the RomVets site: http://www.romvets.com/   This doesn’t include authors, like Lynda Sandoval and Candace Sams,  who’ve worked in law enforcement, or fire and rescue (if someone knows of a site for that, please let me know).

The unexpected challenge of the moment that creates the hero is something that drives many bestsellers. We saw it in real life, on television on September 11, 2001 and if anything, you’d think such stark reality—and with a real lack of happy endings—would have put a serious dent in the desire to be part of the hero business. But military and law enforcement applications rose after 9/11.

I think that says a lot about the human spirit.

I think it also shows the reason why we authors crave happy endings for our heroes. We write about men and women who are pushed beyond their limits, and we want them to succeed. More than succeed, we want them to be rewarded. So we pen happy endings for our heroes. They may be down and dinged-up a bit but they rise, and hope and love rises with them. In a world where happy endings are never a guarantee, we can at least offer a positive outcome in the pages of a book. This police officer, this EMT, this military chaplain, this starship commander will succeed, find love and continue on making the world—or the galaxy—a little better place.

And the world being a better place is something that’s good for everyone.

So as we pass through another remembrance of 9/11 and get back to our regularly scheduled lives—and books—take a moment now and then to think about heroes. The ones we’ve lost. The ones we’ve read about. The ones that are still here. The ones that patrol our streets, staff our emergency rooms, pilot the jets overhead. The ones that run into burning buildings. The ones that stand on foreign soil.

I’ll keep putting them in my books if you’ll keep holding them in your hearts and prayers.  

Every time you hear on the news about people running away from a crazed gunman, remember that someone’s son or daughter in a police uniform is running toward that crazed gunman.

– from What Cops Would Like You To Know, author unknown, posted on various law enforcement sites on the Internet

Namaste, ~Linnea

Linnea Sinclair
www.linneasinclair.com
www.myspace.com/linneasinclair
RITA© Award Winning SF Romance
Bantam Spectra 2005:  FINDERS KEEPERS, GABRIEL’S GHOST, AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS
2007: GAMES OF COMMAND, THE DOWN HOME ZOMBIE BLUES, SHADES OF DARK

I’d planned to write my blog entry about something useful and controversial like serial commas during editing (and if you don’t think that’s controversial, you don’t know many editors! LOL!) But a thread on another writing site I visit changed my mind. You can see from the title here that my new blog topic is also quite controversial, so much so that it’s a sharp knife, stabbing at the psyche of every writer I know—whether published or not. Raise hands, now. How many of you have heard this in your writing life?

“It’s only a hobby. You’re not getting paid (or paid enough,) so writing can’t be your job.”

How many of you have been so incensed by the statement that you want to reach out and strangle/slap/kick the person? After all, nobody would walk up to someone working a minimum wage job and say that. It’s tactless and thoughtless and insulting. Heck, I know career burger flippers and waitresses who struggle with their salary, but LOVE their job and never would want something different. And even some multi-published full-time authors don’t make much more over the course of a year than a fast food/discount store position. Plus, let’s not talk about how much more tax we pay as self-employed people, rather than W-2 employees, or the lack of health insurance.

I think one of the big problems is that people look from the outside and only see that “product + money = career” while “product - money = hobby. But if the writer identifies with BEING a writer, then that’s their career. It’s an internal thing that can’t be judged from the outside . . . and SHOULDN’T be judged from the outside. I see articles and posts and blogs from writers who have never wanted more than to write. It’s their calling. It screams in their soul—struggling every day to get out. How can a life’s calling, one that you’ve trained for and practiced, NOT be considered a career? That is one of the Webster’s/Oxford definitions, after all. “A profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling.”

But what about the hobbists? Are they somehow less of a writer because it’s not—in their own mind—a career? Should they give up publishing because it’ll never be their “career?”  This is an important question to me because I’m one of those hobbists. I identify with being a paralegal, even though that’s not where my money is coming from presently. So, to me, writing IS my hobby. It’s just a well-paying one with lots of benefits. But in my heart and brain, I’m still a paralegal who’s taking a break from the day-to-day business of it. I still keep up my certifications, though, and read equally as much new case law as fiction. Part of me desperately misses pursuing my career, even though my present job is paying well and has the potential to pay REALLY well.

In my mind, my attitude toward writing takes nothing away from someone who considers writing their career but doesn’t make money, whether “presently” or “ever.”
Yet, in some writing circles I dare not state my personal feelings on the subject. Even my co-author, when I said writing was my hobby (albeit a well-paying one) said never to speak that out loud again. If she ever began to consider writing a “hobby” she might as well stop and never pen another word for the rest of her life. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach. I know she’s truly sincere, but it seems so strange to me. I hear “How dare you!” as often as “Well, that’s your opinion, I suppose,” from various friends and acquaintances in the business, and aspiring authors frequently take special affront at the view—like, why should I have a spot on the bookshelf if it doesn’t scream in my soul? I have no RIGHT to earn the prize when apparently it’s some sort of lark to me. I get nasty rep points and angry emails from those who feel I’m dissing the entire of the writing community by sharing my belief.

But the thing is, I consider a “hobby” just as important—quality wise, as anything I would do in my career. It has no less status in my head. I still seek perfection in each book/story I produce. Does someone who makes fine furniture as a hobby do any less of a job because it’s not the main source of paying the bills? Actually, most of the time, the quality is MORE exacting in a hobby, because you’re living up to your own standards. So, a person with already high standards seeks to constantly improve. It must be perfect, and nothing less will do—no matter how long it takes to produce.

So, I ask all of you who read this: How do YOU think of your writing? Is it hobby or career? Does it matter to you whether someone feels the opposite? Does it stress you out? Let’s hear your views!