This post is all about you! The answer you leave in the Comments section is the key.
Q: If you had to define your blog/website in 5 words or less, what would they be?
I was going to complicate the Test a little more by making these words off limits:
– Writing
– Books
– Creativity
But that would just be cruel.
In the comments, please leave your blog/website link, and its defining words. [If you can!]
Yes, you will be graded. This will go down on your permanent record.
It began with a new Twitter follower. [I believe this connection came via WriteOnCon? Will have to check on that…]
Katie Slivensky@paleopaws
I’m a science educator and writer fascinated with the natural world. My goal in life is to inspire others to get to know science a little better.
Hmmm…Science. I like science; and I strive to weave accurate, real-life info and facts into my writing. A proverbial lightbulb ignited. [It was more an Edison-style bulb than those weird pigtail fluorescents. Sorry, energy misers!] Thus began this Tweetversation.
John Lucas Hargis @gypsyroots
@paleopaws Awesome on the science front! What’s your specialty?Katie Slivensky @paleopaws
@gypsyroots My science degrees are in paleontology and my side interests include astronomy and zoology. Yay science!John Lucas Hargis @gypsyroots
@paleopaws Wow! That is an amazingly, perfect mix. Are you open to having your brain picked at some point in the future (for a novel)?Katie Slivensky @paleopaws
@gypsyroots Absolutely! Any and all writers should feel free to use me as a sounding board for science-y things in their books. Just DM me!John Lucas Hargis @gypsyroots
@paleopaws That’s awesome! Thx for your willingness to share your knowledge. I retweeted. You may be in for it now! 😉Katie Slivensky @paleopaws
@gypsyroots Haha, np. I live to teach science, so helping fellow writers with this stuff is a blast for me. Thanks for the RT!John Lucas Hargis @gypsyroots
@paleopaws You’re welcome. In the meantime, I will check out your blog to see what kind of goodies I can unearth.
So, there you have it.
Not only is Katie a phenomenal mix of writer/educator/scientist, but she is more than willing to share her talents with others. Make her happy by hitting her up with your random scientific questions & thirst for knowledge. Your writing may very well be richer for it. You can message her on Twitter or contact her through her website.
Follow Katie on Twitter @paleopaws
Check out her blog here: http://discoverific.blogspot.com/
In the Comments: Please feel free to provide links & leads to other professionals you know are willing to serve as sounding boards for authors.
It seems like I have been writing nonstop since Oct 2010.
You can guess the next line, eh?
I have.
If you’re a writer, you know the drill: brainstorm, organize thoughts into coherency, draft, revise, seek feedback, more revision, more & more revision, query, wait, perhaps even more revision, sigh, wait, sigh, repeat. This has been my life for twenty-one months straight. Yeah, I’ve slipped some other things in, but one of those ^ stages has always been ticking like a loud-ass clock in the background.
Officially, I suppose the ‘brainstorm’ part is still going on. My mind sporadically drifts into wondering, dreaming, and pre-writing my next novel. But, it is in that fun place where I can let it run if I like. There is no self-imposed deadline hanging over me. There is no pressure related to this process. If it happens, Yay! If I don’t think about it for days, So what?
Today, that writer-limbo-freedom allowed me to let an idea (which did not involve writing) come to life. I was in the midst of another task in the studio, saw some old clock parts I picked up a while back, and started making steampunk glasses. Uhhh, random. But since I didn’t have the threat of Author Lucas yelling at me, I started tinkering.
Here are the results:
Today, I created an unexpected something on the spur of the moment. It wasn’t a piece of flash fiction, a poem, another chapter’s worth of edits, or any other writing related thing. [Well, I say that…but here I am blogging about it. And–the novel brewing when it wants to, does have a steampunk element…] Oh hell, whatever. I spontaneously created and had a helluvalotta fun doing it.
Now to sew up a brocade waistcoat to go with the glasses…
In High School, I was the ‘Artist’. Won a lot of awards for my art. I had an art-arch-nemesis, though. We were friendly, but quietly competitive. We silently assessed one another’s work, secretly envied one another, and cheered one another along with a respectful jealousy. One County Student Show in particular, I took 2nd place in acrylic. He got 1st & 3rd–sandwiching me with his entries. We never gloated or pouted. We simply nodded and congratulated one another. I haven’t seen him for 18 years, but we are ‘friends’ on facebook. Every now and theI troll his page…
After a slew of revisions using input from both sides of my brain, CPs, betas, and even a pair of agents, this is the [current] opening for FREEBORN.
Katia shuffled down the busy sidewalk in her geriatric shoes. Shoulders and sharp elbows rocked the old woman as the mindless clones around her scurried to some appointment or another. The pulse in Katia’s temples thumped four times faster than the clacking of her copper cane. Wary of the surveillance cameras, even in the crowd, she slowed to a stop and adjusted the scarf securing her gray wig. Though her granny disguise was fake, her Infection was all too real.
Every face that passed wore a government-issued prevention mask. Every set of eyes above those masks posed a threat to Katia’s dangerous ruse. Even though she had taken every precaution—done every prescribed step to prevent it—the dreaded sickness had wormed its way into her blood. Red-hot fear and a hungry, deadly parasite now squirmed together in her gut.
She chanced a peek at the pair of militant Doctors blocking her direct route to the building. Their chrome assault rifles glinted in the sun like surgical blades. Katia had seen the Doctors in action many times: kicking the infected, mocking them, toying with the victims before dragging them kicking and begging to a quarantine center. A single prick from one of the detectors clipped to their belts would immediately unravel her disguise.
Her status would instantly downgrade from a harmless, healthy clone to a diseased punching bag.
Katia hunched extra low. Her lungs burned with stale, recycled breath as she worked her way through the masses and shambled along behind the Doctors. Their gruff laughter bounced off her humped back as she passed. Caught up in some dirty joke, they paid no mind to the rickety, old granny mounting the steps to the ten-story structure.
The woman in Suite 940 held Katia’s last scrap of hope. While the pirate forums referred to the woman as a witch, Katia didn’t believe in such things. The mysterious Ilythia, supposedly, possessed the secret knowledge needed to help the infected survive the horrific final stages of the Infection. With the world slathered in deception, it could be a trap. But Katia’s symptoms intensified with every passing day. Her stomach was already visibly swollen with the bastard parasite eating her alive from the inside out. Soon, she would no longer be able to hide her sickness from the ever-watching eyes.
Fear jabbed her insides as she approached the GeneTag scanner. ID cards, fingerprints, and retina scans were obsolete. This new technology now guarded entry to any building. Katia thought the method suspicious. Stupid, really. With the airborne virus so contagious, why had the idiots in the skyscrapers designed an ID system that required removal of the protective masks?
She slid hers off.
A couple exited the building, swinging wide around the threat of her exposed face. Katia stuck out her tongue and confronted the polished steel panel inset in the wall. Her ragged, fake-old-lady reflection disappeared as the door slid upward and out of sight, revealing the angry mechanized armature. It was like a cyborg’s arm severed from its body, all the flesh boiled away. Clinical and demanding. Rods, hinges and tubing with a singular, selfish mission: to prick.
The hoses plumped, and the hydraulic arm emerged from the wall. Bent at the elbow, wrist maneuvering into position, it aimed itself at Katia’s open mouth like a cobra ready to strike. But it didn’t have a pair of fangs; it only had one—a four inch needle looming shiny and sharp.
Katia squeezed her eyes shut to brace against the coming pain. With a sickening pop she couldn’t get used to, the needle plunged into her tongue. Pain erupted. Hot serum injected. Tangy. Bittersweet. Like molten glass flooding her mouth. The siphon engaged, reversing the flow, and the syringe sucked its rancid fluid back out.
Sirens blared. Strobes flashed.
Infection Detected! Infection Detected! Infection Detected!
The two halves of my brain like to talk to one another. Not as in the split-personality kind of way, but as in, Hey! I’ve got this idea. Wanna work with me on it?
It’s like having a lobotomy that didn’t quite take.
We all know the pop-science concept of the left hemisphere controlling creativity, with the right hemisphere controlling logic. In weird human-body-fashion, this lateralization results in the right brain dominating the left side of the body and vice versa. While there is some quantifiable truth in this concept, it doesn’t really break down all that clean and perfect.
I am right-handed. I tend to notice lefties everywhere I go. There’s no telling how many store clerks, mechanics, salesmen, customers, and random folks on airplanes I have asked, “I see you’re left-handed. Are you creative?” I’d say, oh, about 90% of them chuckle and protest profusely that they’re not. So much for a dominant right-brain causing lefties to ooze with creativity.
Check out this tidbit from the all-knowing Wikipedia:
“A person’s preferred hand is not a clear indication of the location of brain function. Although 95% of right-handed people have left-hemisphere dominance for language, 18.8% of left-handed people have right-hemisphere dominance for language function. Additionally, 19.8% of the left-handed have bilateral language functions.[5] Even within various language functions (e.g., semantics, syntax, prosody), degree (and even hemisphere) of dominance may differ.[6]“
So, what do my botched-lobotomy halves like to team up on? Well, just about everything. More specifically: art, furniture design, writing, witty things. (Does that bar me from being called a ‘half-wit’? Probably not.)
Left-brain likes spreadsheets and formulas. But right-brain likes to make them pretty with lots of sleek formatting and graphics. Creative right-brain likes to make stuff. And left-brain logically says, Let’s do it using stuff we already have. Let’s repurpose these things. Let’s make non-functional stuff functional.
OK, says right-brain. As long as we can also make it beautiful. So, they–we–do. Furniture, lighting, mirrors, accessories, art.
So what does all this babbling about lobotomies & brains & pics of repurposed creations have to do with writing? I mean, after all, this is The Chronicles of a Fellow Seeking to Publish a Novel or Twelve, right?
All this comes together to make me who I am as a person–first–and then as a writer.
I dig spreadsheets, math, order, patterns, and symmetry.
I dig impulsive decisions, creating, chaos, randomocity, and things that are askew.
Add in psychology, Dali, hard science, skydiving, mythology, documentaries, medical oddity specimens, square-toed shoes, poetry, physics, spiritualism, and shiny things.
Compute it all, embellish the edges, and toss in the variable of two hemispheres which get along (most the time); and you have a silhouette of the joker composing this post.
While not officially the victim of a botched lobotomy, my lobes definitely fire at different times. I’m just glad they choose to aim at the same targets. It takes a pretty unified front to make the craziness happen. So, thanks, left-brain. Thanks, right-brain.
You’re welcome, they answer in unison.
Bibliophiles, don’t hate me. My book carving is done out of love.
Rarely is a writer only a writer. We have facets and interests which span beyond the boundaries of merely crafting words on a page. A few of my other interests include psychology, astronomy, gadgets, couchsurfing, antiques, furniture design, spreadsheets, weird shit, low-fi music, dry wit, art, etc, etc…
Learning and creating are my two favorite things in all the world.
A few years ago, I created a series of altered books for a solo show at Kenosis Gallery in Mansfield, OH. These were amazingly fun to make. The inspiration for each work sprang from a concept I wanted to convey, the book’s title, inside illustrations, the cover image, or a trinket I wanted to incorporate.
In the medium of altered books, I can tell a visual story using recycled materials. Some of the books were given to me or came in box-lots I won at auction. A few I purchased for their visual potential: size, title, cover design or color.
Here are a few of the wall-hanging pieces:
“Into You” was sparked by the transparencies from an “H” volume of an old set of encyclopedias. As a kid, I used to sit and read random entries for hours at a time. The pictures and captions always caught my eye first. All but the last few pages of this book are carved out. Each transparency layer is suspended between a 1/4″ thick layer of pages so they align but do not touch.
“Into You”
“Dynamo Electric Machinery” speaks to the influence of technology upon the family. The different collage elements are mounted on varying depths of carving. Some of the images are from the actual book itself. I love breaking the plane of a piece, and the telescopic antenna does that beautifully while remaining on-theme.
“Dynamo Electric Machinery”
“Foreclosure” was a response to the economy, the housing market crash, and the whole myth of the American Dream. Whether a homeowner’s property was in a low-end or high-end location, those 12 monthly mortgage payments and any effort to sell the house were major issues. The title and cover image of this book sparked the piece.
“Free Love” is definitely a play on words. A key part to this piece is the exposed words from the original text which can still be seen peeking around the anatomical image of the human heart.
For “Fragile”, I studied the illustrations within the book and created my own story for the main character. The stitching and real egg speak to the internal state of this new character I created in my head.
I have over a dozen more wall-hung and free-standing pieces I will save for another post. I see my altered books as visual pitches: a quick snapshot into a story. Of course, these pieces do not represent the premises inside the original books, but stories I chose to tell instead.
I already know that–when my manuscripts become novels–I will definitely alter them into visual works of art. An autographed copy of an altered book written and reconfigured by the author sounds like a sure-fire giveaway to me.
In the meantime, I’ll throw this out there. I do commissions.
Do you have a favorite book or story you would like transformed into visual form?
Are you an author who would love to have an altered version of your own novel?
Agents: Would you like to see your clients’ books as wall-hung art?
Let me know. My willingness, creativity, and carving tools stand at the ready.
——
*** A few words about the main image at the head of this post:
“Surrender” is the most autobiographical piece in this post. It is also one of the more intricate altered books I have created. Each level of the tiny steps is about 1/2″ deep. These were quite a challenge. It took me a while to collect the images from multiple sources–looking for just the right one to relate with the others. The spiral staircase dropping down is constructed from the arch-shaped section I removed from the cover.
I declare today my personal ‘Submissions Follow-Up Day’.
Part 1: Send follow-up emails to agents who requested partials & fulls 2+ months ago. I certainly don’t mind doing this at all. While the pragmatic side of me tells me it’s useless–they would have jumped on it if they were interested–the hopeful side of me keeps the fire alive. Maybe lovely agent just hasn’t gotten to it yet…
Part 2: Decide whether to follow-up with agents who have not responded at all.
I record details for each query I send:
– Submission date
– Anticipated response date (based on agency websites, interviews & Query Tracker reports)
– Outcome
– Agent & Agency name
– Type of materials sent: query, synopsis, number of pages
– Notes: Any contact with agent, likes/dislikes, chances of a good fit, screw-ups/typos I caught in the submission after-the-fact, etc
The Query Tracker reports and User Comments have been great in discerning whether or not I should follow-up.
For instance, I currently have 3 outstanding queries which I should have heard back on prior to 7/25. Thanks to QT, I am chalking them up as ‘Closed/No Response’. The reason? Check out the reply % for each of these three agents.
Really? 78% – 83% non-response rate?
Maybe I’m daft. Perhaps I expect too much. But even a form rejection is better than no response at all. I picture the process as a simple one.
1. Agent reads sucky query & knows immediately it is not right for him/her.
2. Agent moves email into “Send Form Rejection” folder.
3. Once a week, Agent [or intern] replies to all the waiting writers who didn’t make the cut.
I get the whole hundreds-of-submissions-per-week argument. But I also know the meaning of the term “professional courtesy”. Honestly, it’s a pain in the ass to research and tailor a query to a specific agent using the posted guidelines. Each submission is different. Each requires its own set of materials. Surely that time and effort is worth [at least] the professional courtesy of some sort of reply–even if that response is a dry, form rejection.
So, on Submissions Follow-Up Day, I will mark these three queries as “No Response” on both my personal spreadsheet and on Query Tracker. I have 8 more responses due in the next week. Hopefully, these agents are professional and courteous. Hopefully, they understand that:
Bad news is better than no news.
I am quite thrilled to say that the agent/publisher response to my third novel, FREEBORN, has been far and away better than for my first two novels. That tells me I am learning more of what it takes to grab and hold their attention through pitching and actual writing craft.
That last statement sounds like agents & publishers are my market, my audience. They are not. The buying public is.
But agents are pivotal in the process of getting my words to that market. Agents are partners and advocates. They’re often called gatekeepers–those who hold the keys to the magic portal through which a manuscript must pass in order to become a book. (I’ve noticed some agents don’t like that term for some reason???)
That thought dredges up a random song from the depths of my lyric-infested head. An old Schoolhouse Rock tune. Sing its catchy educational glory with me.
I’m just a bill.
Yes, I’m only a bill.
And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.
Well, it’s a long, long journey
To the capital city.
It’s a long, long wait
While I’m sitting in committee,
But I know I’ll be a law someday
At least I hope and pray that I will,
But today I am still just a bill.
In this sense, I suppose agents are a lot like Congress. My manuscript will remain just a bill until an agent decides it is worthy to become a law.
Since I’m having more fun than you can imagine with this analogy…I suppose that would make the head of each agency the Senate. Even if Congresswoman Agent likes my manuscript, she will have to pass it through Senator Agency Head for a second approval. If all is a go, then my lowly manuscript will be on its way to becoming a full-fledged book.
It’s a long, long wait while I’m sitting in committee.
Then there is President Publisher towering over the paperwork with a veto stamp in hand. My poor little bill can get rubber-stamped, kicked back, and remain an unrealized idea. Damn bureaucracy!
Like Bill, I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.
I know I’ll be an author someday
At least I hope and pray that I will,
But today I am still just a bill.
With complete contrition for getting this song stuck in your head for at least a day, here is the YouTube link to help you dig out the earworm.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7266360872513258185
Be sure to check out all the Grammar Rock subgenre of videos, too. Chalk it up as “an online writing course”.
What is it about Schoolhouse Rock? I just dig it. Yes, part of it is the artwork, but mainly it’s the songs. Let me tell you about one of my favorite musicians. Mike Doughty. He is solo now, but I was initially introduced to him when his old band Soul Coughing opened for Dave Matthews waaaaay back there in the past. My frinds hate him: his voice, anunciation, music–all of it. Too bad. Suck it up. BTW, he has a remake of Schoolhouse Rock’s “Three is a Magic Number”. When I’m feeling capricious, I can put that song on and just watch the shoulders tense as eyes roll with disdain in there sockets. Not that I would ever be capricious…
Query – FREEBORN – YA Sci-Fi (With pregnant dudes? What!?)
Dear John,Thank you for your query. I thought this was a really creepy, interesting concept and that you executed it very well. The writing was super compelling and the pace was great. However, I’m afraid that I don’t do all that much with Sci-Fi, as I’m not a big sci-fi reader and don’t feel I know the market well enough. I wish you all the best and encourage you to submit your query to other agencies. Thank you for thinking of me!Best,Agent with Vague Profile
So many creative possibilities to draw from for a post today. It’s funny though. When a health concern pops up, everything else turns into scatter noise on the radar. Yes, I’m nervous about something. Yes, I am being intentionally vague. This is a public blog, not a private journal.
Now that I have gotten that out of my system…
I have two new full requests for Freeborn to announce!
– Jo Fletcher books upgraded from 3 chapters to a Full
– Entangled Publishing requested a full via Brenda Drake’s ‘Entangle an Editor’ contest
That’s as much excitement as I can muster at the moment. Stay tuned, though. I’ll be back on track soon enough.
LUCAS HARGIS 