Lots of things to announce!
1. My holiday story, which wasn’t accepted into the Dreamspinner holiday anthology last year, has been accepted by them as its own separate work after I fixed it up a bit :) So yay! More things being published!
2. A very fun interview via MM Good Book Reviews about Double Hue has been posted here. This came complete with a 5 star review ^^
More writing news from me :)
Here it is! The pre-sale for the anthology I wrote for is now up! Follow the link for prices on the entire anthology and/or the individual stories. Yay!
To celebrate, here’s a fun snippet:
***
This next game, Lukis realizes, is a rather strange one. He doesn’t bother trying to play. Instead, he watches as Aaron fights against someone else. Lukis wonders, as he watches the intro video, why high school students are even allowed to fight with swords and strange monsters that they summon. Don’t they have parents? And since when can bears talk, fight, and smoke cigars? Was that a robot just now? With an axe?
“Told ya it was completely different,” Aaron says, picking some kid that uses a gun and has some sort of fly as a monster friend.
It’s still exciting to watch, Lukis thinks. Aaron’s fighting against some tall, buff guy who uses a folding chair as a weapon — that makes no sense, either, who brings a chair to a gun fight?
***
Follow the link to see how you can get a hold of this story and others :)
YAY!
Hey everyone, check it out! This is for the short story I wrote in Dreamspinner Press’ upcoming sports anthology. It’ll go on pre-sale next week, so I’ve been given permission to share the cover image and the story blurb.
Lukis Singleton’s once-popular sports column is fading fast, thanks to the terrible track record of the local football team. In an attempt to save the column, Lukis’s editor, John, decides he needs to go in a different direction. Video games are all the rage these days, so John insists that sending Lukis to a huge video-game tournament in Los Angeles will shake up his current readers and bring in new ones. Lukis isn’t thrilled about reporting on games with impossible powers or gamers who still live in Mom’s basement, but then he meets a tempting flaw in the gaming stereotypes of unwashed man-children. Aaron Sanders is a gorgeous breath of fresh air at the tournament who takes Lukis’s less-than-stellar view of gamers and turns it on its head, leaving Lukis to wonder if it might be worth being Aaron’s player two.
It was a ton of fun writing this. There are quite a few geeky nods all throughout the story, from Marvel vs. Capcom, to Street Fighter, and even some Persona 4 Arena. Fighting games are one of my favorite video game genres, so as soon as I saw “sports theme” I thought “fighting game tournament.”Lukis is the naysayer, the “games are stupid” character. But Aaron is all “games are awesome” and breaks all of Lukis’ stereotypes since he’s attractive and social. The main point of this story is to show that us gamers aren’t just a bunch of anti-social children who can’t function, who still live with mom, and who waste their lives with a controller in their hand. There’s so much more to video games, especially in this day and age, and on top of the gay romance is the theme of, “Don’t make assumptions about people because of what they do. Don’t make assumptions about something until you try it yourself.”
I’ll post a link when the pre-sales start. Until then, enjoy this snippet :)
On top of my book “Treat Me Kindly,” there’s a short story coming soon! Remember to follow my writing blog for up-to-date information :) And yeah, Persona 4 fans you read that write, there’s a nod to the game in the story along with a bunch of other fighting games ^^ I just couldn’t hep myself!
A conversation between me and my wifey this morning:
Me: If the book sells well I want to take you somewhere nice
Her: It might be kind of cute if it didn’t sell too well right away and you took me to like McDonalds
Me: LOL! But we want it to sell well!
Her: Of course we do! Just saying that it would be cute if the first check went to McDonalds
Me: All right! If it doesn’t sell too well, I’ll take you to McDonalds
Her: If it does good, you can take me to Wendys
Me: And we’ll sit inside and eat!
Her: And if it does amazingly well, you can take me to Culvers
Me: And if it hits bestseller status I’ll take you to either Five Gives or Red Robin… or Fat Burger in Vegas
Her: Sounds like a plan!
Yes we just categorized how to celebrate the book’s success by way of hamburgers.
This is a thing that happened this morning.
I’m not sure if I can post a picture, so I asked and am waiting for a response, but guys! It looks so cool! I’m so happy with it!
GOOD NEWS FROM MY WRITING BLOG!!!
Hi guys! So, in case you were curious about how the whole publishing thing works (at least from what I’m experiencing right now) here’s a few thoughts I have about it. I’m going to do two sections, because I have both a book and a short story being edited.
1. Treat Me Kindly (Urban Supernatural book)
I’m going to assume all publishers are different, but the general idea is the same. The job of the editor is to strengthen your book, not to completely change it. They’ll mark grammar and things, of course, but they’ll also ask questions, point out inconsistencies, things like that.
First, there’s the “Author Form.” This goes through every possible thing you can think of regarding your book. What do you want the cover to look like? This question itself has several parts to it, as far as Damnation Books go. They ask what you want it to look like, who are the main characters so they have an idea of who the story is about. Location? Season? Characters’ physical appearances? Tone of the story? Theme? Tag line? Just… all things I really had to sit down and think about.
The rest of the form included things like: what do you want the back of it to say? Do you want an author pic on the inside? Write up a bio about yourself. Any dedications? Acknowledgements? All stuff I think you see in books, but you never think of what yours should say until the questions come up.
Then there’s the first round of editing (which is where I am right now). They have a certain format they want you to put the story in. This includes font, font size, how to do scene breaks, whether to spell out “Chapter 1” or not, trying to avoid “and” or “but” in the beginning of sentences, thoughts being in italics, just… pretty standard things, I think. I’m sending this off today to their senior editor, who then will send it back to me within 20 days with edits. Then, the two of us go back and forth until we reach a point that we’re satisfied with.
As far as actual editor’s comments… that’s what this next part is for.
2. Press “START” to Play (Gay Romance short story)
This is the gay romance short story I’m going to have in a Dreamspinner Press anthology in June. I just got the first edits back yesterday. The way they do it is very, very clean and precise. The first thing you should realize is that the edits are NOT meant to be discouraging, they are meant to be helpful. When you get your story back, be prepared to see a whole lot of red. It’s not going to be perfect. The thing to remember is that the entire reason why they’re putting so much work into editing isn’t because there’s something wrong with your work, but because they REALLY LIKE your work and they want to make it shine. They wouldn’t be editing it in the first place if you didn’t like it.
The editor I have for this short story is awesome. I’m not sure if all editors start the edits this way, but this person took the time to say good things about the story. Essentially, my editor for this loved the plot, the characters, the theme, just… actually they pretty much loved everything. Then, there was the note of, “Don’t be discouraged,” because it can hurt to see someone correcting so many things on something you worked hard on. But it’s there to help guide you into making the story better. My editor pointed out some really, really good points, like things I never thought about. This certainly doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything your editor says. The point is to have a conversation back and forth (key word: conversation, not argument).
And you know, when you’re writing, you’re not going to think of EVERYTHING the first time, no matter how many times you read it over. The way I usually write is this: I write something, I finish it, I reread it. Then, I have my partner read it. Then I reread it again after she makes comments and things. Then, I send it off to hopefully be published. As you can see, before it’s been sent to a potential publisher, it’s been read three times. Still, you’re not going to catch everything, and that’s fine, that’s what the editor is for.
I’ll write more about how this works as I go through the motions, but I’m at the first steps right now in two stories :)
This is my life right now besides getting ready for Anime Detour ^^
So I’ve already talked about “Hunters: Seeking the Storyteller,” but I haven’t said much about my own story. My own story is called “Treat Me Kindly.” It’s already finished and is also in the urban supernatural genre. It’s sort of this murder mystery with supernatural elements, creatures, and is much darker than Hunters is.
I tried submitting it to places last year but it got lots of rejection (major writing lesson: be prepared for rejection, but don’t let it stop you, take a day to be sad, eat cheesecake and nummy things, then wake up and try again). This year, I went back to submitting it while we submit Hunters.
THERE’S A PUBLISHER THAT WANTS MORE!
The really cool part is that according to their site it normally takes 6-8 weeks for a response. I sent them an email about a week and a half ago and they already want more O.O
THINGS ARE HAPPENING!
So the agent said no… for now. She actually didn’t flat out decline the story. She said we had a unique concept and she loved our descriptions — especially the supernatural elements. She also liked the characters, but at times, their interactions and decisions were off, which is the part we need to fix (we read through it again and agree with her). So now, we’re going to edit the story again, because she actually encouraged us to resubmit it when we fix those kinks.
So it’s not a flat out no, it’s a, “Good job so far, try again,” which is what I figured the process would be like in the first place :)
So that’s the latest with Hunters. Not a no, but not a yes, not yet at least. Just gotta keep at it. It was actually kinda nice that she did this so we could make a stronger story. Instead of a straight up “no thanks” it was “it’s not there, yet, but when it is, send it to me again.”
So I’ve been submitting small short story things to Dreamspinner Press for the gay romance side of me to be published. Last year, nothing I submitted quite made the cut, but they’re really encouraging and told me to keep trying. This morning, I got an email saying that they want to include the latest thing I submitted in an upcoming anthology. So… a short story of mine is about to get published in an anthology.
Excuse me while I SCREAM!!! That’s two positive publishing things this week! Let’s keep this up!
