Why oh why?

So I was on Twitter yesterday when I saw this from Agent Janet Reid: click here.

Whoever did this I'd like them to contact me. Seriously, we need to talk lol

But, on a more solemn note, I really think us aspiring writers should avoid this kind of behaviour. Aren't you worried of becoming the butt of agents' jokes? We may not know who you are, but Janet does, as do a lot of her agent colleagues, I'm sure.

It reminds me of that time when agents did #queryfail in an honest attempt to aid aspiring writers and some aspiring writers turned it into a declaration of war. In fact, I wrote a short story about it back then (base on some of the nasty things these writers said). Here it is. If you're an agent and wouldn't like to be reminded of that horrific time you might want to leave this blog now. If you're one of those aspiring writers who took up arms against agents and are ashamed and would not like to be reminded of ... well, your rash, unconsidered reaction, you should leave as well.

Award winning short story:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there existed a planet called Earth. A planet teeming with resources and life. The most abundant life was human life. Humans strived for greatness in whatever they did, and for many years they grew in great numbers and strength, determined to one day conquer the universe.

Amongst these humans were those who studied the art of writing, and those who honed their eyes, tongues, and nose to better see, taste and smell good writing. They were respectively dubbed Writers and Agents.

Agents have since stood as gatekeepers of the paths which Writers must take to confront the publishing gods.

Because Agents must carefully choose which Writers to let through, many Writers have grown embittered in silence, their anger bristling in the shadows, swelling and clenching their hearts until all kindness and happiness have long been purged, lost forever.

On a day that seemed as ordinary as any other day, a gatekeeper by the name Jessica Faust determined that it would be a clever scheme to utilise one of Earth's newest and most unimpressive (me didn't like Twitter then) awesome technologies – Twitter – in teaching Writers what not to do when requesting access (by means of querying) to the publishing gods.

Unfortunately for Jessica and her cohorts of Agents and Editors (high priests of the publishing gods), her scheme backfired, and Writers were handed a perfect opportunity to engage in a war they had desperately sought after for years:

::This is the part that gets really ugly::

'Take yourselves off the pedestals you stand on and stop acting like we should feel privileged that you allow us to bow and scrape to gain your attention. Without us, you would have no product to sell, therefore no income. To say it very plainly, without us you are nothing.'

Translation: without us, working at McDonalds wouldn't even come close to your greatest achievement. (But I work at Best Buy).

'Reply with more than one freaking line via email that says something like, "I didn't really care for the male characters". I mean, a rejection is OK, but, after all that time (and $$$ in postage for 300 plus pages!!!), I thought I deserved a bit more. I won't be querying her again.'

Translation: I spent my time, effort, and hard-earned cash getting my manuscript to you. I literally lowered myself to your standards, and this is the best rejection you can come up with – 'I didn't really care for the male characters'? Go to hell. (But I will query you again when I calm down).

'Creating art requires the ability to expose the self and plumb the depths of human pain. Please stop telling me not to take it personally. Sending you my manuscript is more personal than a visit to my ob/gyn. If you refuse to acknowledge the intimate dynamic of this transaction, stick to repping diet books or go into accounting,'

Translation: sending my manuscript to you is like letting you sleep with my husband and not slitting your throat. It's more than personal. So when you refuse to recognise the gravity of things, you hurt my feelings. Trust me, honey, that's the last thing you want to do. My advice: leave this industry. Now. (But I would totally do anything to get you to represent me ... AFTER I calm down).

'Many of those querying you are smarter than you are, prettier than you are, and meaner than you are. We have long memories and we share agent stories just as you share "bad writer" stories.'

Translation: You're dumb, you're ugly, and the best way – no, the only way you can hurt me is by sending stupid, lame rejections to my mailbox. If I had to send my rejection to you, it'd be in the form of my foot, so when you opened the letter or email it'd pop out and shove itself so far up your fat arse that "sitting" would become something of an enigma for you. Yeah, I'm THAT mean. And don't forget, we know who you are, and when we become bestsellers and gain access to millions of $$$/£££, we're surely going to destroy you. Literally. (But ... but ... I love you still)

'I'm so tired of smug, wannabe hipsters being the gatekeepers of taste.'

Translation: I'm seriously considering assassinating you. (By sending Starbucks coffee cups with flour in them, or mugs with 'you're the best agent ever' printed on them. Oh, did you get that already? Good. We're even now).

(Note: these are very real statements made by writers. You can find more here).

Jessica Faust, undeterred by the raging battle, has sworn to resurrect her scheme on April 17. She strongly feels she's doing the right thing. However, the APO (Agents Protection Organisation) has dispatched government operatives to protect Jessica and other #agentfail participating Agents/Editors 24-7, just in case things get out of hand.

:: Note here ::
Jessica doesn't have magic powers. She can't talk to ponies either. No, other agents can't too. Actually, agents are just like all of us, with hopes and dreams and jobs, and they don't make a billion dollars an hour and take pleasure in rejecting queries like they're covert masochists.

'Jessica is important to us. She is the last living Agent with magic powers and the ability to talk to ponies, and we intend on making sure she remains earth-bound,' says Jimmy Jim Jims, Director of APO.

On the other side of the pond, rebel leader of AWAW (Aspiring Writers At War), Anon1, had this to say about Agents: 'The sooner they – agents, editors, the publishing gods – disappear, the better for us writers. Publishing-on-demand for the world!'

::Note here::
Publishing on demand or self publishing or whatever it's called is not really the answer to your problems. If you're getting rejected by every single agent it means you're doing something wrong. Honest. It means you should go back to the drawing board and fix your manuscript.

End of Award winning short story.

So, you guys, let's stop this, ok?

Be smart.

Teaser Tuesday

Guess who's back?

Yeah, I missed you too ;)

Now, to business.

Eons ago, I introduced you to David and his wife Elle at the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, where they met a confused and powerful boy named Jon. Unfortunately I've taken those teasers down, in case you first time visitors are curious. But I do have something for you.

Today, I give you Giaan, another pivotal character in my book. If you've read my half-arsed synopsis (which I wrote under 30 minutes) then you know Giaan is the character who makes a certain choice in the hopes of doing the right thing. But all he accomplishes is tearing a world at peace asunder and putting his friends, those he holds dear to him, in danger.

This teaser is from Episode 2, entitled "Welcome to the Family Business".

Snippet starts:

*Snip snip!*

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There you go. Hope you liked it.

PS: If Kathy is commenting, can she please confirm if I won the sunshine award thingy? :D

Reviews and other posts to come!

Dude, I solemnly swear I am up to some good, even though my blog is so empty these days! Honest. I've been doing more writing than usual, which is great. Finally focusing on my WIP. I'm going to participate in next week's teaser tuesday, and I promise to read everyone's teasers as well.

I have a couple of reviews awaiting public posting, 'cos I read a bunch of books, you see. Really cool books. Fire, et la. I'm still reading Wings and loving Aprilynne Pike's take on faeries. I have Beautiful Creatures clawing for my attention, and I'm also eager to get to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. (Seriously if you haven't bought this yet, you should ... go in a corner and cry!)

I miss you guys :)

So, apology accepted? Cheers :D

Outline – very important

Some semblance of normality is starting to trickle into my life at the moment, so I can at least blog about some things. I've never written an advice before, especially one for writers, but I felt I had to after reading the blogs of some writers on Absolute Writers.

Outlining.

Some published and unpublished writers don't do it.

Well, I'm going to tell you now – you need to do it.

Eschewing outlines doesn't make you smarter than those who embrace it, and it doesn't make you more awesome or the greatest writer ever because you can visualise your plot from start to end almost seamlessly. Every decent writer can do that. It's not nearly as difficult as you think it is.

Outlining helps you understand your plot in ways you never thought you did, which in turn aids the transition from idea-I-dreamed-about to written-and-completed-book – the real challenge for any writer.

Let me explain it to you like this. (For those of you studying at university level you'll probably grasp this concept better.) While tackling your dissertation, you know you're going to write a report at some point. So the smart and professional thing to do is research as you go along, writing down whatever useful information you stumble across. When the time is right, you gather your research – the outline of your report – and because that outline gives you a broad perspective of what your final report should encompass, writing your report isn't as difficult as it should've been. You probably won't use everything you uncovered from the internet and books, and you may add some new stuff to your report that never graced your outline, but your journey to completion will still be so much less stressful.

Now I know what some of you are thinking: "I don't have to sift the internet for material to write my book, at least not to a large extent. All I have to do is sit down and write. Research isn't required!"

But you're wrong. You do have to carry out research for your book, though not necessarily by looking at websites or other books. The real Information on your book is stored in your most personal library – your head. That's where your ideas reside. That's where they're bouncing about, waiting to be plucked. And that is where you must go. They're scattered, disjointed, and raw, like crude oil. What you need to do is take that crude oil and transform it into petrol, and you do that by outlining.

It's not enough that you've concocted some brilliant idea for a book: "Oh man, I have this totally awesome idea about a boy who is a wizard but he doesn't know it. He wakes up one morning and discovers he has magic powers and decides to save the world when an evil sorceress kidnaps his little sister as a plan to bring about the apocalypse! Wow – rock on!"

Yeah – awesome, dude. Really awesome. But:

• How does your MC discover his powers?
  
• What's he doing at the time he discovers his powers?
  
• Does he turn to anyone when he finds out he can make things disappear with his mind?
  
• If he does, do they teach him how to control his gifts or try to manipulate him or try to stick him in a mental institution?
  
• How does his sister get kidnapped?
  
• What is she doing at the time she gets kidnapped?
  
• Are they really close that he'd be willing to risk his life to save hers, and if so how are they close? (Just because she's his sister doesn't mean they're BFFs. Plenty people hate their sisters, or don't love them enough to embark on crazy adventures.)
  
• Where were his parents at the time of his amazing discovery? Or at the time of his sister's kidnapping? (Are they even alive?)
  
• Does he turn to anyone to join him on his adventure – friends, other siblings?
  
• Does he travel to a different world?
  
• Does the world have languages?
  
• Blah, blah, blah?
  
• Blah, blah, blah, blah?
  
• And plenty, plenty other questions.
  

So many questions.

So many important questions.

Questions that, while you can sit down and think up their answers, you may never remember to address them, because you had no outline to remind you. Then you finish your "awesome" book and send it out to your betas, and your betas come back saying things like, "Yeah, this is cool, but how come your MC didn't think about going to his parents first?" or "What happened to the dog weapon he found in page 3? He had it all along, didn't he? So why didn't he use it to easily finish off that baddy in page 16, instead of wasting time from page 4 to page 14 trying to learn all that hard magic?"

Little plot holes emerge. Soon you find yourself trying to patch things together, and the more you patch, the more your plot rips, until finally you have to rewrite the whole thing.

Then there's the classic my-novel-sags-in-the-middle problem. Your idea about Wizard Boy is crazy awesome, because:

• The first few chapters will focus on his discovery of magic, how his sister gets kidnapped, how he and his family react, and his decision to go on some insane magical adventure to save her. A great opening – will surely leave readers breathless.
  
• The last few chapters will centre on his use of magic to defeat the evil sorceress and liberate his little sister. Oh, the action – so riveting, so out of this world. Your readers will be clamouring for a sequel.
  
• The middle chapters will ... um ... er ... will talk about ... well ... his training ... and some other stuff that you don't really know right now but you're certain you'll know when you get there.
  

Yeah. Right.

If you had an outline you'd have a good idea of what the middle of your novel would look like, and if the middle is rubbish, you'll know where to add new plot devices to spice things up.

Be aware, outlines do not prevent plot holes or other writing related problems. They minimise these problems by getting you to think really hard about your plot – if it's actually something you should spend days and months writing. True, the idea of a wizard boy trying to save his sister is awesome, but then you don't want to get to chapter 15 and realise you actually don't have that much to write about, because your idea just doesn't have enough meat. That's something an outline would have told you before you went about wasting your time.

There are some accomplished writers who don't write outlines, you could argue. They just sit down and write, and in the end they produce classics. You know what else? Albert Einstein came up with all those physics theories and solved those complex physics calculations without using a calculator. Doesn't mean we all can.

In the end, no one's going to give you a "Best Book that didn't require an Outline" award, and similarly you won't get an extra score in your exams for not using a calculator when everyone else did.

The end product – a book with a great plot – is all that matters. Be smart.

Teaser Tuesday ...

... and my final one, I'm afraid. At least, for a while. I've been very, very busy of late (with school, job applications and my WIP), which explains why I haven't posted any book reviews or other stuff that I would love to talk about.

So, here it is.

Snippet starts:

*snip*

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Hope you loved it. This should give you guys an idea of what my book's all about, since its title is "The End is Where I Begin".

In an hour's time, Manchester United will be battling AC Milan in a Champions League game, and David Beckham, a Manchester United legend, will make his first return to Old Trafford (United's home stadium) in his professional career since he departed United years ago. It's going to be one hell of a football match (or soccer, for you Americans). I know I'm going to be having fun, so you guys should have some fun too.

COME ON, UNITED!!!

Teaser Tuesday

It's that day of the week again :) and this time I'm not late for my date with you guys! Here's my tease for the day. It continues where last week's teaser ended.

Background info for those who didn't read last week's teaser (you can still read it now – it's still up): Jon, the strange boy David encountered at the museum, seems to exhibit strange powers. He has stolen the golden burial mask of Tutankhamun, with the notion that he's meant to protect something from someone, and is headed out of the museum.

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*snip snip SNAP!*

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Feel free to leave comments XD

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser for the week! As usual, I'm late. Late again, Akin! No wonder I'm single lol. If I can't post something as simple as a teaser on time, how am I ever going to make it on a date on time!?

A little recap – the ever so annoying David and his adorable wife, Elle, are at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, and there they meet a boy covered in dried blood. The boy's name is Jon. The last teaser (which is still available if you want to read it) ended with Jon smashing the glass case housing the golden burial mask of Tutankhamun. Today's teaser continues from there.

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*snip snap, and there it goes!*

Snippet ends.

Hope you enjoyed it, ya'll.

Also, notice how my blog has been devoid of other posts except teasers. Well, I do have some reviews I plan on putting up, but lately I've been so busy with my WIP that I haven't had time to post anything. Hopefully I can find time this week :D