Picture it & Write Publication

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book, books, charity, Picture it & Write, Picture it and Write Publication, poetry, publishing, reading, writing

We interrupt your normally scheduled Picture it & Write to bring you this important announcement.

It’s been a little over a year since Ermisenda started hosting Picture it & Write.  We look forward to it every week as you continue to dazzle us with your contributions. Whether you’ve had dreams of becoming a published author or you just contribute for fun, here’s your chance to have your writing in a publication.  100%* of sales from this publication will be go to The Girl Effect, a movement to improve the world through empowering girls to become educated leaders of their communities rather than child brides.

If you would like your work considered, paste the original contribution in the comments section of this post with a link back to the original, whether that be on your blog or a Picture it & Write post.  Submissions will be accepted until February 28, 2013.

You are encouraged to go through the archives and contribute to any that inspire you.  For a gallery of images, check the Facebook gallery or Pinterest board.

Not all submissions will be printed.  Ermilia, LLC will chose which submissions at the sole discretion of Ermisenda and Eliabeth.  If you are a photographer and would like to donate a picture to the publication, e-mail ermilia [at] live.com.au for consideration.

Rejection Quote

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ABC, authors, Castle, comedy, failure, publishing, quotes, rejection, television, TV, writing

“Rejection isn’t failure.  Failure is giving up.  Everybody gets rejected.  It’s how you handle it that determines where you end up.”

Castle S4E3: “Head Case”

Castle is a comedy about a writer who follows NYPD Muse Detective Beckett around while he writes mystery novels.

Spoilers follow.

Outside Looking In

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books, jobs, publishing, rants, Robert Gray, Shelf Awareness, So You Want to Write a Novel, Starbucks, Twitter, writing

In “Bookselling Is Harder than It Looks,” an article by Robert Gray in the Shelf Awareness newsletter (http://www.shelf-awareness.com/), Robert described a bookseller’s job being like a duck “which appears to float serenely on the water’s surface while paddling like hell underneath.”

Here’s just a bit of what those customers nestled in their comfy reading chairs planet-wide don’t see because you are doing your jobs so well: today’s deliveries stacked up in shipping & receiving; cartloads of as yet unshelved books; sections needing to be culled for returns; returns waiting to be boxed and shipped; staff meetings; internal staff rivalries; scheduling conflicts or sick days that result in overstaffing/understaffing (whichever is the worst one that could happen at this particular moment); ordering to be done; bills to be paid (or strategically delayed); websites and blogs to be updated; author events to be planned and executed….

This isn’t that different from my days at Starbucks only our deliveries were perishable.  Crates of milk stacked up in the back needing to be sorted into the apropriate walk in freezer; merchandise to be unboxed and put on shelves; a cafe that had to be cleaned every ten minutes even though there was a line out the door, staff meetings; extra staff meetings for the holiday rush; internal squables over who was going to suffer headset duty; bitter rivalries over who was promoted; scheduling conflicts and people who left in the middle of their shift if they bothered to show up at all.  I don’t think we ever had an overstaffing issue.

And then you have the customers.  We had customers literally throw the drinks back at us through the drive through window.  I’ve had a customer look at a tan and a brown cupcake and ask me which one was chocolate.  I’ve handed a customer a pink frappicino and a brown frappicinno and ask me which one was strawberry.  After calling out a drink for customer XYZ including the drink name I had customer ABC come up, take a sip and inform me that this was not their drink.  I’ve had people wander off and “forget” to pay for their drink so I’ve refused to make it until they did.  I’ve had people order a coffee traveler (which takes about 30 minutes to prepare) through the drive through and have the nerve to be disgruntled when I ask them to pull around out of the way so they’re not making people behind them wait.  Customers in the drive through have asked me to recite every pastery we currently have in stock because they are too lazy to come inside… and the list goes on.

I doubt any job is as glamerous as it looks.  Take this video about some of the misconseptions about writing and publishing.

If you resemble the “novelist” and I use this term loosely… good luck to you, I would find a new day job unless you’re a trust fund baby.

Even reading the job descriptions may not prepare you, so be careful before you think any job is easy, tranquil, or glamerous.

-Eliabeth Hawthorne

Follow the people mentioned in this post on Twitter @ShelfAwareness and @Fresheyesnow

Twitter Rants

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advice, publishing, rants, Twitter, writing

I love Twitter!  I did not think it was possible to sound intelligent in 140 characters, but I was wrong.  For one thing, you can post links to blogs where *gasp* you can expand past the 140 character restriction.  Twitter also has some awesome rants and advice from agents and authors.

Here are some of my favorites:

“Awkward when I start a manuscript, am digging the POV character, and then they kill someone and I realize I was supposed to find them evil.”
-Amy Boggs (@notjustanyboggs)

“How NOT to get your MS read by an agent: Police blow up briefcase left for lit agent: http://yhoo.it/rusZ58”
-Lydia Kang (@LydiaYKang)

“Don’t quote your rejection letters. They don’t count as “reviews”. #pubtip”
-Evan Gregory (@EvanJGregory)

“Here are words and phrases I like to see in query letters: Edgy, contemporary, fast-paced, no love triangle, no vampires, badass chicks, etc”
-Bree Ogden (@breeogden)

The rest I cannot quote exactly, because they are too far back in my list, but they involve tips like, do not show up in person with your entire manuscript, do not bribe agents with food, do not send pictures of yourself, and for the love of everything… if you are stupid enough to call in to submit your query (which btw you shouldn’t do ever) know what agency you are talking to.

Lastly, not so much a rant, but the Tweet that inspired the post:

“The things I research while writing–what does rabbit taste like…what kind of texture does it have. Yes, the things I won’t do for my work”
-E. S. Lark (@eslarke)

I’ve gone to my brother’s work to collect bar stories in order to have more realistic scenes for our book (some of the characters are bartenders) and I’ve consulted with psychologists on behavior responses for some of our more colorful characters.

What happens in your book that you decided to research rather than experience yourself?  What advice have you gotten from Twitter people that you would like to share?

Follow me on Twitter @EliaHawthorne, mention this blog post and I’ll follow you back.

Authors, beware

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agents, authors, beware, publishing, queries, query letters

For any other authors out there following our progress, there are many, many places to find literary agents, including but not limited to AgentQuery, Google, PublishersMarket, AAR, and Twitter.  Yes, even Twitter.  Some are obviously more legit places to look than others, but that does not mean that all agents (on Twitter for example) fall into the red flag territory. 

For example, I am currently following Amy Boggs, who I found on her company website, Donald Maass from the same company, and that lead me to agents that they follow or reTweet.  However, you still have to be careful of people claiming to be literary agents like this:

“Even if you don’t use my services, you have to pay me a commission or you can’t remain a client.” (Barbra Annino via Twitter)

This could not be more of a red flag.  Even if you do not use her services you have to pay?  Seriously?  No legit agent will charge you a reading fee, much less a fee for not using them at all.  Agents make money when you make money, which is one reason it is good to have one.  Members of the AAR are automatically anti-red flag, and everyone else falls somewhere in the middle.  So what’s an author to do?  What if someone on Twitter looks promising?  Well, chances are you will not find their mailing address on Twitter anyway, but even if somehow you do, do your homework.  Your MS is your baby and you do not want anyone conning you out of it.  Ask around, see what other people saw about them (check the Writer’s Water Cooler, it often comes up when you Google the agent) and check their company website, see what their current client list is like and their most recent sales.

Good luck to all of you who are in the same boat as Ermi and I.  Querying is a long process and there’s still the step of getting the agent to lure in a publisher.  There are no short cuts.  I can’t imagine a short cut to writing a full MS, so think of this as part of the process.