December’s mania is the Season of Giving.

Thank you to Susan Johnston of The Urban Muse for promoting the Writers’ Emergency Assistance Fund.

This fund is a 501(c)(3) charitable trust made up of donations from writers like you to help freelance nonfiction writers in times of acute financial distress. As you can see from the stories, writers who receive funds (not huge, either) generally qualify through not just one financial disaster but two—double-whammies. We’re talking about serious medical conditions like cancer draining a freelance professional’s savings and preventing them from working to support themself.

Do you believe in writing? in writers? in being grateful when you’re on the end that gets to give and not the one that has to ask?

Give what you can.

Happy holidays!

Dashiell Hammett wasn’t the world’s greatest writer. But he had something vitally important: credentials. He’d been a professional private eye for the San Francisco Pinkerton Agency for years when he began writing his ground-breaking, gritty, realistic PI mysteries set in—you guessed it—San Francisco.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was told real families don’t act the way they do in her fiction: secretive, back-stabbing, prone to multiple marriages and bare-faced lies and theft and suicide and even murder by neglect. “Oh, but they do,” she said. She was herself one of the eldest of an enormous mixed family full of malice and intrigue. Her twin youngest sisters committed double-suicide in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day, while the rest of the family was home, and are now suspected of having been lovers.

Stephen King uses a medical expert.

What does this tell us?

KNOW YOUR SUBJECT. If at all possible, have professional experience in it. Failing that, find an expert who does. Interview (that’s right—even for fiction). Do the research. Read the books, watch the documentaries, study the reference material.

When an agent reads an author bio that says, “I don’t have any experience in this field, but I can picture it,” I’m afraid that’s a donation to the circular file right there. However, when they read one that says, “I’m a retiring homicide detective with the Chicago PD,” for a mystery about an unsolved series of murders in Chicago’s notorious Englewood neighborhood or, “I’ve been the head of ER at the Las Vegas Valley Hospital for eight years,” for a novel about a recovering gambler turned doctor who gets embroiled in a local casino scam that implicates the head of a fictional Las Vegas ER or, “I spent two years interviewing young streetwalkers in the red-light districts of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and LA,” for a white slavery horror novel set in the underworld of West Coast prostitution. . .then they’re going to sit up and take notice.

Even Compton-Burnett, who wrote literary novels entirely based on inner-familial warfare, could have said, “After sixty years as the matriarchal eldest sister of a mixed Victorian family of twelve, four of whom died young and all of whom bear intense hostility toward certain others, I have accumulated a certain knowledge of human nature within the confines of the traditional Victorian family milieu.”

Of course, the quality of her writing also helped.

And for those who never get enough, Chuck Sambuchino has a whole post of author bio do’s and don’t’s.

Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest runs a regular feature in which he interviews literary agents. This week it’s children’s literature agent Erin Murphy of Erin Murphy Literary Agency.

He also runs a Successful Queries feature showing actual, real-life queries that actually, in real life, worked.

And, finally, Chuck got 20 Tips to Query Letters from literary agent Janet Reid. Twenty’s a lot of tips!

Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest runs a query workshop for a hundred bucks, but even more than that she very generously lists a whole series of helpful links about querying.

Also, Mary Kole of Andrea Brown Literary Agency has been running a Query Contest for children’s literature.

Rachelle Gardner of WordServe Literary has written a terrific piece on how to avoid getting an agent.

And there’s this great query tip from Kate Epstein of The Epstein Literary Agency: “Don’t tell me you’re writing because your day job isn’t paying off or you lost it.”

It just proves you don’t know diddley about what authors make.

We were supposed to talk about rejection again yesterday. But I knew you didn’t want to. Who wants to talk about rejection? Right before Halloween?

So instead I called up Craig Bartlett, Creator/Executive Producer of Nickelodeon’s Hey, Arnold!, author of the Hey, Arnold! children’s books, and now Creator/Executive Producer of the new PBS/Jim Henson Company children’s cartoon, Dinosaur Train, and interviewed him.

Unfortunately, that interview’s not ready to post yet. I need to get some pictures from him and verify his bio (all I know for a fact is that he worked with me on our school paper in 1980, and even that I might be misremembering. . .after all, it was the eighties) and ask him a few more questions about craft—we spent an inordinate amount of time catching up on each other’s lives and hyucking it up over shrink-wrapped geoducks.

So in the meantime we will toy with rejection only in terms of how, hey, it’s Halloween, right? It’s just a form letter, it could be from anyone, it could be about anyone. It doesn’t have teeth. You can set it on fire if you want to, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Meanwhile, there are ghosts and skeletons and and other manifestations of the really serious issues of life bumbling around out there, banging on your door and demanding treats to leave you alone.

Seriously—things could be a lot worse, now, couldn’t they?

For starters, go to Kung Fu Grippe to learn how to handle rejection like a grown-up. I don’t know who this is, but I LOVE them.

Little, Bown acquisitions editor Alvina Ling has written a piece on on Decline Letters.

The Rejectionist displays a rejection from the NY MOMA to Andy Warhol. Boy, I bet they feel stupid.

Then if you still haven’t had enough, read Kung Fu Grippe’s version of an honest rejection letter.

Happy Halloween!

You’ve got a query letter. You know what to put in your author bio. You’ve even looked up how many pages of your manuscript this particular agent you’re querying wants to see with your query.

What’s missing?

That’s right.

Laura Mosko, Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market Editor, has outlined the basics of writing a synopsis from literary agent Marshall Evans’ The Marshall Plan for Getting Your Novel Published on Fiction Addiction.

eHow, of course, has instructions on formatting a synopsis.

Fiction Writer’s Connection of Albuquerque has a useful synopsis checklist.

Writing World’s Marg Gilks wrote a nice, chatty piece on writing a synopsis back in 2001.

Pearl Luke offers a good, succinct synopsis for her novel Madame Zee.

The Absolute Write forum thrashes over contradictory synopsis advice.

And I have to include this one not because it is helpful in any way, but because the answer A: made me laugh: WikiAnswers.

Have you ever wondered why agents want to see an author bio paragraph in a query letter that is—as least ostensibly—supposed to be entirely about selling them on one particular book? They don’t want to hear about your other unpublished novels or ideas, but they do want to know whether or not you have any published books, even if they’re not the same type. They don’t want the full plot of this particular book, but they want hear what you do for a living if it matches your subject. They don’t even want to know the ending (which they’re such sticklers about with synopses), but they want to know if you’ve won a major writing award, although it obviously didn’t lead to literary representation.

Why?

Sterling Lord
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Lord:

A hopped-up madman and a psychotic angel shift the steering trannie into neutral and roll backward down Hyde Street at dawn.

America is my land, says Sam Eden as he and the saint with god in his eyes creep out Brody’s steep San Francisco driveway one morning before sunrise in 1949. They roll all the way to the pencil-thin heaven-piercing masts of the waterfront in a turgid, angel-heavy silence under the clouds, leaving Brody’s cigarette-girl wife from the alleys and red velvet backroom paradises of the International Settlement to wake to the grainy dawn between the baby in the sad sheets and the god-who-is-not in her womb. They are off to find the roads of America. Before they’re done, they’ll have met and kissed all the hobos and streetwalkers and tired seraphim turning crumpled bills into salvation on this cusp of the last mid-century before God’s throne falls with a crash to shake the ages through the blood-bellied sky.

I am seeking representation for my literary novel, BACK ON THE ROAD, completed at 70,000 words.

Unfortunately for you, who probably love this query so far, I am a belligerent drunk and an idiot. I style myself on my hero, Jack Kerouac, whom I am certain wiped his feet on women and despised his social inferiors as much as I do. I write exactly the way he did—putting a roll of paper towels in my typewriter and letting the words just breathe out onto the page in all their original genius and life force. I’ve submitted this query to I don’t know how many agents, all of them morons who couldn’t tie their shoelaces without their mommies, and gotten it bounced back in my face faster than a rubber band. You might think I’m a joker, but actually I’m a mean son-of-a-bitch who’s been convicted of assault and battery of at least three of those agents, not counting the ones who were afraid to press charges. I feel terribly sorry for myself and am only interested in an agent I can call up at all hours and insult horribly in my frequent black-outs. If you don’t believe me, ask around.

I keep submitting my stories to magazines, but they are staffed entirely by my unknown enemies who know I can write circles around them any day. I wouldn’t waste my time on contests, which are beneath me. Even you are beneath me. But what choice do I have? I hate you already.

Over-professional demeanor is not one of my glaring faults.

Sincerely,

The author who will never get representation because now the agent knows what kind of person they’d be dealing with if they took this project on

I try to stay up on the literary blogosphere. I read Twitter (never thought I would, but I do find a lot of links there). I check out posts on writing and querying and publishing. And I notice a remarkable thing—not a recent thing—but a stunning thing, when you think about the logic.

Far more people are interested in selling novels than in writing them.

This is like far more people being interested in opening restaurants than in learning how to cook. What do you suppose they’d see in this opportunity? The chance to manage staff? To brush lint off a maitre’d’s coat? To supervise kitchen cleaning? To eat?

That last one can’t be it. It takes a miniscule fraction of the effort to go to a restaurant and buy a really good meal that it does to open one and find a way to sell that meal without having to cook it.

It’s like being far more interested in becoming professional contractors than in learning how to build. Professional contractors get paid lots of money. I personally have paid a surprise $20,000 bill my contractor just found lying around. (And before you ask, yes, it was for my house!) They get paid LOTS of money, even out here in the sticks. Of course, they also spend a fortune on Worker’s Comp and liability insurance, not to mention actual salaries for their carpenters. But it looks heck of good on the books. And they get to be known as as: Jefe.

It’s like being far more interested in becoming a politician than in learning how to write laws, how to negotiate reasonably for what you want, how to work cooperatively with others, how to present a united front, how to act like an professional in your professional capacity. . .Okay, well, that analogy’s going nowhere fast.

Anyway.

Give it some thought, people. I know you’re inundated on all sides with tweets and blog posts and marketing advice about how you need to be out there hustling your platform like a fiend because You. Are. The. Next. Blockbuster. And wouldn’t it suck if your chance was just lying around being stepped over in the driveway and you never knew? (You picture J.K.Rowling in that Edinburgh coffee shop saying, “Aw, to hell with this bug-eyed twerp. I’m going to a movie.”)

So I’m going to do the best I can to steer you in the right direction, which is toward the advice agents keep giving that, it seems, somebody keeps not taking. I know you guys all take it. I know that about you. But I also know you like reading this stuff and fantasizing about how it’s going to be when taking it someday pays off:

Toughen your hide with Miss Snark, still relevant two and a half years after she closed shop and headed for Tahiti with George.

Check out the section on A Query Letter at Bookends, LLC. They also have a post on wordcount, which frankly seems to shoot a bit high to me (80,000 words at 250 words/page is 320 pages, and I don’t see a lot of 320-page first novels—my first agent told me years ago publishers like something in the 200-250-page range, which is 50,000-62,500). But it’s worth reading to get a general idea of comparing different genres.

Go to Kristin Nelson’s Pub Rants blog, scroll down, and read the Agenting 101 series. Then read the Queries: An Inside Scoop section below that.

If that’s not enough, read Scott Eagan’s You’ve Got 30 Seconds—Convince Me post.

And don’t forget Jonathon Lyons’ No Duh post!

Janet Reid and Rachelle Gardner blog regularly on their lives as literary agents and how not to get on their bad sides, repeating the same old stuff patiently over and over so we can all get on the bus. I like Rachelle because she’s fairly new to the game and hustling her weight in gold. I like Janet because she’s mouthy.

Folks like Noah Lukeman for his free ebook How to Write a Great Query Letter, although I have to say his photo kind of creeps me out. He looks like my dad saying dourly, “I AM smiling.”

You all already know Nathan and his This Week in Publishing series, not to mention that classic post, which I’m certain he got more hits on than any other: Everything You Need to Know About Writing a Novel, in 1000 Words.

And, finally, join Agent Query. It’ll give you something to read while you’re waiting to hear back from all those agents and stonewalling on your writing.

Acceptance/Rejection. Two sides of the very same coin. Welcome to the publishing world.

Please note: Not, “Welcome to the writing world!”

Publishing—Writing. Writing—Publishing. Two different words. Two different activities. Two different universes.

There is one guaranteed way to avoid literary rejection, and that is not to seek literary acceptance. It’s easy, simple, and honorable. Since we’re all writing for our own sakes anyway, there is nothing on earth more straight-forward than producing the work you want to produce and going directly on to further adventures.

My son has five hard-bound 200-page chapter books on his shelf that I’ve written for him every Winter Solstice for the past five years. There’ll be another one this year.

Why aren’t I out there peddling those babies to agents? Are they not well-written? Are they not designed properly for their audience? Do I not think anyone but my son would ever love them? (Which he does—he re-reads them in their entirety every few months.)

No. They’re great books! We all enjoy them, almost as much as we enjoy blowing the minds of his friends’ parents when they see them. Someday I might even think about selling them. (Okay, one of them is with a children’s literary agent right now, but I keep forgetting.) But the purpose of writing them was to give my son terrific reading material, and when I’d achieved my purpose. . .guess what? I went directly on to further adventures.

You know why? Because I know a secret. I know how little publishing authors really get paid.

So when you’re clutching your chest and staggering across the room with that rejection letter crumpled in your hand, remember—you got yourself into this game. You can get yourself out again. And if you decide to stay, take to heart the advice of the professionals you will be dealing with about how this game is played:

Dealing with Rejection, by Gabrielle Harbowy of Dragon Moon Press in San Francisco, lists seven points to consider when staring dumbstruck and heartbroken at that rejection letter you just got out of your mailbox. She also lists most of the following links, which I will reproduce for you below in case you skip that part at the bottom of her post—a common and dastardly habit of blog-readers the world over—because they really are that important and she really did track these down herself:

In Dealing with Silence and Rejection, witer/director Earl Newton responds to the letter you want to write, crying abjectly, “But why. . .?”

Investment, by thriller writer Joe Konrath, lists eight things to do rather than write that letter to Earl Newton.

In The Art of Reading Rejection Letters, literary agent Nathan Bransford suggests some good might come of taking a hard look at that rejection letter (assuming it’s not a form rejection, which of course could mean anything), along with a reminder that agents aren’t “STUPID. Most of the time.”

Why It’s Hard to Tell the Whole Truth, by literary agent Rachelle Gardner, admits the ugly, secret truth behind the agent’s end of the dreaded rejection letter.

Finally, I’ve written a post on rejection, myself, which I let Laverne Daley re-post on her site for freelance writers, Words Into Print, and which I will direct you to here because Laverne has been immensely generous to me with her professional advice, and you all should be reading her: Handing Rejection.

You’re going to notice a common theme running through these articles: agents are not editors. They do not get paid to tell you how to make your manuscript publishable. And they don’t have time to do it free because they have—what do you know?—real paying jobs that eat up all their time. I’m not going to get your work published for you, and an agent is not going to tell you how to fix your story.

I can’t tell you how vital this distinction is in the game, friends: agents are not editors.

You’re going to get along a whole lot better with them both now that you know.

There’s literally nothing I like better than being asked my opinion. Whee, doggies! You bet.

Lady Glamis has a situation going on over on her blog. Someone’s getting some real passive-aggressive treatment from their agent.

Now, all of their questions were answered extremely intelligently by quite a good-sized crowd, so I’m not thinking there’s much new I can tell anyone about the industry. I can tell you not to expect an agent to edit your book, because they are not typically trained editors, they are trained agents, and even if they were the vast majority haven’t got that kind of time. But maybe I can help put this whole issue into some context. And I’ll do it the way I do everything else on my blog. . .by telling you guys a story.

I got my first agent in 1996 at a writer’s conference, although—I know—everyone says agents don’t get clients at those things. She did. I did. I was a newby to book publishing, too. That was great.

I had a novel in early draft (which I never did get into decent-enough condition to send out). What I had that was worth something was a book already at the publisher’s, which unfortunately my co-author and I had already signed a contract for. I didn’t want to just sign it blind. I wanted to get an agent, for heaven’s sake! But my co-author refused to involve an agent on the grounds that it might annoy our publisher’s editor. The book was riding on his name, so I went along with him and only later showed the contract to my new agent.

She said it was a travesty.

So our book came out, and I did another draft of my novel for my new agent (which still wasn’t enough). And I started writing book proposals on new nonfiction works for her to start shopping around. I didn’t know beans about book proposals, but that was okay because I’m not sure she knew a whole lot about them, either. It was a long time ago—the publishing industry has gained about 100% more writers since then, not to mention literary agents, and things like this weren’t as carved as stone as they are now. My agent had a last name that’s extremely well-known in publishing, she was chock full o’ excellent stories about famous people she had hobnobbed with, great fun to visit, and I was doing a couple of book-readings for my just-published book around the San Francisco Bay Area, getting excited about being a published author. Altogether, a pretty thrilling time.

Then I got pregnant and, in short order, sick up the wazoo with morning sickness, and I stopped doing book-readings and book proposals and writing of any kind and just lay on the couch a lot thinking about chucking my lunch. I was in love and newly-married and a published author, so that was all still wonderful. But morning sickness SUCKED.

A lot of other things went wrong right around that time, too, including black mold in the bedroom and our landlord and lawyers and whatnot—you know how drama always seems to dogpile you.

My agent and I were now spending only as much time talking as it took to deal with the fact that our publisher’s editor (the one who discouraged both me and my co-author from letting an agent see that travesty of a contract she wanted us to sign) had not 1) edited our book before publishing it, 2) read the final draft of our book before publishing it, 3) sent me galleys to proof before publishing it, with the result that 4) it came out UP TO THE EYEBALLS with typos. No kidding—to this day, if you look on the page facing page one (page zero), you find a charming quote attributed to “Irish Murdoch.” Plus my co-author inserted various cartoons on his own authority, one of them making light of pedophilia, which he inserted into one of my chapters. This was a book about children, aimed at parents and teachers and educational administrators. Apparently nobody on that project but me knew that pedophilia is not a joke to the people who care for children.

So my agent was sending faxes and making phone calls, demanding some accountability from the publisher, all to no avail. Our editor ignored her. She could afford to—she was the head of her department at that publisher. I’d met the woman and not particularly liked her, so I wasn’t surprised, but my agent and I were both pretty bent. I wrote a letter to the editor threatening legal action after I found out she’d gone to press without sending me the galleys, and it scared her, so she kind of made an effort to act a little more professional after that for about a minute, but not much. Altogether what you could consider an unpleasant experience with publishing.

The book sank. It was important, it was the first of its kind, it was positioned beautifully (it came out the week of a local industry-wide conference highlighting its exact subject matter, which we didn’t know until it was too late because the publisher’s marketing department didn’t do a lick of marketing research). The book was actually timed to coincide with a Presidential edict, if that’s not too rich for you. There was a real possibility we could have gotten a statement from the White House supporting it. But it sank.

I didn’t really care. I was on the couch thinking about chucking.

About a year and a half later, when my son was old enough to walk and I got a chance to go back to work, I finally gave up waiting for my agent to get results and went to the National Writer’s Union, which, to her credit, she’d advised me to join the minute she met me. They told me to collect all the information about her communications with the publisher and they’d help me write a letter to the top brass.

The thing is, my agent wasn’t really interested in taking my calls anymore. I’d been a mom for a year and a half. I hadn’t been a writer. I hadn’t produced any salable book proposals. I hadn’t done a rewrite on my novel. I hadn’t even been tech writing in all that time. Just a walking Need-Meet-er for the toilet-impaired. I knew she was getting tired of hearing from me.

You can pretty much read the writing on the wall.

So I continued to call and leave messages, which I knew she would not return, and to call when I thought I could trick her into picking up, which in the days before caller-ID I could. And I finally got her on the phone and told her what I was doing with the National Writer’s Union and asked her to send me all her communications with the publisher on my behalf. Thank you for everything, sorry you couldn’t get results, that damn editor, I know you did the best you could.

I knew I’d never hear from her again.

What is the moral of my story?

The publishing industry is brutal. It is made up not of a handful of supremely talented, dedicated, genius-level professionals devoting their lives to publishing the books that need to be published and helping deserving authors get their just rewards. It is made up of a GAZILLION people of all stripes and colors, many of them talented, many of them dedicated, a few of them even genius-level, but not one of them guaranteed to make anything happen with all the other gazillion of them involved. Not one. I’m telling you: not one.

It’s all hype, folks. They’re not even the ones producing it. It’s hype that writing a whole book will result in a great query letter. It’s hype that a great query letter will result in a great agent. It’s hype that a great agent will result in a great publishing deal. And it’s hype that a published book will result in a career as an author.

Where does all the hype come from?

Unfortunately. . .us.

Look around, people.

But you know what was worth all this? (Aside from the end of morning sickness). The evening after I gave my new agent my partial to read, she called me at about six-thirty p.m. and said to me, “I never call anyone after six. Ever. But I had to call you. I love this. I love your book.” And while I was standing there reeling—thinking of everything you practice saying for just this moment when a literary agent calls you up and says just exactly that—she started quoting me to myself.

She did. She read my own words out loud to me over the phone.

So I can die happy. I didn’t sell that novel. I didn’t even get the publisher’s editor who screwed us over so badly to say, “Woops, I’m sorry.” I certainly didn’t get my one published book published properly, without too many obvious typos (for heaven’s sake) or with some teeny, tiny modicum of marketing by—I don’t know—maybe the publisher’s marketing department.

But a literary agent called me up and quoted me to myself.

And that’s got to be good enough.