Category: publication news

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Now that the contracts are in the mail, I feel like it’s time to announce it: The Taint has been accepted for publication by Lyrical Press! Here’s the teaser that I included in my query, for the interested:

St. Anne’s State Penitentiary is home to of all sorts of monsters: drug pushers, rapists, pedophiles—and Dimitris Spiridakis, convicted of slaughtering his wife and children. He insists he didn’t do it. But with no memory of the event and a plethora of evidence against him, he has no hope of ever going free again.

Until he meets other, more dangerous monsters.

First Dimitris meets the Wizard, a voodoo-practicing inmate that runs the prison from within. The Wizard carries on a feud with Edwin McHenry, an immortal killer who’s been lurking in the prison since the Civil War. Dimitris sees his opportunity. He plays Edwin and the Wizard against each other to discover the truth about what happened to his family, then sets about securing his freedom. But he doesn’t realize the chaos his actions will unleash.

It’ll be a while before the book is up for sale, even at the accelerated pace of e-publishing, so expect updates on the process here.

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Karen Romanko has said some lovely things about my story over on her blog, on the occasion of my story being chosen to represent the collection as the online sample. The upshot of this is that you click through that link, you can read the story online! For free! Though you should still totally buy the book, the link for which is right over there in the sidebar.

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Wow. A bumper crop of envelopes in my mailbox… but none of them say what I want. I do want to highlight one response I received, though. This wasn’t for my novel, but for one of my short stories:

We thought it had a promising start — the writing is good, and it’s genuinely funny in places. But… [snip lots of useful information about what this editor didn’t like about the story]. That said, please do try us again with more work in the future.

I’ll take that. Yes I will. It’s not quite the same thing as an envelope full of money, but it’s the next closest thing.

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It’s been a while since I got any agenty love. Even of the “not what we’re looking for” type–which, admittedly, is only “love” if you take a very expansive definition of the term.

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Yet another manila envelope sits at my door, waiting to be dropped in the mail slot tomorrow morning.

I’m now about halfway down my initial list of agents to query. I haven’t yet decided what to do if I get to the bottom…

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CS Inman (aka Sän) has a surprisingly good synopsis up to read. Basically everyone, everywhere, hates writing their novel synopsis, so I’m automatically impressed by anyone that manages to write a synopses that’s entertaining and informative.

This even applies to the victims participants in Joshua Palmatier’s synopsis day. Now the synopses listed here were “successful” synopses, meaning that they were for novels that eventually sold. But even so, I found most of them dull, incomprehensible, or overly long. Probably the easiest one to read was Mike Brotherton’s synopsis of Star Dragon. That one suffered from the opposite problem: it was fast-paced and easy to follow, but the writing style itself felt amateurish. (I have no idea if that applies to the book itself, which I haven’t read.)

Reading all those pro synopses made me think that maybe the synopsis was free to be long and boring, which was good because my synopsis was long and boring. It was 2500 words of dull. It was a plodding, interminable death-march through a dozen names and a series of irrelevant places.

When I set out to pare it down this week, the first pass got it down to 1250 words and something of a respectable hook.Sän and Eva have both helped me further pare it down and spruce it up, so the final draft will be under 1,000 words, and hopefully will actually help sell the novel.

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This one came back with a very polite note at the bottom:

PS: You might want to be more careful with cut and paste next time. 😉 My name isn’t (other agent’s name).

Oh, wow. So now I’m one of those writers. The ones I’ve read about on other agent blogs, the ones that send out way too many queries and get confused and insult the agents by using the wrong name. I am horribly humiliated. I would have rejected me too.

However, this agent was so winning with her smiley that I’ll be sure to put her near the top of my list next time. I’m sure she’s incredibly honored.