Anatomy of a bad query letter

From the Guide to Literary Agents blog is this little piece: “Anatomy of a Bad Query Letter: When a Good Idea Gets Buried and Good Intentions Go Wrong,” from Chuck. (I don’t know who Chuck is.)

Initially, my thinking was it’s waaay too deliberately contrived, simplistic and sophomoric an example to post here on the SCWC blog. On second glance, however, the query letter used as an example is one that time and time again I’ve actually come across, in one iteration or another, and in fact runs rather rampant in the industry from emerging writers not yet firmly grounded in the business.

Chuck did a good job critiquing it. A worthwhile read.

–msg

Little Chimp’s disaster in Hong Kong

The illustration website Little Chimp Society reported last week that a Hong Kong company has plundered its artwork and published the images and a number of artist interviews conducted by Darren DeLito in a $100 book without permission.

DeLito, on his personal blog, notes,

The book is available online and in book stores and every image in it has been stolen from my community website and the websites of the illustrators featured - with the interviews being the backbone of the publication. Before anyone asks - the internet is publicly accessible not public domain, copyright still applies.

“The worrying thing is all images are included on a CD in the back. This seems to give the impression that all the featured images are clip-art or copyright free which is certainly not the case.” - Jonathan Edwards

The images’ file-names on the CD have not even been renamed in any way, so you can see exactly where they were taken from. The interviews are word for word with all the typos and switching between English and American grammar. Also according to the Book the interviews were produced by the Art Director Bernadette J with no reference to the LCS.

DeLito has posted a gallery at Apefluff showing the extent of the alleged plagiarism, and it appears to be a disaster. He also has updated (1, 2) the situation a couple of times in his quest for information: “If we find the source, then we have someone to sue.”

A tip of the hat on this to artist Mark Kauffman, from whom I lifted the above image, and who has also noted, “I know I no longer snicker when large multi nationals like Microsoft or Time Warner bitch about piracy.”

-bd

The picture that started it all

Just got a call from another longtime friend of the SCWC, movie editor John Rosenberg, who was a conferee at one of our LA events, and whose manuscript nabbed the attention of editor Jennifer Redmond and agent Sally van Haitsma (as usual). His novel is so achingly close to finding a home that I’m staking money on it being yet another LA-conference book published as a result of the collective effort of so many staffers. He won the SCWC Fiction Award for it, now fingers & toes are crossed that he’ll land the deal it warrants.

And this got me thinking about the LA conference history in general, and in particular how one of the upcoming LA6’s guest speakers (Stacey O’Brien) got her gusto after attending LA4, which was held in Manhattan Beach. Sally van Haitsma put it perfectly:

I’ll never forget that day when I first met Stacey at the conference and you spoke to me about the excitement her project inspired. The endorsements we’ve been receiving for Stacey’s book have been amazing. Here’s the latest, from one of the greatest naturalists alive:

Most “me and my bird” stories are mildly entertaining at best, but Wesley the Owl is a different animal altogether. Stacey O’Brien got to know this owl with a unique combination of deep scientific understanding and rare emotional intensity, and the result is stunning, unforgettable. Read this book and you will never see owls, or humans, in the same light again.

–Kenn Kaufman
author of Kingbird Highway and Flights Against the Sunset

How exactly did Stacey’s manuscript become the focus of so much attention? Well, truth be told, Stacey included the above photo of Wesley in her submission of manuscript pages addressed to conference assistant director and registration administer Chrissie Barnett, my wife, who was so smitten with it that she called me just before Saturday evening’s banquet and insisted that I introduce her to somebody who might become a passionate advocate of Stacey and Wesley’s story.

There you go. I just read the galleys of the book and it is a wonderful read. I laughed. I cried. I suck. I suck because of maintaining this simple perspective: The only rule in publishing is there are no rules!

–msg

Shapiro welcomes submissions

Our very own flash fiction specialist and workshop leader, author Julie Ann Shapiro, has been brought aboard as flash fiction editor of what looks to be a very cool publication called Conclave: A Journal of Character. With her short stories and essays having appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune, North County Times, Los Angeles Journal, Pindeldyboz, Sacred Waters/Fire, Story South, Word Riot, Opium Magazine, Insolent Rudder, Elimae, Cezzane’s Carrots, Mad Hatters Review, Writers Post Journal, Spoiled Ink, Void, Footsteps to Oxford, Salome, Skive, Millennium Shift, Mega Era Magazine, Moon Dance, Science Fiction and Fantasy World, Green Tricycle, Long Story Short, All Things Girl, Ultimate Hallucination, The Glut, Somewhat, Uber, Moon Dance, The Quarterly Staple, Journal of Modern Post, Rumble, Cellar Door Magazine, Edifice Wrecked, Espresso Fiction, Flash Fiction — Coffee Cup Series, ISM Quarterly and elsewhere, my suspicion is that she’s going to be a fine editor.

–msg

Speaking of road stories ….

The only real question, then, is “Where to start?” The beginning, of course, seems the obvious answer, but if you’re looking to be a smart-ass, at least I’ll know where to stuff the monkeys when I finally clean up the mess in the living room.

Do we start, then, with Kerouac? Or fast forward to the 2008 Lexus Original Fiction Series?

Apparently there’s a press release, and maybe someday I’ll find the thing; it’s not exactly prominent in the results of the most basic Google search I could manage, so we’ll borrow from MediaBistro:

“The Great American Road Trip: immortalized by Jack Kerouac, it holds a special place in the American romantic imagination. Now Lexus magazine is adding to the literature of the road with the 2008 Lexus Original Fiction Series,” reads the press release Lexus magazine (which exists!) sent out today. Just think, if Jack Kerouac was alive today, maybe he, too, would have contributed a chapter to “In The Belly of The Beast,” a collaboratively-written story that “chronicles a young couple’s cross-country journey from Brooklyn to the Bay Area in their Lexus IS F.”

MB’s Emily Gould notes that she hopes that the writers got “seriously paid”, and it’s hard to disagree. Certainly, some people are going to hold their participation against them, but it’s also worth noting that Arthur Phillips, at least, has gone about the task of the first chapter with something close to a sense of irony.

I know I am to blame for what happened next—in the desert, obviously, but also in Indiana. I started the trip in high melodrama mode from the very first block, because this, after eight months together (three with him living with cannibals), was how our life began: in the stunning Beast, on our way up the West Side Highway, with me about to make more money than either of our parents could imagine earning; with him not required to contribute a single penny for the first year so he could finish turning his dissertation into a book; with a realtor’s erotic dream of a house sparkling in readiness for us; with a Napa Valley wedding to plan—and with him asking if I shouldn’t have the lumbar support set a little more forward.

Chapter two is from Richard McCann, and the third by Curtis Sittenfeld. Beyond that, you’ll have to wait until July.

Follow up on Perfomance Slam at California Center for the Arts

Hey friends, I just thought, since I was involved, that I’d give you all a follow about the Performance Slam we had at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido. I wanted to fill you in on how it went and who took home the grand prize.

And the winner was….

It was me!

Can you believe it?

Me me me me me me me!

I won!

Me!

Seriously, I NEVER thought I had a chance at winning this thing. Ask Michael. I told him I was certain the crowd was going to drag me off the podium and dismember me alive after I read my piece.

Here’s the back story.

Keeping up with Ms. Jones

Ah, the circles of coincidence. Perhaps I should not be so easily impressed. It’s a small world, after all, and given the e’er-proliferating recombinations and regurgitations of information in this, our grand digital age (we ain’t seen nothin’ yet), we might certainly expect to encounter, on a regular basis, nexes of factors that, in some small way, strike us as coincidental.

Like this. Colson Whitehead. Couldn’t tell you a thing about him, just to go by the name. Well, except from what I gleaned from Wikipedia. Turns out I heard of one of his novels, several years ago, and listened to the New York-based writer discuss his debut—The Intuitionist—on the radio.

Tap, tap, tap, your foot might say. Your inner voice might inquire, “And?”

And nothing, actually. I only mention this to add the appearance of substance. After all, I’m only posting a link and a short excerpt otherwise.

And don’t think name-dropping counts for anything significant. It’s not like I ever met Colson Whitehead. Hell, it’s not like I ever read Colson Whitehead, else I wouldn’t have had to look him up to figure out why the name was familiar. Oh, right. And what to call him. He’s not what we might call a regular at New York Magazine; “Flava of the Month” is the first article bearing his name to grace the pages of the periodical in four years:

As we return to the city, I ask her why she thinks people respond so strongly to her book. “Most people live comfortable lives, and that makes them uncomfortable.” She notices my expression and says, “That’s like a Zen koan, right, homey? Think about the times you’ve said, ‘My life is so boring—why can’t I have olfactory hallucinations or a flesh-eating disease?’ How many times have you thought, ‘Where are the killer bees, and will I be trapped alone in a desperate fight for survival when they come?’ ” I shake my head and smile: She has my number.

“There’s no shame in being average, you jive turkey,” Margaret says. “The only shame is in doing nothing about it.”

Average. That’s one thing Margaret most definitely is not. I broach this subject with her friend Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which describes how she hid out in the forests of Europe to escape the Nazis and was taken in by a gang of wolves. Whenever Misha makes it out to the States for a visit, she and Margaret go shopping for Levi’s, which are difficult to come by in her native country. She resells them to aspiring hipsters in her village at a dreadful markup.

Yes, but will it get me high?

Do you feel … do you feel like ….?

A veritable cadre over at A.V. Club have pooled their amazing geek powers to compile for us a list of drugs—great and not-so-great—that never were. From Star Trek’s synthehol and Huxley’s soma to Substance D, banana peels, and even jenkem—who remembers jenkem?—the good folks at A.V. Club have dredged up these legendary highs, or in the case of synthehol, mild buzzes, so that you don’t have to. Now you can be the life of the party when someone camps on a crappy joint rolled of roadside weed eight weeks out of Tijuana, you can crack ‘em up and knock ‘em down with snappy one-liners like, “Hey, man, don’t bogart that jenkem!”

For all you Judy Reeves fans…

…and there’s a lot of ‘em for the cherished SCWC workshop leader and author of, among other titles, A Writer’s Book of Days and A Creative Writer’s Kit: A Spirited Companion & Lively Muse for the Writing Life, here’s a little thing we recently did in which Judy can be seen demonstrating yet another one of her many, many talents: Mystery Remains Trailer No. 2.

It’s not the first time Judy’s done me the favor of appearing in a movie.  She was also featured prominently in the doculogue We, The Writer.

–msg

Redmond included in new anthology

One of our own, Sunbelt Publications editor-in-chief Jennifer Silva Redmond, is also an author of course. One of her latest stories can be enjoyed in the brand spanking new collection from Bilingual Press, Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, edited by Daniel A. Olivas. She is joined by such other stellar contributors to the book as Kathleen Alcalá, Victorio Barraga, Rigoberto González, Luis Alberto Urrea, Richard Vásquez and Helena María Viramontes, among others.

If you’re in San Diego Cinco de Mayo weekend — Arriba y adelante! — be sure to drop by Somewhere Else Coffeehouse and Books in El Cajon on May 3rd, between 2-4 PM to pick up your copy and have both Jennifer and contributor Victorio Barragán sign it. You can also catch up with her and many of the other authors at the San Diego City Book Fair on Oct. 4th. (Yeah, a ways off but you gotta plan these things.)

–msg