School's out today. Which means one thing... PARTY. And by party I mean trying to finish my latest crop of short stories without too much robot sex. (The pixie sex, however, has no limitations.)

My good buddy Cat Rambo recently completed a story with Jeff Vandermeer that is here and is very good.

However, I have to lambast Cat for turning my attention to a reason to hate Garrison Keillor. Ira Glass had better not turn out to be a hypocritical schmuck.

I want to encourage people to paste in the first few pages of their novel to their queries. This is a much better way to get noticed, and it makes the process much faster for me.

I've been through not just queries for my internship now, but many partials. The partials add up fast, since I request so many. Of course, so far I've only read all of one, and most of another. The others didn't last past the sixth page (the end of the honeymoon period for me and novels). And all of the partials that failed so far broke basic rules for beginning writers.

Here's a list of the broken rules so far:

1. Don't introduce more than two new characters per scene.

2. Show, don't tell.

3. Make your characters likeable first and complex later. Show their good qualities, then introduce their bad qualities after the readers have a reason to like them.

4. Don't use present or future tense in fantasy, science fiction, historical or any genre novel. For that matter, don't use present tense when you submit to agents who mostly represent genre material. This also applies to omniscient voice.

5. Get inside the character's head and give them a compelling conflict right off the bat.

Of course, I'm quite aware of how easily and how well those rules can be broken. There is nothing wrong with breaking these rules and doing it well, but my internship so far has taught me that you're better off sticking to them. The novels that break a few rules and still succeed are, first of all, spectacularly good. Second of all, they often have a pro behind them. I'm thinking of Susanna Clarke and the help she got from Neil Gaiman, or Guy Gavriel Kay and Christopher Tolkien specifically.

I like to call this "Early Beatles Syndrome." The Beatles famously mentioned, a few times, how they were not the good boys they pretended to be in their early years. Their first real gigs were strip clubs in Germany, after all. But they wore the suits and sang the teeny-bop songs and painted themselves as loveably good boys in order to put themselves in a category. They made what the radio would play... and then, around the time of Revolver, their music changed successfully because they had already built up an audience. I think they probably could have done a decent proto-Revolver in 1963. But they wouldn't have been signed. So follow the rules now and break them later!

Probably the best first novel that follows 95% of the rules out there is Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. It's a one-volume epic fantasy that still manages to create a world as detailed as many ten-book series, and its only fault that would make me look twice at it is its length.