Starving Artist Enters The Vietnam of Blackberry Picking
We went to the beach with Adia today. As usual, she threw rocks. In the water. I don't think you understand how FREAKING AWESOME IT IS TO THROW ROCKS IN THE WATER. Adia will tell you. Also, we saw crabs, who we identified as Sebastians. There is a Little Mermaid addiction in the house.
George R.R. Martin is teaching at Clarion next year. Whew. I don't usually apply unless I'm really taken with the instructors (I was shortlisted for 2005 with Octavia Butler and Gordon Van Gelder, but no one died, damn it) so I might have to next year. I love Martin's short fiction. Though most of his short fiction is still pretty long, so I'm not sure how he's going to do grading 4k stories.
I predict one of the writing prompts will be "Create a character you adore and kill them." Followed by "Write about something you always wanted to do with your sibling that you never did."
Writing update:
The Great Faerie Strike goes on. It's a lot of fun to write, and the one project that I don't get stumped on lately, not like the many short stories I've been doing. The idea for the GFS actually came from when I was agenting. I had gone through a huge batch of queries and I was, off the cuff, just trying to think of things I hadn't seen yet. One was, well, a great faerie strike in the Victorian period. Given that the 19th century was the founding age of real labor unions as we know them today, it seemed to work.
The Victorian upper class--of werewolves--has gone too far when they fire Charles the gnome. It seems that the new synthetic blood substitutes (readily available, highly nutritious, completely disgusting) have led these socialites to believe that they can run their factories on nothing but vampire labor. And though vampires are stupid, smelly and ponderously boring, they keep quiet, thinking they're getting a good deal.
Charles is lucky enough to have a friend among the unwashed vampires of London's Otherworld--an atypically bright vampire who still has all her teeth, Jane. Charles knows that street marches of elves, fairies and gnomes won't be enough to get their jobs back. He has to help Jane convince the other vampires to hold a strike, which means that he has to convince the vampires and the rest of the Otherworld to work together. In the process, he finds himself falling for Jane, complicating his life even further, and both of them are steadily drawn into the vicious politics of the werewolf class. They don’t have to worry about escaping with their souls, since they don’t have any, but their lives—that’s the question.
The Great Faerie Strike is a complete urban fantasy novel of the 19th century at 74,000 words. (No, it's not, but that's how you end a query.)
Kudos to
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
catrambo , who helped me come up with nearly every aspect of the story through some brainstorming sessions.
posted by Spencer Ellsworth at 2:57 PM
4 Comments:
I want to read the story, but I couldn't get through the synopsis. I hate synopsiseses.
I got purple and scratched up from blackberry bushes. WORTH IT.
I hope that thing about siblings refers to playing baseball or roller skating or something. If not, don't tell me. Related: I am never reading George R. R. Martin.
Hi Spencer! Thanks for the tip about ending a query with the word count; I wasn't exactly sure whether to state it at the beginning or not, and I'm currently embarking on the wide wonderful world of querying agents about taking on my epic fantasy book "Talon".
My next dilemma is reworking my synopsis to try to force it onto one page (the majority of agents require only one page, it seems). How to do this for epic fantasy and still have it making sense... there's a challenge.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with the world.
http://www.AmandaGreenslade.com.
One page? Crazy. When I was an agent I gave people three to eight pages... and I never read the synopses. Just include the sex and violence, I say.
Hi Chrissy and thanks also for your tip. I think the guidelines on most agents websites are sort of a general rule, but then again there are others which make me think my query or submission would end up straight in the bin if defied. Do you think with the synopsis for an epic, most fantasy agents would still accept two or three pages (even if they don't read it all)?
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