Tip: A Really Good Book About Agents

The best book I've found on what agents really do, what to expect from them, how the agent/client relationship actually works, how to assess an agent's quality, how to tell if they are reputable or scamsters, etc., is Literary Agents: A Writer's Guide by Debbie Mayer. It's a little older than some of the stuff out there, so you might need to get it used, which you can do on Amazon (here's the direct link: Amazon.com: Books: Literary Agents: A Writer's Guide) or A Libris (here's that link: Alibris - Used, New and Hard-to-find Books, Music and Movies).

The book also has some agent listings in the back, which I did use in my first mass mailing. However, it's not that large a section, and for mass-mailing of queries purposes, you're probably better off with the latest edition of a Writer's Market.

As always, good, good, good luck!

No Comment

Hi, all. I've deleted the comments function - it still seems folks are in general more comfortable talking to me via email. Maybe because it's more private? Anyway, thanks to you who commented. And don't forget to email me - the link's over there at the right in the sidebars!

And by the by, yes, my friend Dorothy, who I mention in the audio post below, does indeed play a part in the name of my protagonist Dorothy in The Suspicious Room. As does Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. It's a name that makes you think of a young woman who enters a different world.

From Deep in Berkeley

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Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown

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Peace on Earth.

More Suspicious Room

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Miscellaneous Helpful Thoughts

Okay, first, the good folks at Blogger have posted a fairly helpful article, BLOGGER - Knowledge Base - How To Get A Book Deal With Your Blog. Give it a read. Note that it refers to Wil Wheaton, whose acting career, including, of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation, ensures him a pretty high Google quotient. However, the main point is that a Web presence, steady activcity in what you love and what you think is fun to work on, and persistence can combine to do terrific things. So see if any of the good info and links in the article apply to you. You might also want to check out Wil Wheaton's blog, WIL WHEATON dot NET. He's a very nice, real, unpretentious guy.

Next, I would like to call your attention to the DVDs of M. Knight Shyamalan. If you rent the DVDs for Unbreakable and Signs, you will see that M. Knight Shyalaman has decided to include "early" films of his on them. By "early" I mean really early. These are things he did when he was just beginning to mess around with a camera. I applaud him for making these (charming) bits of his work public, because it allows us all to see the long road he took from beginner to successful feature film director. He's showing us how he started out. So often, we compare our work - writing or art or film or whatever - to the highly finished work of very seasoned, successful professionals. But the work of these people did not always look like it looks now. They had to do all the beginning stuff first, although for some reason there seems to pesist a myth that professional writers, or artists, or filmmakers, were doing top-quality professional work right from the beginning, with no backing or help at all. Hah! And again I say, Hah! Beginners need to compare their work to the beginning work of experienced artists. This helps you realize that everyone has to walk that path. There is nothing magical about the people who have reached their goals. They have only been on the path longer than you.

Tip: Sometimes Aristotle's Three Unities Help

Well, first I wanted you all to know that Publishers Marketplace, that site I find so useful, is having an extended free trial over the holidays. You can use all its services for free through January 4. Here's the link to sign up: Publishers Marketplace: Register. See how you like it and you can get a paid membership later. Or get as much info as you can before January 4!

Now then, this is something I have talked about with my students: what did Aristotle say in his essay Poetics about the writing of tragedies in his day that has relevance to modern writers? Well, this is where there are to be found Aristotle's "three unities": unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action (sometimes called unity of plot, circumstance, or situation). Aristotle believed that perfectly constructed tragic plays (they didn't have prose fiction in ancient Greece) should take place within twenty-four hours, one day (unity of time); in one place, not moving from house to house or village to village (unity of place); and that all action and everything else in them should further the plot and situation of the piece (unity of action).

If a piece of your work is sprawling a bit out of control and hard to get your hands around, try using one, two, or all three of these unities. Mostly we try to use the third one anyway, but even so, think about having your subplots further your main plot, instead of being off to the side, and keeping your imagery in style in tune with the overall mood of the piece. Experiment with having everything happen in one day or in one place. If one day really seems too limiting, try one week or month or year. If one place seems too limiting, try keeping it to two or three. You may be surprised at how much this helps the results and how much it helps you focus. And in flash fiction, which you know I love and which needs such clarity and brevity and focus, these things can help even more than usual!

Have fun. Has anyone entered Glimmer Train's current short short fiction contest yet?

New Flash Fiction: A Wishbook Christmas

I really do like Christmas, but like I said, some part of my right brain must be channeling a little Ebeneezer Scrooge.

A Wishbook Christmas

Deirdre and Frannie must have been bad, very bad, that day in December, because even when they came out of their room ready to say, "We're sorry," their mom said, "No you're not." She said they weren?t going to have any Christmas and she was going to call Sears and cancel the orders from the Sears catalog, the special one with all the toys called the Sears Wishbook. Deirdre and Frannie cried while she dialed the number. The whole phone vibrated as she put her finger in the holes and twisted them around hard. And after each fateful dial, they heard the click-click-click as the round telephone face circled back to the beginning, inexorably, inescapably ready for the next digit. "Yes, hello, I have some orders I want to cancel," their mother said crisply into the phone. Her nose was in the air. They were on their stomachs, they kicked the floor, they pounded their fists on the carpet, they wailed, they tore their clothes. She paused and covered the mouthpiece with her hand. "Are you sorry? Really sorry?" Their heads went down, down, their faces screwed into the floor. "We're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry," they cried into the carpet. "Really, really sorry?" They pressed their noses deeper into the fibers. They were beyond wailing now, they only nodded. Their mother said in the same crisp voice into the phone, "Never mind." Their heads never quite went up all the way again.

On Christmas morning the presents were knee deep around the tree, they reached to the very walls of the living room. Frannie looked at Deirdre, who was older, but Deirdre didn't know how to look or what to say. Their mother beamed.

Okay, These Pics Should Actually Show Up

Apparently the problem with the image in the Dec. 16 post is that I am storing it on the Geocities server, and Geocities gets all cantankerous and persnickety about remote hosting. Although if you have IE and you click on the image URL, and then click back, it'll cache it and it will show up, so what the heck, I'll leave it there, in case anyone's interested. But for those of you who don't feel like going to all that trouble just to see a picture of my husband directing, here are a couple more that Sean Cain is kindly hosting on his site, Velvet Hammer Films.

Mehran and his camera.

Sean Cain, looking very skinny, holding boom, Mehran doing something directorial, actor Alan Craig at work.

Pic of My Directorial Husband

Couldn't resist. This is Mehran directing his short The Hundredth Monkey, now in the Philadelphia Film Festival and the Director's View Film Festival. That's his pal and fellow emerging filmmaker Sean Cain in the tree; the guy dressed as a priest is actor Alan Craig; the guy in blue is lead actor Kyle Puccia; and the one with his back to us (of course!) and the earphones is Mehran.

Production still for The Hundredth Monkey

Tip: Leads for Getting Your Short Stories Published

This one, like some of the other tips, involves looking at the books of authors whose writing or subject matter you think yours resembles. If an author you resonate with has published a book of short stories, go to the book store and look at the copyright page. Often at least some of these stories have already been published in literary reviews, and sometimes these are reasonably accessible reviews, that is, not just The New Yorker or Esquire. Write down the names of the magazines and reviews where the stories were published. Look online or in Writer's Market for their addresses and submission procedures. When you send them your submission, mention in your query letter that you are influenced by the work of said author and that you were so pleased to see that the magazine published that author's work.

Take heart if it takes some time - or lots of time - to get your short stories published. These places are literally swamped with submissions, and you are competing not only with those manuscripts, but also with published authors whose agents and publicists are also working on getting their stuff into these venues. (How unfair! I know.) But little things like this will increase the odds a bit and at least show you are a serious, thoughtful contender.

A Second Installment of The Suspicious Room

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Tip: Set Aside a Small Amount of Regular Time for the "Getting Published" Work

I know -- we become writers because we want to write, not because we want to send hundreds of query letters and investigate which literary reviews are best for us and schmooz and network. These things are an entirely different skill set, and we have varying degrees of ability at them. But that's okay.

Here's what worked for me: set aside a small amount of time to deal with getting your writing out there, the same way you set aside time for writing. Remember I said set aside an hour a day for your writing if you can, and if you can't make it a half hour a day, or an hour or a half hour three days a week, or fifteen minutes a day, or one hour twice a week, whatever you can manage? The important thing is to make it part of your routine. It's the same thing for this stuff. Set aside fifteen minutes a day on the weekdays, or ten minutes, or one hour on a weekend day, or something like that. It doesn't have to be that much time. Then during each of those time increments, do one thing that will help you on your way. It can be small: look up the address of one literary review you want to send your work to, write one paragraph of your query letter, make one phone call to a venue to find out how much they charge if you want to have a reading event there, email one contest to get its guidelines, print out one copy of your story according to contest guidelines, send one story out in the mail. Whatever. At the end of a few months you will find you have accomplished more than you thought you could.

I even find these administrative tasks are kind of a nice break from the writing. They can have high stakes in our minds, and make us nervous, it's true, but they are less emotionally draining than the actual writing. For me, anyway. And when you do them regularly, you develop a sort of detachment that makes them easier.

So, as always, good luck!

Fiction: My Christmas Story

First, the audio blog directly below this post is me reading the very first page of the novel I'm working on now called The Suspicious Room. Fifteen-year-old girl named Dorothy, French countryside, werewolves. Enjoy a listen if you are so inclined. Audblog is addictive and I may be doing a lot of this!

Second, I couldn't resist. 'Tis the season. Some of you may know I have a bona fide published Christmas story, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown, in my second collection (The Falling Nun and Other Stories). So click on over to it if you like. This was the last version I sent my editor, so there be a proofreading mark or two not incorporated but basically this is what's in the book.

Hmm . . . getting to be time for another industry-related tip, isn't it? I'll get right on that.

First Page of My Novel-in-Progress, The Suspicious Room

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Someone Is in Another Film Festival!

So can I just say that my husband Mehran received an email this morning that his short The Hundredth Monkey has been accepted into the Director's View Film Fest?! This is a very prestigious festival (honorary chair is Francis Ford Coppola). Like I said, he's shy about this stuff, but I don't have to be!

As anyone who knows him knows, Mehran has worked very hard and very long for this. And FYI, there was no magic or rocket science to it. (He just said to me, "Nothing is overnight.") He did the same thing I'm always carping about, step-by-step, day-by-day, as much as you can manage.

So hang in there and keep writing or filmmaking or painting or whatever it is you love!

You May All Comment Now . . .

Eager as always to make it easy for y'all to give me feedback or ask me anything, I've added the HaloScan comments function to this blog. (Yes, I just went online crazy today, it must be something in the Christmasy air . . .) Anyway, I think you just click on the "Comments" link under each post and can write stuff in. All my previous postings list zero comments now, but hey, if you actually want to go back and comment on those too, go ahead! You have 1000 characters in which to make your opinions known. And of course you can always email me.

Okay, later now. Really.

Let's Try a Different Method for "Would You Like E-Mails of Each New Post?"

The more I thought about it, the more I realized it just makes me nervous to tell any of you folks to sign up for a Yahoo! group. Even if they have decent security, there are lot of wily disreputables out there dredging for email addresses. I would never forgive myself if anyone ever got spammed or spoofed through anything even remotely connected with this blog. So, how's this? If you'd like to receive emails of these posts when they go up, just email me and tell me so. I'll keep my own mailing list (which I will never under any circumstances use for any other purpose or give to anyone else) and just cut-and-paste it in each time. Much safer. Like I said, my email's over there in the links at the right.

Later!

Would You Like E-Mails of Each New Post?

So I've just found out that Blogger (this is a nice little service provider, isn't it?) has a feature whereby I can get a Yahoo group going, combine it with Blogger's email feature, and email each new posting to a mailing list. Would anyone out there like to be on this mailing list and get these oh-so-exciting-and-inspirational posts as they happen? Let me know.

If you would, just send me an email and tell me. (Link to my email is over there at the right.)

Alternatively, I did just set up a group (pamelarafaelberkman@yahoogroups.com) moments ago and you could go join that, but since they ask you for information about yourself when you join, and I'm not sure what they use it for, you might not want to. If you want to give me your email to put on this mailing list, I can just do it in a screen called "add members" and they don't get any other information about you, or use the address for anything else.

Flash Fiction: Junior High

Sometimes I whip out a little flash fiction either to warm up before I start my two hours' morning work on a novel (currently I have this fun one going about a girl who goes to a mysterious village in the French Alps and uncovers werewolf-y goings on) or else as a break right afterward. I thought I was in a pretty good mood this morning but clearly there was some bah humbug lurking around in there somewhere. Here's the dark little number I came up with (feedback welcome, as always):

Junior High

Because, you see, they turned on her. Marti had a few friends, three, keeping her from the bottom of the heap, but they turned. Maybe the day one of their fathers called her Townhouse Trash when he thought she couldn’t hear. Her parents had moved to the suburbs because the schools were better. They lived in the same complex as all the newly divorced moms and everybody else’s maid. Lisa and Caitlin and Ashley all had their own houses. With breakfast nooks.

Marti was walking across the overpass above Green Bay Road. To home. Where they couldn’t see her.

“Hey!” they called. Lisa was on a bike and Caitlin and Ashley walked along next to her. “We want to talk to you.”

They got her with her back against the railing. The cars whizzed by below her, on their way to Ravinia, the outdoor theater, to classical concerts outside in the warm autumn and music school for gifted children.

“Okay.” Marti was defiant. “Talk.”

Ashley stuck out her upper lip to parody Marti’s overbite and Caitlin mimed the soccer shot Marti missed in gym class that afternoon. Lisa called out, prancing over her bike, “Ooh! Ooh! I’m so cool! I only wash my hair once a week and wear a rugby shirt every day!”

Marti’s two striped rugby shirts were bought with her baby-sitting money. Her parents didn’t understand about how that was all anyone at school wore. She was saving for a pair of Levis, too, so they couldn’t make fun of her Sears Toughskins anymore. The real down jacket was way out of reach, and there wasn’t anything she could do about her oily hair. She didn’t wash it very often, it was true. It was like she was afraid she would fall apart in the shower.

Marti leaned over. Lisa’s hair was long and dark and smooth and neat on either side of a white middle part. The cars whizzed by below her.

Just ignore them, her parents always said. Ignore them.

She grabbed a fistful of Lisa’s hair from either side of the part. How soft it was, how silky. how straight. Like all the really popular girls’ hair. She pulled. She pulled as hard as she could. Some of it broke off in her hand. Lisa screamed. The cars whizzed by. Ashley and Caitlin tried to get her off Lisa but they couldn’t. She hung on. She leaned back over the railing like she would take Lisa over by the hair. The cars whizzed by below, far below.

She pulled hard. So hard. The tears pulsed down Lisa’s face, the screams echoed, bloodcurdling, throat-cutting, satisfying. Marti let go, grinning. They turned. They ran.

It was the best thing she ever did.

She never regretted it. Never. When she was fifty, married, with children, full of love, she was still glad. And while she idly watched the news, getting breakfast ready for a family, her curls coifed and perfectly highlighted swinging across her back, she saw the jocks and beauty queens, saw even the banal nobodies who only watched, pouring out of the high school cafeteria. Saw the SWAT teams. Heard the rapid-fire of the boys’ sub-automatics.

Oh! Good for you, she thought, her jaw tight, her hands still around the straight silky hair while the cars whizzed by below. Good for you.

How Do We Like the Audblog?

Well, I just left an audio blog using the free trial for this new feature, offered on Blogger. Pretty fun and easy from my end! Let me know if you like it, had trouble with it, whatever. I'm seeing if I want to spring for it for the whole year. As I say below, I have to see if it plays in anything except Windows. Since I'm a Mac girl myself, I don't want to cut out any other Apples.

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