Announcement!

Well, I've been wanting to say these words for some time now: I HAVE AN AGENT!

And all last week, I've been absolutely desperate to add: AND IT'S JESSICA SINSHEIMER!!!!!!!!!

Time for the dance of joy!

This is how she makes me feel. 

When I began thinking about how I wanted to tell our agent story, I immediately got a little panicky.  We do not have a traditional courtship to share, and I didn't want Jessica to get flooded with unconventional emails and the like, so I asked her if she didn't mind if I shared exactly how we got together.

She, being the wonderful and awesome human she is, said of course.

Ok, how'd I find Jessica?  A contest.  Specifically, Cupid's Agent Invasion (AWESOME blog with AWESOME contests, btw.  www.cupidslitconnection.blogspot.com).  But that's not the unconventional part.

How'd I get her interest?  Tweeting about a WIP I hadn't even started.

Oh snap, you guys are thinking, that is really not smart of you, sword-bride-girl.

Oh, I know, I know.

Anyway, it went a little something like this.  Jessica had tweeted that once an agent and author corresponded enough, you may want to start talking about WIPs.  She had asked for my manuscript a month prior, and I tweeted back a little bit about my next project.

Jessica's a foodie-- I knew this.  I thought the tweet would make her smile and maybe she'd remember it.  I said, "My WIP is about a time-travelling food critic."

I expected a smiley-face at best.

I got a "tell me more".

Oh dear.  I hadn't started GASTROPHYSICS yet. I had an outline and a query.  Ok, ok, I'm a nerd who writes queries ahead of time. Sue me.

Anyway, I sent her the details (she knew I had zero word count) and she said she squealed out loud in her office when she read it.  Then five minutes later she clarified the squeal and bounce was a good thing and that her intern may be terrified of her.

So we begin corresponding about this WIP.  Then I wrote a little. 

THEN SHE ASKED TO READ THE LITTLE TINY SAMPLE.

Oh no you didn't! is what you're thinking, isn't it.  Why on earth would you share a rough, unfinished first draft, unbeta-ed, with your dream agent?!  ARE YOU CRAZY?!

She was very persuasive.  I sent it. She asked for more.  I wrote more.  This little dance continued and one day that email about "when's a good time to talk" showed up in my inbox and...

... The rest is history. 

Needless to say, I'm thrilled and truthfully a little smitten.  We've talked on the phone a few times and she makes me positively giddy. We're in sync in so many ways, it's actually baffling to me how I could find someone so perfect to represent me.  Plus, Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency is so amazing and prestigious!  Wow!

Ok, so there it is.  I have been smiling for a week straight thanks to this funny, professional, smart and charming agent.  My agent.  :D

Writer Interview: Meghan Drummond

Ok, so dream theories, the Trojan war, teen ghost hunters and manuscripts under your mattress?  All in a day’s work for today’s writer interview with Meghan Drummond.  Come get to know this up and coming talent!

 

AG: Tell us about your current project.

MD: I’m currently working on two. One is in the querying stage, and the other is almost complete. The one I’m querying for is about a sixteen year old who turned to paranormal investigations after the death of her younger brother. Actually finding a ghost turns out to be more trouble than she expected, especially when it follows her from the haunted house she was investigating to her New England boarding school.

The work that is still in progress is almost finished, that one I’ve been laboring over for close to six months. It’s a retelling of the Trojan war, but with a young adult paranormal twist. I don’t want to give too much away, but I did get to spend a lot of time researching the nature of dreams for it. Which was so much fun. Everyone should spend an hour reading about dream theories before going to bed, you’ll have the craziest dreams ever.

AG: Is it your first book?

MD: Nope! I’d always heard you needed at least one under the mattress. I have three. Mattress novels are really useful for a few reasons. There was one character that I absolutely loved from a mattress novel, but as I reread I realized I had created a novel that was all character and no plot. Now that character is a side character in the book I’m querying for. It’s great to have over a hundred pages of backstory for one side character. And I still read my mattress novels whenever I think my writing hasn’t improved.

AG:  How did you tackle the revision process before you queried? Did you use CP’s?

MD: I took a month off right after I finished. I was too in love with my own work to see it clearly, let alone revise it. I needed that month of believing it was perfect. Then I re-read it. And cringed. It was so far from perfect! I started sending it off to a few friends who wrote, begging them for honest feedback, and I got it. Finally, I knocked out the dents and added some shine, then I started querying. Finally an agent told me that my MC was too old for Young Adult, and I needed to change EVERYTHING. It was hard to hear, but I looked around and they were right. I changed a ton of details, rewrote the character and created a timeline for all of their new birthdays and important life events that reflected the three year backwards jump. I just finished that process and have started querying again. It took me a month to write my first manuscript. It’s taken me close to a year and a half to get it revised. I understand that after I get an agent, there will probably be even more revisions.

AG: What was the querying process like for you? Any tips?

MD: At first, I just kinda flailed my arms at the query process, and failed hard. I don’t recommend that. This time I’ve been a lot more organized.I started following a lot of agents on twitter, and made an excel spreadsheet with all of my ‘dream’ agents, complete with the agencies they worked for, and what they needed in a submission packet. I’ve been querying one or two at a time, and just slowly making my way down the list. I think a list is really important. Before I was wasting a lot of time querying multiple agents from the same agency, or querying people based on order in the alphabet on querytracker, or because they looked like they had kind eyes in the picture on their agency website.



AG: Do you blog? Where can we find you on Twitter and the internet?

MD:  I love twitter, and can be found @meghdrummond. I don’t blog much, just because my writing time is precious and usually gets dedicated to works in progress. You can find my blog at Snarkyforhire.blogspot.com.

AG:  What online resources have you used to help your writing and querying and revision process?

MD: Agents blogs are wonderful, and can be an unexpected source of revelation when you can’t figure out why your query got rejected. I love scribophile, and think that the community there is a great one if you need some help with revisions; they have provided some of the most honest feedback I have ever received.I actually pretty soundly got my butt kicked by some of the folks on Scribophile, and thanked them for my asskicking whole-heartedly. Recently I found the Teen Eyes website, which provides a lot of great services for writers.

AG: Any extra info you’d like to add or discuss?

MD:A while back a close friend told me something that really made writing less frustrating for me, and I think it was good advice. Publishing is the goal, but writing is the dream. Don’t lose sight of the goal, and work toward it, but don’t forget you’re already living the dream.

 

Ok, that’s my new favorite quote, Meghan.  Thanks for sharing!  Everyone, go follow Meghan and her snarkiness!

#GUTGAA retraction

I am withdrawing my query from #GUTGAA.  For good reasons.  Best of luck, everyone!

Guest Post: She-Wulf author Sheryl Steines

Please enjoy this guest post by Sheryl Steines, author of the action-packed urban fantasy, She Wulf. Then read on to learn how you can win huge prizes as part of this blog tour, including a Kindle Fire, $550 in Amazon gift cards, 5 autographed copies of She Wulf, and 5 copies of its companion, The Day of First Sun.

If you could go anywhere, meet any person, in any period of time, where would you go, what would you do, who would you meet?  I know this is all hypothetical, but hey, I write in the pretend–in the fantasy.  So suspend your disbelief,  and come play with me for a moment.

Not such an easy question to answer, is it?  One option would be to go and meet someone long dead–perhaps Elvis circa 1959 makes your heart swoon.  Would you take the opportunity to meet a favorite entertainer, or maybe you want your trip to count for something meaningful?  But what if you made a change, saved a life, corrected a wrong, how would your alterations affect the future?  An interesting notion, don’t you think?

As I wrote She Wulf, my time travel adventure, I developed the idea of changing the past and how that might lead to the future you are trying to change.  Maybe our interference might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  That’s when The Terminator movie struck me as so relevant and important in how I shaped my ideas of time travel.

For those who don’t know, The Terminator is a science fiction adventure where machines take over the world.  The machines are human like cyborgs, ruled by an artificial intelligence program called Skynet, whose sole mission is to annihilate humanity.  In opposition, the resistance was created by John Connor and they are winning the war.  In an effort to prevent the resistance from being founded, the cyborgs send back one of their own, to murder John’s mother Sarah, before he’s born.  To protect her and ensure he is even conceived, he sends back one of his soldiers (his father), to protect her.  Got all that.  So finally to my point, and I realize this all imaginary and takes place on celluloid but really, had the cyborgs never sent back the terminator, John Connor never would have sent back his father and he wouldn’t have been born.  But what can you expect from a bunch of cyborgs anyway?

For me, in She Wulf, you couldn’t just decide one day to go to the past unless you found yourself there when the past was actually the present.  Huh?  Picture it this way.  It’s 2012 and you want to go to the past, let’s say to the year 1900.  You can’t go unless during the year 1900, you actually showed up.  I know, it’s all theory, but that’s how it happened when Annie Pearce finds herself falling through a time portal, back to eleventh century England.  She understands the concept of time travel, of altering the past and how it can affect the future which makes her reluctant to get involved.  But she realizes that she had already been there, in the year 1075, had already altered time and whatever she touched or changed or created, was meant to be touched, changed or created.

So still think time travel is cool?  I know sometimes we’d like a do-over, the ability to change a decision, to not have to live through pain and despair.  But sometimes, these things make us who we are.  Each experience shapes us, each tear, each laugh, adds to our self.  We gain something.  All those things that I’ve experienced, including the loss of a child, made me who I am.  Without that, could I have written She Wulf?

So time travel–can you see it?  What if it was real and I could look at it from a purely joyful perspective, without those darned consequences hanging over my head.  Maybe an afternoon with Elvis would be fun.

As part of this special promotional extravaganza sponsored by Novel Publicity, the price of the She Wulf eBook edition is just 99 cents this week–and so is the price of its companion, The Day of First Sun. What’s more, by purchasing either of these fantastic books at an incredibly low price, you can enter to win many awesome prizes. The prizes include a Kindle Fire, $550 in Amazon gift cards, and 5 autographed copies of the book.

All the info you need to win one of these amazing prizes is RIGHT HERE. Remember, winning is as easy as clicking a button or leaving a blog comment–easy to enter; easy to win!

To win the prizes:

1. Purchase your copy of She Wulf for just 99 cents
2. Purchase your copy of Day of First Sun for just 99 cents
3. Enter the Rafflecopter contest on Novel Publicity
4. Visit today’s featured social media event

About She Wulf:  Annie is sent through an ancient time portal with only a prophecy to guide her; she struggles with a new destiny as she tries to figure out a way to destroy an un-killable demon and return home.  Get it on Amazon.

About The Day of First Sun:  A vampire, a rogue wizard and an army of soulless zombies are par for the course for Annie Pearce and Bobby “Cham” Chamsky of the Wizard’s Guard. But when the non-magical princess, Amelie of Amborix, is murdered by magical means, a deeper plot unfolds. Get it on Amazon.

About the author: Behind the wheel of her ’66 Mustang Convertible, Sheryl is a constant surprise, using her sense of humor and relatable style make her books something everyone can enjoy. Visit Sheryl on her website, Twitter, Facebook, or GoodReads.