Straight from the Mouth of 'Rowena and the Dark Lord' Melodie Campbell

“Much as I love history sex and violence…”

Rejection Slips and other Ciphers

All writers share one experience in common:  Rejection.  Yes, that single three-syllable word can pack more punch than a swat team of grammarians in a first year college class.  I’ve known grown novelists crushed by the impact of a lone one-page letter in a returned SASE.  (You can tell by the thickness of the envelope that it ain’t holdin’ no contract.)  In New York, it is rumored that spurned essayists have been seen to (gasp) forgo imported and guzzle down domestic in their haste to heal the pain.

Rejection is the hurtin’, cheatin’ country song of the writer’s world.

We all know that tune.   Usually sung off-key, by editors who can’t do what we authors do, but have the power to keep us out of print. 

Rejection slips serve only one useful purpose as far as I can tell: they prove to Revenue Canada and the IRA that we are indeed working writers and deserve all those measly tax deductions.

But wait – is there more?

In case you missed it, there is a hierarchy of rejection slips!  If you write for a living, or merely for the loving, you will undoubtedly have a collection that cries out for classification.

            Keep them. Treasure them.  Devote a drawer to them.  (Better still, a steamer trunk.)  Make your own list of rejection translations and get to know the lingo. 

            Here’s my list, to get you started:

1. “…unfortunately, it does not meet our requirements at this time.”

This means No.  Allow yourself ten minutes to rant, and then try another market.

2. “…does not meet our current needs, but we would welcome seeing more of your work.”

Hey – you’ve reached them!  Maybe they can’t use this piece, but they like your style.  Send more.  Persist.  Be relentless.  That’s how I first got into Star Magazine.  I wore them down.

3. “….if you would consider revising, I would happily have another read of it.”

Go, go, go!  Whenever an editor gives direct encouragement, run with it.  Act immediately.  Revise and re-mail.  Invite her to dinner.  Walk his dog.  Do what you have to.  But don’t lose his interest.

      I cherish personal replies from editors, not only for the time they take to write, but also for the hidden messages within.  Some are priceless.  Here are a few gems from my personal file (er…trunk):

      “…not for us, but I think the ‘Idler’ uses satire.”

      That’s right, pass it off to the competition and hope it sinks ‘em.  The ultimate publisher power play.

      “…we found your novel an interesting and compelling work, however…”

      Shucks.  I should have known they don’t publish ‘interesting and compelling’ works.

     

And my own personal favorite:

      “…much as I like history, sex and violence…”

      Well, gee, that’s interesting.  But exactly how does this relate to my returned manuscript?

      By the way, what are you doing Saturday night?

 Dark magic…dark passions….

When Rowena is abducted from Arizona and taken back to medieval Land’s End, one thing is clear: she must learn to control her powers of magic. It isn’t easy being a modern girl in an archaic land, and when Rowena accidently conjures up a Roman Legion in mid-battle, Land’s End is on the brink of a war that could jeopardize everything and everyone she loves.

The stakes are raised when the Dark Lord reappears and traps Rowena in a cyclone of lust and passion. Once again, she is torn between the man she loves and the mage who fires her desire.

Purchase the book on Amazon.

Currently #2 Timetravel in Canada!  Top 100 in US!

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Melodie Campbell achieved a personal best this year whenLibrary Digest compared her to Janet Evanovich.

Melodie got her start writing comedy (stand-up and columns.)  In1999, she opened the Canadian Humour Conference.  She has over 200 publications including 100 comedy credits, 40 short stories and 4 novels. Her fifth novel, a mob caper entitled The Goddaughter’s Revenge(Orca Books) will be released Oct. 1. She has won 6 awards for fiction, and was a finalist for both the 2012 Derringer and Arthur Ellis Awards.

Melodie is the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada. Her humour column ‘Bad Girl’ appears in The Sage.

Connect with Melodie on the web:

www.melodiecampbell.com

www.funnygirlmelodie.blogspot.com

Facebook: MelodieCampbellAuthor

Twitter: @MelodieCampbell

Keeping it in the Family by New York Times Bestselling Author Jane Green

I adore my family. I have a wonderful relationship with my both my parents and my younger brother and his wife, so close I think of her as a sister rather than a sister-in-law. When people ask me what I miss about England, I may answer with silly witticisms such as Marks and Spencer's food hall, but in truth what I have missed most, since moving to America seven years ago, is my family.

And what I have found myself doing, from the moment I touched down on these shores, is attempting to create a 'family of choice', surrounding myself with people I love, friends who become so much more, people I can phone in the middle of the night who will drop everything and come to help me out of a crisis.

I have a couple here in town, girls I have known for some years, our children growing up together, going to the same pre-schools, the same painful music classes.

But I don't see these friends as much as I used to. Long gone are the days when the children were all in pre-school and we could spend our time at one another's houses, drinking endless coffees as the children crawled around our feet.

Now I am lucky if I see these friends once a month. We still get together in the evenings from time to time, when we are not so exhausted we do nothing more than collapse into bed, and we still get together for Christmas and Thanksgiving, but now that our kids are in different elementary schools, it's rare that we see one another on a daily basis.

I live in Westport, Connecticut, in a town where few of my female peers work, where I spend my time ferrying my four children back and forth to ballet and soccer, wondering why it is I never feel quite right, never feel that I belong, as groups of women expertly unfold their collapsible chairs, maneuvering their Starbucks coffee from one hand to the other as they shout hellos and wave to all around them.

Even now, in Summer, I drop the kids at camp every morning and feel my muscles tense as I get out the car. I know a few of the women, but I am not, have never been, tribal, have always felt ill-at-ease amongst groups of women, and particularly these groups. I don't know what to say to them, and I stand, awkwardly, at one side as they greet each other in their workout gear, each of them looking as if they have something I don't: they belong.

These women, for the most part, don't work. These women, for the most part, are full-time mothers, involved in local charity work, their children's PTA's. I am quite certain that most of them are delightful – on the occasions I've met one of them on a one-to-one basis, they have been lovely – so why is it that I feel so awkward, so different, so utterly wrong? Is it because I'm English? Does that automatically make me different? Is it because I work? Or perhaps is it the nature of my work?

What I miss, as I sit on the edges of the soccer field or bury myself in a book as I wait for my daughter to finish ballet, are other authors, female friends who work in the same line, who can truly relate. Who else could understand my frustrations at an editor, my delight with an agent, my strategies with a publisher? Who else could understand the difficulties of juggling book tours with motherhood, and the joys and sorrows of writing novels, this peculiar life where you are half in, half out of the public eye.

Two years ago, when I moved – briefly - to Litchfield, Connecticut, I told myself I was moving away from suburbia and towards an area in Connecticut that is known for its artists, actors and writers. All I'd have to do, I thought, was walk out my front door where I would be stumbling across household names, people I have, for years, found inspirational, people with whom I would be able to sit, recounting our various literary adventures.

I did find them, but only in passing. I was married, at the time, to a rabid Republican, something of a fish out of water in the liberal world of artists and writers. The friends I did find would talk of organizing parties for us, introducing us, then balked at the eleventh hour, knowing that however I might have been accepted on my own, as a couple, as a 'we', it would never have worked.

My marriage started unraveling, and I moved back to Westport. I moved away from a world that held so much promise, that had so much potential to be the right place for me, to a world that I knew, a world that already held my friends, a place that felt safe.

I jumped back into suburbia with my eyes squeezed tightly shut, but I have found that those friends I made in Litchfield, the artists, the writers, the actors, are still in my life, that the distance between us hasn't changed our friendship, but has given us the space to explore it slowly, has made those friendships even stronger.

My family of choice now includes those people, my closest friend from that time being another female author, fiercely successful, far more literary than I, yet we meet for lunch and can't stop talking for hours – from the writing process, to book tours, to new deals, to make-up, and back all over again.

So even though we are no longer neighbours, even though I now have to jump in the car to spend time with these friends, they are now, firmly, part of the fabric of my life, and I am so grateful that I have them, that I don't have to spend my time fretting as to the precise reasons I will never fit in with the other soccer moms.

Jane Green
Author of Second Chance
http://www.janegreen.com/

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Tags: book promotion, book publicity, author interviews, blogging authors, guest blog, guest bloggers, book blog, virtual book tour, online book promotion, Jane Green

All for the Sake of the Al'Mighty Pen by Dorothy Thompson

Interesting story in the NY Observer yesterday.

The title was what caught my eye: "My Book Deal Ruined My Life."

Say it isn't so.

Here's part of it:

Brendan Sullivan, 25, moved to New York after studying creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio. He hasn’t landed a book deal for his novel, but is determined to find a publisher. “Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”

That's only one case. The article quotes other cases where one's life was disrupted by the al'mighty pen.

Six years ago, I had a life. I was thirty pounds lighter, I actually knew where all members of my family were going after they told me and rather enjoyed frivolous waste-of-time shopping trips where I had nothing to do all day but ogle clothes I only wish I had the money to buy.

I showed up for work on time and actually volunteered for overtime to increase the paycheck so I could have more money for said shopping trips.

The car got washed and the garden got watered, not to mention my body took on a golden glow from all those trips out in the summer sun.

Relatives were visited, neighbors were checked in on and playing in the park with my dogs was an every day thing.

Clothes were thrown out on the line to save on the electric bill instead of tossed in the energy-guzzling dryer and food actually was prepared up on top of the stove (or the grill) instead of the microwave.

All for the sake of the al'mighty pen, I have given up all those things.

Every morning, there is a mad dash for the computer to either read email from my writing group, write in my blog or start working on a scene in a novel that was hauntingly driving me to write it down, lest I forget it.

All for the al'mighty pen do I do this because...

I'm not quite sure.

I'm thinking it might be a disease that inflicts ordinary people that drives them to give up on what they used to know as everyday life and turn it into a frenzied marathon of writing, editing, revising, writing some more, sending said writing to agents and publishers, reading the rejections, screaming, writing again, sending again and repeating the whole process over and over until you finally give up and start on another novel and repeat the same process over and over.

It's a disease of the al'mighty pen.

Anyway, what prompted me to get out of bed, empty my bladder, grab a sandwich and some pepsi and turn on the computer at 4 a.m. in the morning when I could still be sleeping is a condition that strikes every known man or woman on the face of this earth if they decide to become a writer. And, God forbid them to want to become a published author because if that happens, they're in for a treat and their life will never be the same unless they take that al'mighty pen, lay it down and refuse to pick it up again.

But, we don't do that.

We can't.

We just can't.

So, I'm sitting here at the computer at 4 in the morning - errr, make that 5 by now - and I come across an article in the NY Observer titled "My Book Deal Ruined My Life" and I'm thinking...no matter how much my life has changed and no matter how much I long for the times when I could kick back and enjoy life without having to turn this blasted computer on, I still think because of the al'mighty pen, my life has become a little richer, and a little more meaningful.

I don't know how or why because that book deal is just not happening; but somehow, somewhere, I just feel it and if I wait just a little while longer, and pray a little harder, and keep on writing and revising and submitting, I'll finally get to where I'm going.

All for the sake of the al'mighty pen that just won't let me let it go.

Dorothy Thompson
Co-Author, The Search for the Million $$$ Ghost
Editor/Co-Author, Romancing the Soul
CEO/Founder PUMP UP YOUR BOOK PROMOTION PR
www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com

Tags: the writer's life, book deals, NY Observer, book promotion, book publicity, author interviews, blogging authors, guest blog, guest bloggers, book blog, online book promotion