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My Website ranks at 32!!!!!

OMG! My Squidoo lense now ranks in at 32 on the Squidoo top 100 list! 32 out of 220,000 lenses! I can’t believe it!

Here it is if you want to check it out:

http://www.squidoo.com/PublishingMethods/

Why I Write Horror

It has been asked of me, more than once, by multiple peoples:

“How can someone like you, who loves peace, non-violence, and animals; how can you write the horrible things you do in your books?”

This question is most often presented after someone reads about either The Lansquin or The Red Dragon, the two vivisecting blood crazed villains from The Twighlight Manor series.

My answer to that question: As writers we write what we know. Every writer will tell you that they get their ideas from events of their own lives. I am no different than they. As my fans, friends, and family all know, I am more outspoken for animals rights than the average animal rights activist.

Ask anyone who knows me personally, and they will warn you to stay clear of that subject with me. They warn you for good reason. I was only 6 years old when I began my early protests. I lived on a chicken farm. We ate chicken. One day when I was 6 years old it occurred to me that my beloved babies in the yard and the food on the table were both called chicken, because they were in fact the very same thing. I stopped eating chicken and turkey that same day. About a year later I found out that steak was cow, and I stopped eating that as well. By the time I was 8 years old I had become a devote vegan, and have been so ever since. What does this have to do with me writing horror? I’m getting to that.

As most of you know, I had already written the first 2 volumes of The Twighlight Manor series by the time I was 8 years old. Those early stories of cute talking animals and Herbie-esce living cars, were markedly different from the later rewrites that dripped of horror and blood. Friends Are Forever, originally written in 1978, has undergone 3 major rewrites since it’s first creation, each more grim than the last. Why?

By 1982, I heard news stories of a young girl who refused to dissect frogs in science class. The school expelled her, even though she was only 12 years old. The story mesmerized me. It was one of the few times in my life that I became truly interested in watching the news. I began to tell anyone I could about the evils of frog dissection.

When I was 12 years old, I was with my mom, while she was visiting one of her Avon customers. Who was also one of Maine’s most dramatic and outspoken PETA members. I listened for 2 hours as she retold her latest adventures of rescuing a circus donkey, followed by her latest craze: she was hell bent on telling the world about the horrors of a company known as Proctor & Gamble. It was the first time I had ever heard of them. At this time, almost no one knew anything about P&G’s vivisection and Draize testing, as the horror of this fact had only been just discovered that same year. My mom and me went home that day with a carload of pamphlets about PETA and animal rights and how evil animal testing was.

Over the next few months, I sent for every free pamphlet, brochure, magazine, and catalog I could find about the animal rights movement. By the end of the year, the first revision of volume one of The Twighlight Manor series, Friends Are Forever, had been written. Into the series had been added a new set of characters. The cars were no longer living cars, but now had owners who had taken on the characteristics the cars had had. That same year I would start writing The Wild Years.

the new characters included also a new planet into The Twighlight Manor solar system: Planet Diona, and its formidable scientists who had infiltrated the earth. Testing lab scientists on Earth, were no longer humans, but now aliens. A later, rewrite would change this, and instead of animals, the alien scientist would do word for word everything that P&G did, only my scientist would do it to humans.

In 1993, The Twighlight Manor series took its final turn, becoming what it is known as today, when the addition of a prime villain known as The Lansquin was added to the series. The Lansquin was everything in my book that Proctor and Gamble was in real life. Every bloody glorified horror straight from the laboratories of Proctor & Gamble went straight into my books, under the guise of a deranged madmen bent of torturing every human to cross his path. His reason? For the good of science. For the good of mankind.

And that is how I came to write horror.

Though I write a wide range of other things, including children’s books and romance, it is for my Twighlight Manor series and it’s M rated graphic tales of horror that I am most well known. Yes, I love animals. Yes, I hate war and promote world peace. Yes, I abhor fighting and violence. And yes, I write some of the most graphic tales of gore ever written. Why? It is because I love animals and hate fighting that I write what I do: to open readers’ eyes, so that they too, may come to hate fighting and love peace. Peace for all, including peace for those who cannot speak for themselves. I speak for the animals. I write the tales they themselves cannot tell. I write in memory of those who died for the name of science, for the good of mankind. That is why I write horror, so that the animal who have died at the hands of P&G scientists, may not have died in vain.

~~Wendy.

Self Publish? Vanity Press? Traditonal Publisher? Something Else?

A question I see time and time again is: Is *name of business here* a self publisher, vanity press, or traditional publisher? How do I tell the differance?

While there are many branches of the publishing tree, these 3 are the big limbs, from which all the branches shoot off of. Here is how to tell them apart:
a self publisher, is an author who gets a business license, buys the ISBN #s, hires a printing press (print shop/printer) to print the books, than sells them themself… the author keeps 100% of the profits, because no one pays royalities; you keep 100% of the copyright (which btw, does not cost a penny)… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a vanity press is a print shop/printer/printing press, that does that for you, they usually ask you to pay money for them to edit your MS, they also chagre you if you want a color cover, (often they charge you for such things as “the right to keep your copyright”, or the ISBN #, in addition to the cost of everything else they chage) and than pays you a percentange (royalty), after you first pay them for the books… the royalty they pay, though it may sound high, is actually very low, because you don’t see that money until after they have deducted what you “owe them” for printing the books… in short, they make money, while you go broke, and you may or may not get to keep the rights to your book, depending on how much money you paid to buy your own rights back from them… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a traditional publisher, hires editors who read your MS which you send to them; they recive thousands of MSs each week, so it may take up to 2 years before they get around to reading it; after they read it, they either reject it or accept it; if they accept it, you well be sent a contact (and often with a recommendation that you go over it with your literay agent/lawyer before you sign it). Once you sign the contract and send it back, than the publisher’s laywer checks it to be certain that all is in order (and done legally). The publisher is given the tempory copyright allowing them to print and distribute your book to the public… they hire and editor to type set and spell check your MS, than they hire an artist to create the cover art, they distribute the book to bookstores worldwide, you never own them a cent, they pay you royalties

in other words:

self publishing is you starting your own business (a publishing house) and earning an income

vanity press is you doing a lot of hard work, getting your book printed, and getting scammed out of the money that should be yours, while they get rich and leave you with nothing

traditional publishing is you hireing a business to to the work for you and you both earn an income

I hope this helps

~~EK

FAQ: What is Space Dock 13?

What is Space Dock 13?

Other than my web site you mean?

The name Space Dock 13, like everything else, comes from the Twighlight Manor stories. As I said before, the Twighlight Manor is some what of a base camp for the aliens who live there. The #13 figures in strongly with the Manor’s history. Constuction for the Manor began in 1313, after a space craft was sent off course and crashed on Earth. During it’s construction 13 workers were killed when one of the walls crumbled. The Manor was abandoned and went unfinished. Years later, construction resumed, and it was the first Emporor Swanzen, who officaly made the Manor the space dock of planet Earth. His son Vielder added to the Manor, what would become one of the key elements behind the Manor’s curse…a giant floor clock. The clock sits in the front parlor, and at eight feet tall, it towers forbodingly over all who enter the front doors. The clock was said to fore tell doom, predicting the deaths of those who had at some point set foot in the Manor.

Vielder, was a merciless tyrant, his reign was one of terror. Vielder’s most famous additions to the Manor were two grizly rooms now boarded up…the first was known as “The Head Room”, and as it’s name implies was the room which stored his human head collection. Vielder saw the planet earth as a primative planet, and humans were nothing more to him, than alien animals waiting to be slaughtered and added to his ever growing trophy collection.

A second room added by Vielder, remained undiscovered for nearly 400 years. Upon aquiring the Manor in the late 1800’s, EelKat had every room, every item, every book, and every artifact cataloged. During that time, was discovered a room that EelKat cataloged as “The Wax Museum”. It was quite simply a room filled with what on first sight appeared to very life like waxworks. They were, in actuallity, taxidermed creatures from around the galaxy, many humans and earth animals make up part of the collection as well. Oddly though, while the room and the older figures were put there by Vielder in the 1400’s, EelKat’s scientists claimed that most of the human figures had been added in only the last 100 years, during the 1700-1800’s. And in the 150 years since the room’s discovery, it’s collection has nearly doubled in size. “The Wax Museum” remains one of the Manor’s darkest mysteries…who are the bodies? how do they get there? and who is continueing to expand Vielder’s horrid collection 400 years after his death? Since I’m writing the story, I know the answer to that….shockingly, the story’s darkest villain, is also one of it’s best loved heroes.

So what does any of ths have to do with Space Dock 13? Vielder’s reign of terror was the bloodiest ever seen, though not nearly as horrific as the murder’s comited by the book’s as of yet unidentified vilain…known only as The Lansquin’s most devoted follower: The Red Dragon The people began to call the Twighlight Manor, Space Dock 13, after the death of King Vielder. Vielder’s death marked the end of his reign of terror, and the beginning of a series of murders, marked by their horrific, yet artist, public display, and a madman’s riddles written with the blood of his victims. While Vielder’s murder was not the first, it was the first to include the now trademarked blood riddles. This first riddle told of a lost key, a cursed rhyme, and a 3′O clock chime of death. The words had no known meaning, until the next death that soon followed.

After the mysterious murder of King Vielder, the giant floor clock stopped working properly. Many clockmakers have since been brought in, the clock taken apart, even it’s gears removed in order to stop it from running at all, but nothing has ever stopped it from it’s new funtion. Upon Vielder’s death the clock began running backwards, keeping time as usual, just now in reverse. It no longer chimed on the hour, it makes no sound at all. No one ever winds the clock, and after having it’s gears removed, no one knows how it contiunes to run. Posessed is how it’s explained. Exorcists were brought in, and the clock still kept on running, keeping perfect time, going steadly on, ever backwards.

Than one day, it stopped. A small clattering sound was heard, and the inhabitants in the parlor at the time, figured the gears had finally run down…but it had not, the hands of the clock began to move ahead rapidly until reaching 3 O’clock and for the first time since Vielder’s death, it chimed, 3 simple chimes, than began to run just as normal as any other clock. Normal that is until, when twelve hours later it reached 3′O clock again and chimed thirteen times instead, than went back to running in reverse once again.

The curse of the clock, was thus seen for the first time…for death had stuck yet again, now in time with the thirteenth chime. Since that day, every person who sets foot in the Manor, even for a second, the clock knows the time of their death, and tells all who are in the parlor to hear. If ever you hear the parlor clock chimeing 3″O clock, than keeping time in perfect order, you know that some one somewhere will die twelve hours later when the clock chimes thirteen. And because of the clock’s thirteen chime, came the name Space Dock 13.

Topics: King Vielder, The Twighlight Manor, The Twighlight Manor Library

J.M.Barrie

“Always be a little kinder than necessary.” — J.M. Barrie

I wish more people would follow this advice. Life would be so much simpler, there would be nothieves breaking into your house, there would be no vandles destroying property, there would be no corrupt town managers cheering them on to fullfill his greed. Today is J.M.Barrie’s birthday. Answers.com has this to say about him:

J. M. Barrie

Sir James Mathew Barrie, Bt., Scottish author

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937), more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and dramatist. Most people remember him for inventing the character of Peter Pan, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn Davies boys.

Born in Kirriemuir, Angus, the second-youngest of ten children, Barrie received his formal education at the Glasgow Academy and the University of Edinburgh. He became a journalist in Nottingham, then London, and turned to writing novels and subsequently plays. He is also accredited for the invention of the name Wendy, as only five records of girls named Wendy can be found before the 1910 census.

Made a baronet in 1913, Barrie lies buried at Kirriemuir next to his parents, sister, and elder brother David, who had died in a skating accident just before his 14th birthday.

Childhood

J.M. Barrie’s family were Scottish weavers; he was the ninth child of ten. When he was 6, his 13-year old older brother David, his mother’s favorite, died in a skating accident on the eve of his 14th birthday. His mother never recovered from the loss, and ignored J.M. His father would not interact at all with the children. When he would enter a room and see his mother, she would always say “David, is that you? Could it be you?” and when she realized that it was J.M., she would say “Oh, it’s only you.” Barrie’s mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. This had a profound impact on J.M. Not only was he mentally scarred with the notion that growing up was wrong, J.M. himself stopped growing at five feet. Many have obviously speculated that Peter Pan is based on J.M.’s childhood.

Literary career

Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, London

Barrie set his first novels in Kirriemuir which he referred to as “Thrums” (his father worked as a weaver). Barrie often wrote dialogue in Scots. His Thrums novels were hugely successful when they were published starting with Auld Licht Idylls (1888). Next came A Window in Thrums (1889), and The Little Minister (1891). His two ‘Tommy’ novels Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel came in 1896 and 1902 and dealt with themes much more explicitly related to what would become Peter Pan. The first appearance of Pan came in The Little White Bird (1901).

Barrie also wrote a number of works for the theatre, beginning with Ibsen’s Ghost (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen‘s drama Ghosts, which had just been performed for the first time in England under the Independent Theatre Society led by J. T. Grein. Barrie’s play was first performed on May 31 at Toole’s Theatre in London. Barrie seemed to appreciate Ibsen’s merits; even William Archer, the translator of Ibsen’s works into English, enjoyed the humor of the play and recommended it to others. Barrie also authored the flop, Jane Annie (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish, when he suffered the first of his many nervous breakdowns. Notable successes included Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902).

Barrie’s most famous and enduring work, Peter Pan had its first stage performance on December 27 1904. In 1924 he specified that the copyright of the play should go to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is complex. See Peter Pan Copyright Status. Later plays included What Every Woman Knows (1908) and his last play, The Boy David (1936), which dramatized the Biblical story of King Saul and the young David. Like the role of Peter Pan the role of David was played by a woman — Elisabeth Bergner.

Barrie, along with a number of other playwrights, was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain over play production in London.

Acquaintances

Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson were acquaintances from university. The three of them attended Edinburgh University and they also worked for the college newspaper. J.M. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London.

The Llewelyn-Davies family

The Llewelyn-Davies family consisted of the parents Arthur (1863–1907) and Sylvia, née du Maurier (1866–1910) (daughter of George du Maurier), [married the 3Q of 1892 in Hampstead, London: GROMI: vol. 1a, p. 1331]; and their five sons George Llewelyn-Davies (1893–1915), John Llewelyn-Davies or Jack (1894-1959), Peter Llewelyn-Davies (1897–1960), Michael Llewelyn-Davies (1900–1921), and Nicholas Llewelyn-Davies or Nico (1903–1980).

Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897 or 1898 after meeting George and Jack with their nurse Mary Hodgson in London‘s Kensington Gardens where he often came while walking his dog Porthos, and lived nearby. He did not meet Sylvia until later at a chance encounter at a dinner party.

He became a surrogate father to the boys, and when they were orphaned, he became their guardian. Some sources say that their mother will specify the nurse’s sister was to take custody and that Barrie forged or unintentionally mistranscribed the will. However, it was clear that he was the only one with the time and resources to bring them up together, and Sylvia objected to splitting the boys up amongst relatives.

Although there will always be those who find cause for suspicion in his friendship with children, there is no evidence that anything inappropriate happened, and the youngest of the boys, Nico, flatly denied that Barrie ever behaved in an unfit manner. Barrie was married to the actress Mary Ansell but it was a sexless and childless marriage and ended in divorce. He was godfather to Peter Scott.

The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modelled upon a photograph of Michael, but the sculptor decided to use a different child as a model, leaving Barrie very disappointed with the result. “It doesn’t show the devil in Peter”, he said.

Barrie suffered bereavements with the boys, losing the two to whom he was closest. George was killed in action (1915) in World War I. Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily, drowned (1921) in a possible suicide pact one month short of his 21st birthday, while swimming at a known danger-spot at Oxford with his friend and suspected lover Rupert Errol Victor Buxton. Some years after Barrie’s death, Peter Davies, later a publisher, wrote his ‘Morgue’, which contains much family information and comments on Barrie. At the age of 63 Peter committed suicide by jumping in front of a London Underground train.

Biographical Articles

• The Story of J.M.B. by Sewell Stokes, Theatre Arts, Vol.XXV No.11, New York: Theatre Arts Inc, Nov 1941, pp 845-848.

Film biographies

J. M. Barrie

The BBC made an award-winning miniseries by Andrew Birkin, The Lost Boys at the Internet Movie Database (also titled J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys), in 1978, starring Ian Holm as Barrie and Ann Bell as Sylvia. It is considered factual, includes Arthur Llewelyn-Davies (Tim Piggot-Smith), and confronts the issue of Barrie’s affection for the Davies boys. (The DVD is available in both the UK and USA)

A semi-fictional movie about his relationship with the family, Finding Neverland, was released in November 2004, starring Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies. It omits Arthur and Nico.

Both films receive comment in the New Yorker .

Star Log’s Blog Carnival for Writers

I have spent the last couple of hours browsing through Blog Carnivals. I love them.  They are such a great way to find new blogs to read. Well, I submitted several posts from Star Log to some of the carnivals. When browseing the carnival index though, I was disapointed to find that more than half of those aimed at writers have been shut down and are no longer taking new submissions.

In light of that info, I am now starting a new one, to be posted on an ongoing basis here at Star Log. I have decided to hold 12 carnivals a year, one each month. Submissions are open and accepted year ’round.

The overall theme is blog posts of interest to writers. What I am looking for are posts (written by you and posted on your blog), that offer advice to writers of all levels. The prime focus being on fiction stories, though all advice for writers is accepted. Posts on “general” writing topics accepted each month. Additionaly, I’d like to have a sub-theme each month as follows:

January: Writing Mysteries

February: Writing Romance

March: Writing Children’s Fiction

April: Writing Fantasy

May: Writing Science Fiction

June: Writing Pirate Fiction

July: Writing Action/Adventure

August: Writing Gothic

September: Writing High Fantasy

October: Writing Horror

November: Writing Family Memoires

December: Writing Holiday Fiction

Submissions are due by the last day of the previous month. Blog listings will be posted the first week the month. Send your submissions here.

You can copy the following tag to add to your blog so people will have a link back to find your listing with Star Log’s Blog Carnival For Writers:

Attack of the POD People! They are not evil.

Are you a self publisher? Maybe you have a manuscript you want published, but you are not sure if self-publishing is right for you? I’m a self publisher myself and I’m always looking for ways to improve, so as you can expect I spend a lot of my “blog reading time” looking for blogs that help writers in general and self-publishers esp. Well, today I came across a new blog I hadn’t found before. My search lead me to this post:

POD is not Vanity is not Self Publish

April 1st, 2007 · No Comments

POD is a technology. It’s a way to print books. It’s quite useful for printing small quantities, particularly if there is intermittent demand. LOTS of publishers who are not vanity houses or scam mills use POD technology. University presses spring to mind, as do very small limited runs of very tightly focused books. POD is not evil.

Vanity presses can use POD technology OR they can use webfeed technology. Vanity presses are essentially printers with some support staff. They’ll help you print up nice editions of whatever you want. You pay for this. It’s called vanity because they don’t acquire the book. Acquire means there is an editorial staff choosing particular books to publish. Vanity houses do not maintain lists, issue catalogs or sell books in bookstores. Vanity presses are not evil

Self publishers can use POD technology or webfeed technology. Self publishers are not vanity presses in the everyday sense of the word. They are “vanity” in the sense that there isn’t an acquisition but the two phrases are used to mean different things in publishing. Lots of people self publish for a lot of reasons. Self publishing is not evil.

POD/scam mills are companies set up to persuade you, the author, that printing your book with their company is the equivalent to having it acquired by a publisher. They charge you money. Unlike a respectable vanity press, they don’t copy edit or produce high quality products. They are out to make money on volume. They prey on author’s insecurities and lack of knowledge. POD/scam mills are the scum of the earth.

Whether a company is the scum of the earth depends on how they run their business, not how they print their books.

There are several POD companies that do not try to persuade you that you have but to print up books with them to be on your way to fame and glory. Lulu and CafePress come to mind. There are others I’m sure.

– Miss Snark, the literary agent

[via To Publish a Book]

→ No CommentsTags: Self-Publishing · Articles · Books

to the authour of this post, I say:

bravo!

*insert clapping smilie here*

every one with a manuscript should read this post, if you know someone with a manuscript pass this on to them.

~~EK

Happy Easter from EelKat, Moonsnails, and the Vampire Easter Minions!

Happy Easter from EelKat, Moonsnails, and the Vampire Easter Minions! May they inspire you to write about dancing vampire bunnys!

 

EelKat

Moonsnails Magazine

“Where reality becomes a dream & dreams become reality.”

Submission Guidelines for Moonsnails

 

Basic Submissions Guidlines:

This is a quick overview of our basic guidelines. See our fully detailed guidelines for each seperate genre on our Submission Guidelines website.

Status:
Moonsnails is currently accepting submissions

Title:

Moonsnails Magazine

Magazine Format:(projected)

Quarterly: 6″ x 9″, 96 – 132 pages per issue;
60 lb bright white paper, B&W text; 10pt glossy laminated perfect bound full color cover

Circulation:

world-wide though print on demand

Contact Info:

Wendy C. Allen, editor-in-chief, twighlightmanor@yahoo.com

Submission Format:

Send in body of email, 12pt Courier or Times New Roman or Send at attachment .RTF 12pt Courier or Times New Roman.

Payment:

copies only at this time; buys one time rights, (the right to print story in one issue; author retains copyright)

responce time: 2 – 6 months

Needs:

Short stories up to 13,000 words.

Literary Genre fiction. Cross-gen OK.

Rarely uses poetry. Poetry used only if it can be considered a full-fledged story, complete with characters and plot. Never accepts free-verse.

Genres Accepted:

Sci-fi, Fantasy, Gothic Romance, and “mild” Horror

Sub-Genres and Cross-Genres Accepted:

Action, Adventure, Alien Invasion, Alien Realms, Alternative Histories, Amateur Detective, Americana, Ancient Civilizations, Animal Stories, Biographical Fiction, Christmas, Classic Literature, Colonial America, Cryptozology, Dark Fantasy, Dragon Tales, Easter, Ethnic Fiction, Espionage, Faerie Realms, Fairy Tales, Family Sagas, Fantasy, Folklore, Frontier Sagas, Furries, Futuristic, Ghost Stories, Gothic Romance, Halloween, Hard Science Fiction, Haunted Houses, High Fantasy, High Seas Adventure, Historical, Horror, Humor, Inspirational, Kung Fu, Literary, Mad Scientist Sci-Fi, Mermaid Tales, Military, Mystery, Murder Mystery, Paranormal, Pirate Tales, Psychological Thiller/Terror, Regional: Maine, Regional: Quebec, Romance, Science Fiction, Serials, Short-Shorts, Slueths, Space Fantasy, Space Travel, Spiritual, Sword & Sorcery, Supernatural, Suspence, Thiller, Time Travel, Twilight Zone style, UFO stories, Unicorn Tales, Utopian Realms, Victorian, War, Western, Wizard Tales, Young Adult.

Things Rejected:

Rejects all stories that contain:

abortion, animal abuse, child abuse, cutting, death glorification, depression, depressive self-pity, drinking, drugs, elder abuse, erotica, expose`, gore, hatred, hunting, politics, pornography, sex, smoking, swearing, suicide, vulgar verbology, and stories about “how my teenage years were crap”.

Stories must be family friendly and rated PG-13 or less

Poetry Needs:

We focus on short stories, thus rarely use poetry.

Sometimes accepts poetry, at best it’s only 4 poems per year, IF it tells a story and has strong characters. Same as fiction needs, seeks longer “epic length” story poems akin to Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamlin, Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven or Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham. Prefers long rhyming poems with strong characters and a strong story plot.

Poetry Rejects:

Same as fiction rejects, plus: Does not accept free-verse poetry, haiku, short poems, poems without characters, poems without plots, meaningless ramblings, odes to…, poems without rhythem, or any other type of poem that does not tell a complete story from beginning to end.

Cover Art:

Usually done “in-house”, but well consider submissions of full-color photography or paintings, covering any genre. Always seeks beach and ocean themed photos or paintings. Do not send originals. Email files as atactment. Files must be compatible with MSWorks, MSPaint, or MSPublisher 97, .jpg files prefered. Note that we can not accept .tif files, our email treats them as a virus and deletes them. See fiction for needs & rejects list. Buys one time rights.

Art & Inside Illustration:

Usually uses spot illustrations and copyright-free/public domain illustration, but well consider submissions of B&W, pen & ink, line art only … no pencil, no shading, no grey-scale, no color, our printer well not accept them. All illustrations must be 4″ x 6″ or smaller and camera ready. Do not send originals. Email files as atactment. Files must be compatible with MSWorks, MSPaint, or MSPublisher 97, .jpg files prefered.  Note that we can not accept .tif files, our email treats them as a virus and deletes them. See fiction for needs & rejects list.

Advice:

Best advise: buy a copy of Brian Froud’s Faeries. Use it as though it were our Submissions Guidelines. Treat it as your Writer’s Bible. Use it to create believable fantasy characters. Never go anywhere without it. If you want to write for us than consider Brian Froud your new best friend, read everything he ever wrote. Study every painting he ever did. Watch every film he ever created. Watch the 2 movies written by Brian Froud: Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Read the Retief series by Keith Laumer and The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. We like that kind of sci-fi best.

Watch Star Trek (the original series), Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, X-Files, and Tales From the Dark Side. Let them inspire you. If your story would make for a good episode on one of them, than we want to see it!

We like to see strong characters. Character driven stories. Well written plots. We like fantasy realms, dreamscapes, and alien planets. Creativity is always welcomed. Pirates are always good, we need more pirates. Always seeking stories about Mermaids, Sirens, Dragons, Unicorns, or other creatures of the Realm of Fay. We like to see characters that Brian Froud would have created.

Let your imagination run wild.

Twighlight Manor Press Home Page

Twighlight Manor Press Home Page

Business Plans: Moonsnails Magazine: We’re Back!

In fall of 2005 Twighlight Manor Press announced that it was planning the release of a new magazine, which at that point was untitled and it‘s genre unknown. Our original idea was to keep it local; local writers, local sales, local flavor to the stories. Market research, however showed us that that would be a very unprofitable venture that would doom our magazine to failure before it’s fifth issue. We had to rethink out plan.

Over the next several weeks we threw around ideas and finally decided that the magazine would be a fiction “literary journal”. At first we planned on “all good fiction”, but than after studying the market, realized that this was virtually a bottomless pit, that would result in more manuscript submissions than our tiny staff of four would be able to handle.

Another thing we decided early on, was that, we wanted to stand out on bookstore shelves. Looking at other magazines sold at a local bookstore, Nonesuch Books in Saco, I discovered something. Rack upon rack of magazines, where all the same: 8×11” glossy and flimsy issues, that would not stand the test of time on a bookshelf, given them a shelf life of just 3 weeks. (This short shelf life was according to a study I found online.) According to that study, only a few magazines would be shelved and saved to be read again and again for several years. These magazines had good content and a sturdy binding. I went to Nonesuch Books looking for magazines with good content and study bindings, and was amazed at how few there actually were. In the end I found only three, out of the hundreds of magazines the shop had on the racks. By the end of this stage in our study we came to one conclusion: this magazine, was NOT going to be a 8×11” glossy; instead it would read like a book, with crisp white paper and a square bound “paperback” cover.

After some more market studies, we came to the conclusion that rather than focusing on fiction in general, we would instead use the same rule we use for writing: Write what you know. In our case it would translate into: Publish what you read. All four of us are sci-fi buffs. Sci-fi movies, sci-fi TV, sci-fi comics, sci-fi books… well it seemed only natural that we would thus choose sci-fi as the genre for the new magazine.

By January of 2006 we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with the magazine. On Space Dock 13 (the website) we announced that the magazine was a defiant go, and we were planning it’s release later that year.

With our genre in mind, we set out the name our new magazine. After several weeks of debate, only one thing was agreed upon: that the magazine must have a sci-fi sounding name and that it should reflect our local home base, namely that we are on the world’s most beautiful beach: Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

In April 2006 we introduced the world to two new websites. The first was the message board for writers: A Writer’s Desk. It was our hope that through here we would find new talent seeking to be published in our magazine. A message board built entirely to promote the magazine, today it stands on it’s own and has no connection to the magazine at all.

Our second Website was of course the homepage for our magazine. We had finally decided on a name, and that name was: Moonsnails. After a walk to the beach that cold April, me and my three brothers returned home with tote bags filled with Old Orchard’s most beloved seashell: the Atlantic Moonsnail. Later that day, while sorting the shells on the lawn, it hit me: Moonsnails was the perfect name for our magazine, it kept the local flavor and it sounded sci-fi. Later that week Moonsnails homepage went online.

By the end of April 2006 we were getting quotes from various printers, both local and online. Announcement went out with the news that Moonsnails would see its public release in September of 2006. We were off and running, and than came May 9, 2006 and the flood that washed away all of our plans, destroying everything we owned and bringing Twighlight Manor Press to an instant standstill. We lost everything, the building was condemned, and nothing survived. As far as the business was concerned, we were back at ground zero.

That same day, as a result of the flood, my dad went into a coma. In July of 2006, my dad awoke from the coma and returned home disabled and in my care. In September of 2006, instead of releasing Moonsnails, we found ourselves in the midst of fight to save our land from a local land shark. The result was my dad’s return to the hospital. In October of 2006, a fire swept through. What little we had that survived the flood, was destroyed in the fire and we were faced with fighting out Maine’s frigid winter in a tent, a fate that did not sick well with my disabled dad’s rapidly failing health.

In January of 2007, things took a turn once again, this time in our favor, and we found our selves with electricity, heat, and a roof over our heads, for the first time since May 9, 2006.

Reunited with my computer, I was amazed to find, that in spite of the flood, in spite of the fire, the hard drive remained intact, and with a few minor repairs, it runs as good as new. It looks like hell, a bent mangled mess, but who cares, all my files are still here! All my plans and templates, all those months of research and market studies: they had survived! With that knowledge in hand I set out to pick up the pieces, and once again, plans are underway, full speed ahead, to bring Moonsnails into production.

And that brings us to today. Nether flood, nor fire, nor cold of winter, could stop Moonsnails. Moonsnails rises once again.

~EK

testing tags

having a problem getting posts to show up… testing to see if tags are working yet

A List of POD Publishers

I found this list of Print On Demand publishers and found it quite interesting as I had only heard of a few of them before. Well, you know me, now I must go check them all out and compare them against each other. I am compelled to do nothing less. I haven’t had a chance to study up on these yet, so I can’t vouch for them, but feel free to check them out for yourselves and see what you think of them.

Here’s the complete list of Publishers covered in the Guide:  

(links added by me, as the article contained no links ~~EK)

• Arbor Books Inc.
• Authorhouse
• Authors Online Ltd
• Aventine Press
• Blitzprint
• Booklocker
• Bookstand Publishing
• Booksurge
• Café Press
• Cold Tree Press
• Dog Ear Publishing
• Endeavor Printing Llc
• Equilibrium Books
• First Choice Books
• Foremost Press
• Golden Pillar Publishing
• Infinity Publishing
• Inkwater Press
• Ithaca Press
• iUniverse(not pod)
• Llumina Press
• Longdash Publishing
• Lulu
• Outskirts Press
• Page Free Publishing
• Pleasant Word Publishing
• Pod World Publishing (URL expired)
• PublishAmerica(not pod)
• Rj Communications
• Tate Publishing(not pod)
• Third Millennium Publishing
• Trafford Press(not pod)
• Twilight Times
• Virtual Bookworm
• Wasteland Press
• We Publish(URL not found)
• WheatMark(not pod)
• Wingspan(URL not found)
• Writers World
• Xlibris
• Xulon Press

For those interested in POD self-publishing, I also recomend that you first read this:

For the sake of referance, I pasted the first paragraph below:

PRINT ON DEMAND  Print on demand (POD) is the commonly-used term for the digital printing technology that allows a complete book to be printed and bound in a matter of minutes. POD technology makes it easy and cost-effective to produce books one or two at a time or in small lots, rather than in larger print runs of several hundred or several thousand.POD has a number of applications. Commercial and academic publishers use it to print advance reading copies, or when they can’t justify the expense of producing and warehousing a sizeable print run–for instance, to keep backlist books available. Some independent publishers use it as a more economical fulfillment method, trading lower startup costs against smaller per-book profits (due to economies of scale, digitally printed books have a higher unit production cost than books produced in large runs on offset presses). Last but not least, there are the POD-based publishing service providers, which offer a fee-based service that can be described, depending on one’s bias, as either vanity publishing or self-publishing…. To read the rest of the article CLICK HERE.

Except for graphics, and where specifically indicated, all Writer Beware contents copyright © 1998-2007 Victoria Strauss

Attack of the POD People! They are not evil.

Are you a self publisher? Maybe you have a manuscript you want published, but you are not sure if self-publishing is right for you? I’m a self publisher myself and I’m always looking for ways to improve, so as you can expect I spend a lot of my “blog reading time” looking for blogs that help writers in general and self-publishers esp. Well, today I came across a new blog I hadn’t found before. My search lead me to this post:

POD is not Vanity is not Self Publish

April 1st, 2007 · No Comments

POD is a technology. It’s a way to print books. It’s quite useful for printing small quantities, particularly if there is intermittent demand. LOTS of publishers who are not vanity houses or scam mills use POD technology. University presses spring to mind, as do very small limited runs of very tightly focused books. POD is not evil.

Vanity presses can use POD technology OR they can use webfeed technology. Vanity presses are essentially printers with some support staff. They’ll help you print up nice editions of whatever you want. You pay for this. It’s called vanity because they don’t acquire the book. Acquire means there is an editorial staff choosing particular books to publish. Vanity houses do not maintain lists, issue catalogs or sell books in bookstores. Vanity presses are not evil

Self publishers can use POD technology or webfeed technology. Self publishers are not vanity presses in the everyday sense of the word. They are “vanity” in the sense that there isn’t an acquisition but the two phrases are used to mean different things in publishing. Lots of people self publish for a lot of reasons. Self publishing is not evil.

POD/scam mills are companies set up to persuade you, the author, that printing your book with their company is the equivalent to having it acquired by a publisher. They charge you money. Unlike a respectable vanity press, they don’t copy edit or produce high quality products. They are out to make money on volume. They prey on author’s insecurities and lack of knowledge. POD/scam mills are the scum of the earth.

Whether a company is the scum of the earth depends on how they run their business, not how they print their books.

There are several POD companies that do not try to persuade you that you have but to print up books with them to be on your way to fame and glory. Lulu and CafePress come to mind. There are others I’m sure.

– Miss Snark, the literary agent

[via To Publish a Book]

→ No CommentsTags: Self-Publishing · Articles · Books

to the authour of this post, I say:

bravo!

*insert clapping smilie here*

every one with a manuscript should read this post, if you know someone with a manuscript pass this on to them.

~~EK

April Writer’s Challange

One month, One Story, yep, you knew it was coming, it’s time for the: April Writer’s Challange:

Easter is just around the corner. For this month’s challange I thought we  would write an “Eastery” story. Doesn’t have to be Easter exactly. I was inspired by Dove Chocolate’s “Fairy Bunny”, which I saw in the store today. They are so cute. On the box is a poem that tells about an enchanted valley where bunnies with butterfly wings live. It’s a cute little image tale, and it got me to thinking: What a great fantasy story that’d make!

So, this month’s challange is to write a fantasy about an enchanted valley filled with magical faeries and the like. You can spin it off as any genre you like. One idea I thought of was based on my siggie gif: The Vampire Easter Minions. Kind of a fairy tale got mad thing.

Ain’t they cute?

 

What can you guys think of? 

The challange is up, so get going and write!

~~EK

Why Do Editors Reject MSs?

I just read this:

Treat your editors like the coach from any sports team because the editor knows their audience and only rejects writing with a good reason–even if you never learn the specifics.

Seemed like good advice, though I know nothing of sports or coaches. I do know, however, that editors have no choice but to reject 90% of what they recieve. Why? Well, for every book they have the physical ability to publish each year they receive 1,000 or more manuscripts. Many publishing houses only print 12 new books a year, one each month, and yet they receive ten times that many manuscripts in a single day. What does that mean for you the writer? That means that your manuscript had better be damn good if you want it to punch out the compatition and make it onto the editor’s desk. Once on the editor’s desk it had better glow if it wants to get picked for publication.

Why do editors reject manuscripts? Well as the editor in chief of Moonsnails Magazine and The Twighlight Manor Press, I think I might know the answer.

Here are copies of a few of the rejection forms we use:

Rejection Notice: No Space At This Time; MS Put on File:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on the following:At the current time we do not have space for your story in our publication. The reason for this is that all of the space slots have already been appointed for all of our upcoming issues, meaning that it may be a year or more before we well be able to use your story. However, we did like your story, and may use it in the future. Therefore I have put it on file for possible future publication. This does not mean that we can guarantee we well accept it in the future.
Because it may be a year or more before we would be able to accept your story, you are welcomed to submit this same ms to other publishers. If it is accepted by one of them, please inform us of such. If it does get published in an other magazine, we well move it to a file for possible reprint in our magazine.
If at some point in the future we do decide to use your ms, you well be notified and payment well be sent at the than current payment rate.So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct any spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it even better, maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.While your story was not accepted for publication in our magazine at this time, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Inappropriate Content:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on one or more of the following:

explicit sex or sexual references
graphic violence for violence sake
mention of or reference to suicide
animal, child, or elder abuse
excessive use of vulgar verbology
mention of or reference to drug use — this includes one or more of the following:

smoking
drinking
illegal drug use

At this point if you are like most writers, you are sending me a long letter of complaint, protesting that your ms was misrepresented and misjudged, followed by a list of reasons why sex, drugs and gore are essential to your story, ending with a threat of some sort at the bottom. Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to re-read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.

Our editors read the mss and than accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. Likewise, it is the customer who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. You do a good job, the customer pays you to do your job. What is your job?
Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. What can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read. To determine how to keep our customers happy, we first must know who are customers are.
Who are our customers? Let’s examine our magazine.
Our magazine is family friendly: i.e. read by families. Families include all ages. In other words it would not be unusual for the oldest grandmother to be seen reading a story from our magazine to her youngest grandchildren. Keeping that in mind, we do not accept stories that contain any of the above mentioned things.
We are also a small press, sold locally at a tourist resort town on the frigid North Atlantic coast of Maine. Most people who buy our magazine are often tourists looking for something to read on the beach. Others who buy us are local teachers and parents who trust us to publish stories that provide a safe, clean, enjoyable read for students.
What do our readers want? They want a story that they can enjoy reading again and again. They want action, adventure, fun, and entertainment. They want to read about heroes off on grand adventures, pirates seeking lost treasure, super heroes vanquishing dastardly villains, wars in outer space, knights in shining armor, spooky old haunted houses, the type of stuff that was popular in the 1950’s comic books is what our readers enjoy.
What our readers do not want is pointlessness. What is pointlessness? Pointlessness is ho-hum, I think I’ll ad a sex scene in here because I can’t think of anything else to write right now. Pointlessness is , yawn, the dialogue got to short, so I’ll stick in a few swear words. Pointlessness is, geeze this sure is going slow I’ll add a serial killing vampire and have him splatter entrails all over the pages. Pointlessness is, I can’t think of anything else to write, so I’ll have a teenager overdose herself than slice her wrists while jumping off a bridge, because my life is so dull that that’s what I might do tomorrow. Pointlessness is anything that adds nothing to the story plot, it is simply there to fill up empty space. That is pointlessness. Our readers look at sex, swearing, bloody violence, and suicide and say, “Ho-hum. Looks like yet another depressed teenager wrote that piece of crap. Booooring! When are they going to get some real writers to write some real stories. I’m going to cancel my subscription.”
As you can see, if we print those things we lose our readers. If we lose our readers, we lose our customers. If we lose our customers, we lose money. If we lose money we go bankrupt. If we go bankrupt we have to close down the magazine. If we close down the magazine, we end up homeless and starving. So, the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

It was a dark and stormy night, the night I wrote this story. I remember it was dark and stormy because I was watching the drug dealer outside my window that night. But my story isn’t about him, no, it’s about me and my life as a teenager. This is the coolest story in the world! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! It is all about how my teen years were nothing but heaping loads o’ crapola. You’ll just love to reading about how my step-dad was hell and how he raped me and beat up my dog, and how my mom was on drugs (that‘s how I knew the guy outside my window was a drug dealer), and how I run away and everything! It doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the story don’t need no plot. YAH! But than I got to thinking it’d be great if it was a horror, so I turned my step dad into a blood sucking vampire and I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock your readers with too!!!! Isn’t that jus the coolest thing??? I’ll bet no body ever thought of doing that yet. Yeah I know, it’s great, don’t thank me, I’ll settle for you kissing my ass and being my eternal slave, I’m so great you know. Oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex scene on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? You don’t need a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me! Me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great in your face kiss ass @#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! Oh yeah! I’m right baby! Can ya dig it?!

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to WANT read a ms that is submitted without the author at least stopping to think about what our readers do and do not want. Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories that focus on me, myself and I surrounding by naked girls and serial killers on drugs and nor do we. Okay, maybe there are a few magazines that publish that sort of thing, so, send it to them, they want it, we don’t.
As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories, nor do they want to read pointless ramblings. How long do you think a reader will stay interested in your story if you haven’t actually got a story to tell? You would not read it and you know that, and editors know it even better than you do. You’d never pay money to read something like that, so how can you expect other people to buy it? That said, why should we bother to accept it?

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms, delete the sex, blood, and drugs and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. Remove the vulgarity from it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect. Write it, than re-write it.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about with characters readers well want to read about. Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where did they do it? What was the result of what they did?
Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning tells us what the goal of the story is. The middle tells us what the character did to reach that goal. The ending tells us what happened when the character reaches the goal.
Be sure that your main character is someone that you readers well have a reason to love.
Third person stories (he said she did) get accepted more than 80% times more often than first person stories (I said I did), and second person rarely gets accepted by anyone (you said you did). 99.8% of all best sellers are written in 3rd person.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.
Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can yours become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

While your story was not appropriate for publication in our magazine, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.

Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Lack of Spelling and Grammar:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here]we must regretfully advise you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance is based on:

Lack of correct spelling and an abundance of basic grammar mistakes.

Due to the volume of mss we receive each week, we are unable to read mss which require us to first stop and make spelling and/or grammar corrections in order to be able to read it. In the 1800’s when most authors were unable to spell due to lack of education, yes, editors did correct spelling. This is not the 1800’s, it is 200 years later. In today’s world, you would be hard pressed to find an editor that would correct a writer’s spelling and grammar mistakes. Today authors didn’t grow up in log cabins 1,000 miles from civilization, and even if they do live in the Artic Circle, they type the story up on a computer, and guess what? Computers spell check, and most grammar check too.
Before your ms gets to one of our editors, it must first survive the shush pile. The slush pile is a mountain of stories, which threatens to smother our editors in a paper avalanche. Once in a while is found one or two authors who have sent their 4th or 5th draft, a well polished draft with mistakes corrected, and the ms printed neatly and formatted correctly…and editors can actually read it. Those one or two that we can read because they are clean and neat with no mistakes… those are the ones we read, because those survive the slush pile and make it on to an editor’s desk.
Which mss drown in the slush pile? If the paper is dirty, crumpled, and torn, it drowns. If the font is big and flowery, it gets tossed. If the font is smaller than 12pt, it seeps into the unknown. If the paper is scented and has confetti flying out of each page, it gets fumigated. If the paper is pink, red, yellow, blue, or any other color not white, it gets tossed before it gets a chance to blind the editor. If it reads like a dry collage text book, it gets recycled quickly…we don‘t want our editors sleeping on the job. If there are 10 or more grammar and/or spelling mistakes on the first page, it gets tossed. Of every 100 mss we receive, more than three thirds are tossed in the trash as unreadable. Sadly, your ms has fallen into the unreadable category. As a result, your ms did not survive the slush pile and went unread by our editors.
Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.
Our editors read the ms and accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. The customer is the one who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. What is your job? Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. Now than, what can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read.
The author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

dis is da coolest storee i’s even did wrote!!!! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! it is all about how my teen years were noting but heaping loads o’ crapola, you’ll just lov at read about how my step-dad was hell, and i run away and everting! it doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the storee don’t need no plot. I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock the readers wid too!!!! Is’nt tat jus the coolest thing??? Ya I knoe, it’s great,,, oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex sence on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? you don’t neeed a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great@#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! can ya dig it?! howe loong do ya tink a weeder will stae intrested in yor storee ifing dey kan’t weed wat U al wote? and you hav‘nt actualy got a story to tell ? “YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!“ U wood knot weed it and yos no that, & us editers no dat even betta tan U doo, so why wood we bodder to weed it? even if it had been a goode storee, we wood not have nonw for all the mistakes… !!!! it jus 2 bad that mor wriders did knot spell an grammer checke afor dey submit

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to read a ms that is submitted without the author first spell-checking it at least. A typo here and there is understandable and overlooked, but how often do you see a magazine publish a story in a complete lack of grammar? Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories and nor do we. As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories.

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere. Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?

Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about characters readers well want to read about.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.

Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can your become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

You have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well ever accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss in the future.

Sincerely,

As I said these are premade forms. Why do we have premade forms? Because we do not accept certain things, and no matter how many time we tell people that we do not accept certain things, they still send them out anyways, thinking “well, they well make an eception for me”… no, not even if you were Stephen King, would we make an exception.

Baiscly, write the best you can, edit it yourself as best you can, always read submission guidelines carefully, and send your ms out to the places that WANT the type of work you write. Editors are desperatly seeking good writers, they want to accept your work, you just have to find the right editor for what you wrote.

~~EK

New From The Twighlight Manor Press: 2008 Calendar

Twighlight Manor Press on LuLu
Twighlight Manor Art by Wendy C. Allen 2008 12 month calendar
All art, drawings, and paintings by Wendy C. Allen, featureing the characters from the Twighlight Manor series, including EelKat, Sir Roderic, Etiole, Xavier, and more.
Price: $19.79

So When Do Writers Get Paid?

Answer: Not very often.  

I saw this post and had to comment on it over here on my blog:

March 26, 2007

Hard times for authors

Hello, here we go again with another week in the book world. It seems that it isn’t getting any easier for first-time novelists to win a publishing deal, according to yesterday’s Observer newspaper in the UK. The article explains how a two-book deal might yield rarely above £12,000. 

in the US the average writer is lucky if the make $5 – $500 per month on a single story… only a rare few like say Stephen King, see any real steady income from their writing and in most cases it’s from movie rights not book sales… sad really, but what it says in the article you posted is true, writers can not provide for their family on writing alone, except in very rare occasions.

For short stories published in magazines, the average is a one time payment of $5 – $20.

For a book writers can expect 2% – 7% of the wholesale price of the book, which is 30% of the cover  price of the book. For a book with a $4.95 cover price that means the author gets paid an average of .25c per book sold times the average of 5,000 copies sold worldwide. You do the math, you figure out how  much, or should I say how little that is, and than ask “Why do writers have jobs, if they get paid to write?”

~~EK

Writing Tip: Reaching 50,000 useing the 13 Step method…

I wrote this for NaNoWriMo, but it works for all your writing.

My secret to reaching 50,000

I use the 13 step method… actually it’s the 10 step method, but I like 13, so I changed it.. The 10 Step Method it’s quite a popular method used by many professional best selling writers, not sure who invented it…

anyways it helps me to write a lot of words, real fast, so I thought I’d tell you guys about it, in hopes that it’ll help someone else reach the 50,000 goal too

but here is my 13 Step version of it

Write down

Scene 1
Scene 2

etc, all the way to 13… these are your chapters, plan on having 13 of them

Think about your plot, in terms of 13 tiny stories, than write a title for each… now you have your 13 Chapter Titles

Your list should now read:

Chapter 1: “title here”
Chapter 2: “title here”

etc, all the way to Chapter 13

Now, go back to your list and add the actual scenes:

Chapter 1: The Title Here

scene 1
scene 2
scene 3
scene 4

etc, all the way to 13 scences.

do this for each chapter.

Now go back and write one scentance to describe each scene of each chapter.

Once you have completed this, you well have a complete and detailed outline to take you step by step through your story… print it up and keep it on hand when you are writing, so that you can keep your story running smoothly from one scene to the next (though you can change anything in you outline that needs changes once you start writing… it’s not a hard and fast law that you stick to the outline… the outline, just helps you to write faster, by keeping your original story idea where you can see it)

once you get going the actual writing, you plan on say, write 5 scenes a day… and you’ll find that by useing the writing a scene at a time, rather than going for word count or page count, you well write more and write faster…

I average 3,000 to 10,000 a day useing this method. yet, when I try for word count, I usually get stuck after about 500

try it and see, you’ll be amazed at how well this method works

why does it work? because you are focused on your plot, not the word count, and when you stop thinking about the words, they just start flowing out of you with out you even realizing it

thinking in chapters has helped me so much… I used to just slog along trying to write 1o pages a day… that was the goal I gave myself, 10 pages… it was murder, I kept looking down at the bottom where it said page 1 of 1, etc, and I’d stop and think:

man… I typed all that and I’m still on page 1!

than I tried for word count… and after every sentance I’d stop and check to see how many words I’d done…

“What only 7 words in that sentace! /i’ll never get done at that rate”

than one day, I’m complaining about this to my editor, and he says “get this book”… so I go and I get the book, and it’s pretty good, than I get all the books by this author (writer’s how to books) and all the books she recomended as well… ended up with like 50 books on the art of writing

and in one of them I found this 10-Step method… well me writing horror I changed it to the 13 Step method, cause I try to alway have 13 chapters… and I tried it and wow… I write so fast now! I can’t believe it!

13 works for me, cause I write horror, and I design my stories to be in 13 chapters, with 13 scenes each, cause that’s te way I’ve designed my stories to come out…

you can change it to whatever you need… say you only need 8 chapters with 5 scenes each… than that’s what would work for you…

of course, you don’t need to have the same anount of scenes per chapter either… 5 scens in chapter 1, 2 scenes in chapter 2, 12 scences in chapter 3… whatever you need to carry your story across, is what you should use

that’s what’s so great about this method, you can change it to whatever works for you and your story… there are no hard rules

it helps keep me focused on my story too…

for me, I have a BIIIIG problem, with rambling… I’ll go waaaay off topic inside the thoughts of a minor character… which in itself is not bad, but it goes off the story. Good thing about it is it gives me ideas for a spin-off story, which I write a lot of.

The outline thingy, helps me to stay on my story, I keep looking back at it, and I know where I should be, and I can stay on track easier

bad thing, is, all my spin-off need outlines, and each of them reasult in more spin offs, and I end up with too many outlines and not enough stories LOL! 

I hope this helps!

Blogs for Writers: Round Five of Blog Additions

As the month of March draws near an end, so too does my search for blogs for and by writers… what you are now reading is round five of the blog additions. Possibly the last round, but who knows, I may change my mind if I find a few more to add.

I am also seeking out “how-to” blogs for writers of genre fiction, if you know of any good ones be sure to point me in their direction, even if you are not the owner of it.

Write Wrote Written
Pick The Brain
Boost Writing Productivity
Hypnotize Your Visitors
Alpha Glyph: Personal Publishing
Authors Blogs
Grow as a Writer
Given To
Incoherent Thoughts
SELF-PUBLISHING PART 1
Rager Media Editor’s Blog
Books Blog: A Conspiracy of Smart People
From Where I Sit
Good Vanity Publishing: How it should be done
Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog
The Writing Life
ZoHo Writers Blog
Self-Publishing Book Production & Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Petrona
Fiction Fanatic
Self Publishing
Self Publishing Fiction
Be Your Own Editor

P.$. If your blog for writers is not yet added, just leave a comment with a link to it, and let me know, I’ll check it out.  (This is the sixth post, so be sure to check all 6 of them, yours may be on one of the earlier rounds this month).

P.P.$. Once again, I remind comment posters, I only add family friendly, non-porn sites to all editions of my Z-Lists. Links to “adult sites” are deleted and the posters ISP  banned not only on this blog, but on each and every blog, forum, chat room, web ring, fanlisting, and web site of the more than 200 sites that make up The Space Dock 13 Network.

Blogs for Writers: Fourth Round of Blog Additions

Here is the next round of blogs I plan to add to the Z-List for Writers:

The Working Writers Coach

Sylvia’s Insight
Writer in the Making
Ink In My Coffee
Grow Your Writing Business
DESiGN YOUR WRiTiNG LiFE
KCWrite4u
Wealth of Words
Content Done Better
Writers in the Sky
Musings from a Writer
JM Writing and Editing Services
Renegade Writer
Mrs. Write Right, Word Therapist (aka Writer-Editor)
Practicing Writing
WritingThoughts
Engaging Pages For Working Writers
A writer’s life and times
Six Figure Writers
Write For Life
Writers and Authors
Muse Writers Peer Awards
Will Write 4 Food
National Association of Writers’ Groups
My Words, My Way
Writing for Reason
Funds for Writers
Beginner’s Guide to Freelance Writing
The Rural Writer
Paperback Writer
Creatively Self-Employed
Ye Old Inkwell
Writers in the Sky
Bleeding Ink
Editing for Everyone
Newbie’s Guide to Publishing
Irene Goodman
academia
Pub Rants
EVIL EDITOR
iUniverse
Budding Authors
NaNoWriMo
World of Words
Miss Snark
Absolute Write
101 Sites
Agent Query

Fan-Fiction…or the art of stealing fiction

Fan-Fiction…or the art of stealing fiction

Question:What is wrong with writing fan-fiction? I thought writer’s liked it when us fans loved their work and wrote fan-fiction? I write fan fiction all the time…What harm can it do? Answer:FanFic or Fan Fiction. Nope, that is not here either. If you are looking for a place to post your fan fic, than you are in the wrong place, and talking to the wrong person.

As the creator and copyright owner of my own universe, I have my characters designed and act the way I want them to look, talk, and act. My porcupine quills stand on end and shot fire at the mere thought that a fan would maul and mutilate one on my characters to fit their own definition of them. I hate it when fans, create themselves as a character and become the lover of one of my characters. What gives you the right to think that he (she) would see anything to like about you? I know what my characters like and do not like. If I want them in a torrid erotica affair with someone, than I will give them a lover and write about the affair myself.

While it may be good practice for new writers, to write out their fantasies with copyrighted characters… if you are not capable of creating your own characters, than you really have no business pretending to be a writer at all.

Why? Well, for one thing to be a writer, you must create your own universe. Yeah, that’s right…Writers create.

And what do writer’s create?

Writers create characters. If you can’t create your own characters, you will not get very far as a professional writer.

Fan-Fic for your personal fantasy and writing practice is one thing but to publish it and make a mockery of the original writer’s intended character traits is not only an outrage, but a copyright infringement that could get you a $25,000 fine and/or 10 or more years in prison. Some authors may not care, but what about the one’s who do care? What do they do?

In a word…they sue your ass off, and take you for everything you have…you could lose your home, your car, your job, and if you are lucky you won’t go to prison…. that’s IF, and the law swings to the rights of the creator of the characters, so your chances of landing on the little tiny if are not good.

Think about it this way:

Pretend for a few moments that you are not some fan-fic groupie…but that you are an actual writer…the REAL THING…a 100% honest writer who has created a universe filled with wonderful characters. Characters who you get paid to write about. Characters, who, if you stopped writing about, your family would starve, because you are a real writer and you get paid to write….

Now that you are a real writer…think about this…

You have created a character that you love deeply. You have poured your heart and soul into designing him. You gave him a home. A career. A family. A lifestyle. A goal. A purpose, etc. He is perfect. Now you write a story about him. You want the world to know how much you love the character you have created.

Eureka, the story is published! Better, yet, the world loves him. He becomes an over night hit. You are so proud that the world loves him as much as you do.

Than one day you come across a fan-fic site, and shudder, shock, horror! You find that your beloved character has murdered his wife and is in bed with the author of the FanFic story! Or your villain has given up a life of crime and now preaches the Bible as a traveling evangelist.

You stare at the screen in disbelief. You are shocked. You are hurt. With tears in your eyes, you ask yourself: “How could they? How could they take my beautiful perfect character, and turn him into such a monster?”

Your heart is broken. You give up writing. You cannot understand how your fans could be so sadistic and cruel as to destroy your beloved work of art. Why? Why? Why? You thought they loved him as much as you do…and now you find that they don’t love him, they only love to hurt him. WHY? You ask again. You worked so long. You worked so hard. And for what? For this? To sit back and watch as the fans destroy the character you created and turn him into something you never intended him to be?

Than you realize…they are destroying your character, and fans are reading it! Fans are reading it! That means they are not buying your stories anymore. You are not getting paid for these works of fan-fiction. Your family must go hungry because your fans instead of paying for your work are reading fan-fiction. The writers of the fan-fiction have not only destroyed your character, but they have stolen the food right out of your children’s mouths. They have stolen your income, your career is ruined.

You see the problem with fan-fiction?

Do you see now why I hate it so much?

How do you think you’d feel if someone did this to you and a character you created?

writing
writeing
fiction
fan-fic
creators
authors
thieves

Writer’s Debate Team: Magazines VS Social Change

How has the magazine industry evolved in response to social change and technological development?

Have you ever compaired those from the 1940′s to those today?

What about the 1970′s vs today?
Are magazines from the 1990′s differant from what’s being sold now in the 2000′s?

How are the magazines from each of these eras differant?

How has the social lives of citizens affected the way magazines have chaged over the years?

How has technological development affected the way magazines have chaged over the years?

Where these changes for better or for worse?

How well the magazine industry change in the future?

What are your thoughts on this matter?

Story Length

From A Writer’s Desk

bliss wrote: Story length
« Thread Started on Jun 25, 2006, 11:36am »

What defines a short story from a novel? It’s length? It’s level of detail and development?

It’s something I’ve been wondering.

Each market/editor/publisher may have it’s own definition, however these are considered standard:

Extreme Shorts:

Not very common, these are quick quips and fillers under 100 words. It is very difficult to write a high quality story with full plot and characters in less than 100 words, but it can be done.

Flash fiction:

Gaining popularity in some markets, these super short shorts are less than 750 words. Like Extreme Shorts, it is very difficult to write a high quality story with full plot and characters with so few words. Not many writers can do this well, but it can be done, and is a good quick read, when written well.

Minute Mysteries:

Before Flash Fiction came to be, there were these tiny and popular often, murder mysteries. These super short shorts are less than 750 words, can be read in a minute or less, and can be seen in such magazines as Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. Like Extreme Shorts, it is very difficult to write a high quality story with full plot and characters with so few words. Not many writers can do this well, but it can be done, and is a good quick read, when written well.

Short-Short:

Anything under 5,000 words, but usual between 1,000 – 2,500 words long.

Short Story:

Usually used to describe any story less than 7,500 words, but all stories under 15,000 words are considered to be “short”. Short stories often have a full cast of characters, plot twists, and are sometime “serialized”.

Novelette:

A short story that is between 7,500 words to 17,500 words.

Serials:

A set of short stories, each with the same characters and basic setting, but with a totally different plot and story. Often published at a rate of one per month, they continue to tell the story of the life of a certain character. Some serials continue one into the next in chronological order, while others are random stories about a single character, with no real timeline. If the serial becomes popular enough, the short stories are often gathered up and reprinted in chronological order as a single book/novel. Sherlock Holmes is probably the most famous serial ever written.

Novella:

A novella is too long to be considered a truly short story, but it is still not long enough to be called a novel. Most are between 17,500 words to 40,000 words, often published as mini-books known as chapbooks.

Novel:

A long story 40,000 words or more, with no limits, most are 150,000+. When most people think writer, they think of a person who writes “books”, i.e. one who writes novels. A novel is a complex story filled with characters, villains, sub-characters, plots, twists, turns, detailed descriptions of characters and landscapes, and an ever-moving flow of action. Novels are too long to read in one sitting, often taking several days, even weeks to read. Rarely seen in magazines.

Prequel:

Part 2 of the story, that is really part 1 of the story you already told. A continuation of the first story, that tells of the events that took place before the beginning of the last story.

Sequel:

Part 2 of the story. A continuation of the first story, that tells of the events that took place after the ending of the last story.

Trilogy:

A story so long that it had to be published in three separate volumes. May have as many as 500,000 words or more.

Series:

A set of stories with more than 3 volumes, usably paperback novels, each with the same characters and basic setting, but with a totally different plot and story in each book. Often published at a rate of one or two per year, they continue to tell the story of the life of a certain character. Some serials continue one into the next in chronological order, while others are random stories about a single character, with no real timeline. If the serial becomes popular enough, the short stories are often gathered up and reprinted in chronological order as a single book/novel. Nancy Drew Mysteries are probably the most famous series of books ever written, spanning over 300 volumes and more than 60 years of writing. Started in the 1930′s the Nancy Drew series continued to see new storied added to it until Carolyn Keene’s death in the 1990′s. Sadly due to her 1930′s contract she never received royalties, was paid less than $800 per novel, and was not allowed to keep the copyright to her creation. A lesson here: read your contract VERY, VERY carefully BEFORE you sign it.

I hope this helps

~~EK

Types of Narration

Types of Narration:

I could describe for you the meaning of each narration style, but than you may or may not understand. So I have instead written each of the following using the style itself, so that you can see how each style is used. Some styles are similar, for example, both the second person account and the choose your own adventure are written using second person account, however, the format is slightly different.

Most every book you read is written using the third person account. It is the easiest to write and the easiest to read, it is used in both fiction and nonfiction stories.

Also common, is the first person account. This style is used most often in books were the main character is a child, teen, or young adult. True romance stories are often written in this style. The first person account is used in both fiction and nonfiction stories.

A monolog is a type of first person account, usually seen in script writing for comic books and movies. A monolog is a long wordy style that uses a ton of unnecessary words, and often has the character arguing with their own inner conscience. This style is commonly used when the villain is the main character. It is also used by nearly every villain in super hero comic books as a way of speaking.

The most difficult and rarely used style is the second person account. Most every book written in this style is a mystery novel, as this is the perfect genre for second person accounts, though other genres sometimes use it as well. The reader is the main character…the narrator of this story has no name, no age, no gender, no personality, or any other identifiable traits written into the story. By doing this the reader is able to take on the identity of the main character. The secondary characters, the plot, and the scenes are vividly described to make up for not describing the main character. Physical scenes, emotions, and sub conscious thoughts a described with crystal clarity. The reader must feel everything the main character feels, smell everything the main character smells, taste, hear, and touch everything the main character does. It’s a grueling style to write, too difficult for the average writer to pull of convincingly, but when well written the second person account can be the most enjoyable style writing for the reader. Common types to use this style are: Choose Your Own Adventure, Murder Mysteries, Role Playing Novels, and Role Playing Games.
First Person Account:

When I write in first person account, I am telling you the story like it is, the way I saw it happen. I’m telling you this because this is how it affected my family, and me and the world has a right to know what happened to us.

Second Person Account:

You are sitting at your desk ready to write. You are a very good writer, you know this, but you can’t understand why writing a second person account is so difficult. You decide to call one of your writing buddies to ask. The phone rings. No one answers. You hang up the receiver and decide to move on to a different writing style.

Third Person Account:

When Harry writes a book, this is the style he uses most often, because it is the easiest style in which to write. He had tried writing in other styles, because many of his friends had told him that he should. However after much trial and error Harry, decided that third person had proved to be the easiest format for him to write, and so this the one he uses for almost every book he writes now.

The Personal Record:

Dear Readers, I do not know when or how you will come by this, my diary, in which I am keeping this account of my life. I’m sure you will soon learn, because a terrible injustice has been done, that I have to hide this book from those who would seek to destroy it. I must write down these events so that when I am gone the world my learn from my mistakes. Please dear reader, do not make the same mistakes I made.

The Monolog:

You dare ask ME! ME! The great overlord of all life! Me! Your captor! Me, the almighty one! Me! The ultimate life form! You dare ask me, why I write using this style! The impotence! The audacity! The ignorance! You fool! Must I explain everything to your puny incompetent brain? I write like this because it is part of my master plan to destroy the world!

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Soon, I shall control the universe! It’ll be mine, mine I tell you! Mine! MINE! All mine! Mwa_HAHAHAhahah…ha…ha… heh… heh… heh…eh?

Wait…could it be that this is wrong? Could there be another way for me to gain control of the universe without violence? Should I find another way? What am I saying? I love violence! And you! YOU! You incompetent little worm! You shall be my first victim!

BWaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Choose Your Own Adventure/Choose Your Fate:

It was a dark and stormy night. You see the lightening flash! You shudder as the thunder clatters outside your window. You are tired and want desperately to go to bed, but your report is due by morning, so you must continue to type away. You must not be bothered by the sounds around you.

Suddenly you hear a crash outside your window…

1) If you think it was just a falling limb, than keep on typing to the next page.

2) If you think it was a car accident than grab your raincoat and turn to page 10 to go outside and find out.

3) If you think is was a ghost in your attic, than get a flashlight and turn to page 33.