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My Agent Hunt

My Agent Hunt

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childoffireI should start by introducing myself: my name is Harry Connolly and I’m a Del Rey author. My second novel came out on the last day of August and I’m pretty proud of it. I’m also proud that my first fiction sale was to Black Gate: “The Whoremaster of Pald” headed the table of contents of the second issue (and can be read for free on this website). Happily, there have been a couple of other sales here, too. I also spoke about the details of my first novel sale last Saturday, and my interview with Howard Andrew Jones appeared here Monday.

Anyway, per John’s request, I’d like to describe the method I used to find my agent. I’m a cheap bastard, so I didn’t spend any money but the search did take a while. I’ll also detail the mistakes I made, which may be instructive for others.

First, I don’t need to say I spent a long time revising my query letter, right? You guys all know that the letter has to be specific, intriguing and on-point, I’m sure. So let’s skip the part where I recommend you revise it several times and ask smart friends for feedback.

But where to send it? Being cheap, I went to the internet. Specifically, I went to agentquery.com and used their “Full Search” to compile a long list of agents that represent fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Thank you, copy and paste.

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Epic Black Gate Trailer of AWESOMENESS!

Epic Black Gate Trailer of AWESOMENESS!

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Claire: How do we do this, O’Neill? I’m still new at this website editing.

John: Just type everything I say, Cooney.  First, we wanna hype Magill and Sam.

Claire: Easy!

John: Wow, you type fast. This can’t be too long. We’ve got to get right to it.

Claire: Okay. So, dear Black Gate readers, look at this cool thing my friends Magill Foote and Sam Rahn did. It’s so 21st Century. And it makes Black Gate look so cool. Not that it needed any help. And now we just post it? Beneath the cut?

John: No, no, no. It’s gotta be right here!  Do it now!

Join the Sorcerer’s Guild Today

Join the Sorcerer’s Guild Today

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harpers-penJeff Crook, the mastermind behind The Harper’s Pen Award, has announced some changes to the Award, and opened up membership to the Sorcerer’s Guild, the voting body.

He’s also offering a free PDF copy of Black Gate 14 (sold here for $4.95) to the first 100 members:

The time has come to start thinking about nominations for the next Harper’s Pen Award. That means it’s time to unlock the adamantine doors of the Sorcerer’s Guild and open our membership drive. The Sorcerer’s Guild is an autonomous anarcho-syndicalist collective of fans, editors and authors of the short fiction genre commonly known as Sword and Sorcery (cue lights, smoke, thunder). We gather once each year to trade spells and knitting patterns and select the winner of the presigious and lucrative Harper’s Pen Award. The 2009 winner was John C. Hocking for his story “The Face in the Sea” published in Black Gate #13.

Beginning this year, you must be a member of the Sorcerer’s Guild to nominate a story for the Harper’s Pen. Cruel, I know, but we must maintain some standards. Luckily, joining the Sorcerer’s Guild is not only easy, it’s rewarding, because we are prepared to offer the first 100 new members a pdf download of Black Gate #14. Yes, that’s right – by joining today, you will receive a free magazine of the some of the best Sword and Sorcery short fiction being published today.

The complete announcement is here.

If you’re interested in Sword & Sorcery or short fiction, or nominating authors for the Harper’s Pen Award, joining the Sorcerer’s Guild could be extremely rewarding — and not just for the free issue of Black Gate.

Time Element

Time Element

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fine-print-poster1The false motivational poster to the left has nothing to do with the rest of my post today, except that it came as a reward to myself after a week of tough self-disciplined writing, aided by the simple power of time awareness. As I finished my enormous work on late Sunday evening, I celebrated my triumph with a small but exquisite waste of time, creating one of the many “demotivational posters” that travel around the ‘net as humor or an approximation of humor. Better than LOLCats, at least. This is my deep inner Tolkien Geek, who has always wondered what the Lord of the Nazgûl thought as he died under Éowyn’s blade on the Pelennor Fields. My guess: “Damn fine print!”

It’s little time-waster rewards like this that make getting through heavy writing projects just a bit easier.

But the real writing-aid VIP for me, and which has been a tremendous help since I started using it about two years ago, has been a time log. I’ve written previously about how I did revising “on the clock” for National Novel Editing Month (a March event—edit for at least fifty hours during the month) by turning on a desktop stopwatch whenever I sit down to do any writing or editing. I hide the clock, and have it set to chime at the half-hour. I use Apimac Timer, a Mac OS X application, for the stopwatch. For specifically timed exercises, I use a countdown on the same timer. After each work day, I record in a notebook how much time I’ve spent working, and my word count (if applicable). Apicmac Timer also also you to record a log on the program and not lose count of the time you spent

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Harry Connolly and the Black Gate Interview

Harry Connolly and the Black Gate Interview

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childoffireWhen people tell us about their favorite Black Gate authors and stories, one name that inevitably turns up in both staff and fan discussions is Harry James Connolly, whose tales have appeared three times now in our pages, with more on the way. You may not have seen much of him lately over at Black Gate, but he’s been very busy writing some best selling novels. You can find all about that over here, and a little bit more about Harry and his writing if you just keep reading.

A Conversation with Harry Connolly

Conducted and transcribed by Howard Andrew Jones October 3 – Oct 10 2010

BG: First tell us how long you’ve wanted to be a writer, and how long you were mulling over the novel that launched your career before you finally sat down to draft it.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was very small.  I was an early reader — like, age 3 — and when my parents explained that people made a living writing books like the one in my hands, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

Not that I had any idea what that meant.  I do have a distinct memory of sitting in kindergarten learning to write the letter “M” and thinking  this is totally going to come in handy! (to paraphrase my young self).

As for Child of Fire, it’s a setting that I’ve written in before (some short fiction and a pair of novels–but with different characters), butI knew I wanted to do something very specific with it.  I spent several weeks working out the story and, more importantly, the tone before I dug into the writing.

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Howard Andrew Jones’ Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows Available for Pre-order

Howard Andrew Jones’ Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows Available for Pre-order

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Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows, by Howard Andrew Jones. Coming February 2011Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones has had a busy year.

In addition to his upcoming Dabir & Asim novel The Desert of Souls, due in hardcover February 2011 from Thomas Dunne Books, Howard’s second novel Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows will appear from Paizo in early 2011.

Pathfinder Tales novels are standalone novels set in the world of Golarion, home of the succesful Pathfinder role playing game.  The first two volumes are Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross (August 2010) and Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham (November).

Here’s the book description:

The race is on to free Lord Stelan from the grip of a wasting curse, and only his old elven mercenary companion Elyana has the wisdom — and swordcraft — to solve the mystery of his tormentor and free her old friend before three days have passed and the illness takes its course. When the villain turns out to be another of their former companions, the elf sets out with a team of adventurers across the Revolution-wracked nation of Galt and the treacherous Five Kings Mountains to discover the key to Stelan’s salvation in a lost valley warped by weird magical energies and inhabited by terrible nightmare beasts. From Black Gate magazine’s fiction editor Howard Andrew Jones comes a fantastic new adventure of swords and sorcery, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

You can pre-order copies directly from Piazo, either individually or as part of their Pathfinder Tales subscription.

My First Novel Sale

My First Novel Sale

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childoffireThis essay first appeared as a part of Jim C. Hines’s First Book Friday series, in which authors describe their first sales. You can read the entire series on his blog or LiveJournal. This piece has been lightly edited for clarity.

The first thing to know about selling Child of Fire, my first novel, is that it happened after I’d already quit writing.

I’d spent years trying to sell longer works, but had no success; you might say I was a smidge discouraged. The book I’d written just before Child of Fire was very difficult and very personal; I’d literally wept while composing the first draft. What happened when I sent it out? Form rejection after form rejection.

I was angry (with myself, not with the people who’d rejected me; that’s one of my most important rules). I thought I’d been doing everything I needed to do, but apparently not.

For my next book, I used my anger as fuel. I started with a strange incident that needed to be investigated. I loaded the story with antagonists and conflicting goals. Then I ramped up the pace and kept it going, making even the slower parts, where the characters just talk with each other, quick and full of conflict.

But I was sure I was wasting my time. If my last book hadn’t gone anywhere, why should this one?

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The E-book Revolution

The E-book Revolution

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star-soldier1An atomic bomb has exploded in the world of writing. The mushroom cloud expanding over us awes some and terrifies others. Many claim it’s a passing thing and will blow away in time.

“Fah! I’ve seen other explosions before,” say the critics. “This, too, will fade.”

“Look,” they add, “only ten percent of readers will use Kindle, Nook, iPad or read on their computers. Everyone else will stick with print.”

The critics have a masterful argument, too. Smell. “A book smells sooo good,” they say. “I love the odor.”

I call them snifffers. Until the E-book Revolution, I had no idea so many people lovingly lifted their books to their nose like a bouquet of roses and inhaled the odor.

“Ahhh, just smell this, honey. Oooo, it gets me in the mood.”

Like Guttenberg’s printing press, the E-book Revolution is changing the dynamics of the game.

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Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize for Literature

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war-of-the-end-of-the-worldPeruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the finest writers in the world — perhaps, indeed, the finest writer — was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature by the Royal Swedish Academy yesterday.

Vargas Llosa wrote two of the best novels I’ve ever read: Time of the Hero, based on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy — which caused such an uproar that a thousand copies were publicly burned by military authorities — and The War of the End of the World, which he’s called his finest book. This historical novel of End-of-the-19th-Century Brazil reads like epic fantasy, chronicling the apocalyptic fate of the small town of Canudos, in the grip of a visionary prophet and home to the country’s outcasts — prostitutes, bandits, and beggars — and a place where money, taxation, and marriage do not exist. Until the Brazilian government deems it must be destroyed at any cost.

In total he’s written over 30 novels and plays, including The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and In Praise of the Stepmother.

Vargas Llosa ran for President of Peru in 1990, but lost to Alberto Fujimori, who was later convicted of bribery, embezzlement, and human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 1976 Vargas Llosa famously punched his former friend Gabriel García Márquez (author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a 1982 Nobel Prize winner himself) in Mexico City, and the two have reportedly not spoken in decades.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is regarded as the highest award a writer can receive. Previous winners have included Guenter Grass, Toni Morrison, William Golding, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, William Faulkner, and George Bernard Shaw.

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

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World Fantasy Award Nominee
World Fantasy Award Nominee.

A growing number of Black Gate authors have moved on to book deals, and some were published novelists before they appeared in the magazine.

Two of us, James Enge and myself,  landed book deals featuring recurring characters that had appeared in Black Gate short stories.

They were the Dabir & Asim stories for me (“Whispers from the Stone” and “Sight of Vengeance“) and the Morlock tales for James (six appearances in BG so far, starting with “Turn Up This Crooked Way” and “Payment Deferred,” and most recently the novella “Destroyer” in Black Gate 14).

Back before James got nominated for the World Fantasy Award in the Best Novel category (for his first novel, no less! — that’s Blood of Ambrose, if you don’t have a copy yet) the two of us got talking one day about the connections between magazine sales and book deals.

We decided to turn the thing into a public back-and-forth discussion about writing serial fantasy characters, starting with a look at the idea that short story successes lead naturally to selling books.

I’ve captured and condensed that conversation here for your enjoyment.

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