The Hunt for an Agent is On

            Agents are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. I haven’t even met one yet and I'm astounded by the amount of work I've discovered they do.

            First and foremost, they are talent scouts. They wade through piles upon piles of submissions sent to them by authors hopeful of representation, seeking out the ones they want to represent. Note that I didn't say the best ones – every agent turns down plenty of books they enjoy depending on the current book market, what they are specifically looking for and, sometimes, because of how busy they are. The rejections they send out are frequently as hard for them as they are for the author whose book is being rejected.

            Next, a large number of them offer editorial services – they will work with an author to get their book into peak condition before moving on to sell the book to a publishing house. At this point, they turn into lawyers, negotiating contracts that ensure that their authors not only get paid what they deserve, but don’t have any nasty surprises such as discovering they no longer own the rights to their own book.

            After that, many agents stay on to help with marketing the books, which in this day and age is largely the author’s responsibility. This is ongoing work they do throughout the course of the book’s printed life.

            It should also be noted that most of this work is done before the agent gets paid. In fact, until that contract is negotiated, the agent isn't even certain they will get paid. What if no publisher wants the book? All that hard work goes down the drain, along with a crushed and defeated client.

            Needless to say, agents are a valuable resource to any author – not to mention, having an agent is often the only way to catch the attention of the major publishing houses. That’s why I'm currently trying to get one.

            It’s a challenging process, involving finding agents who are interested in my genre of book then writing a query letter to them. A query letter is much like the cover letter you write when trying to get a job, only instead of telling an employer how perfect you are for the job, you’re trying to get the agent interested in your book at the same time as telling them the entire plot, the length of the book, who you are and why you’re the right person to write this book, and why the agent is a good match for the book. All of this in a page or less. If the query isn't good enough, you get an impersonal form letter of rejection with no feedback on where you went wrong (you can hardly blame them; I just told you how much work they do).

            To add to the challenge, agents have tons of these queries to go through. One agent I follow on Twitter had over 400 submissions come in overnight last week! So this query letter has to stick out – it needs to be both personal and professional, at the same time as saying “Hey! Look at this great book!” as modestly as possible.

            Luckily I've had a bit of help in this department. I had the privilege of beta testing some of the courses offered at getabookdeal101.com which have helped me gain a great deal of insight into the entire process – not to mention a lot of positive encouragement.

            Now, armed with knowledge, I have begun my hunt for an agent. With any luck, I should have an agent within the next few months and those of you waiting eagerly to read my whole book will find that the wait is nearly over.

            Incidentally, I should mention that this blog was in no way written to flatter any agents who might happen along while investigating my queries. Really.

            But the thought did cross my mind...

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Understanding Phobias

            I have often felt that most people don’t understand the term “phobia”. The general meaning is understood – a phobia is a fear. But, if it’s a fear, why not just say “fear” instead of “phobia”?

            The reason is that a phobia is much more than a fear – it is a type of anxiety disorder. Depending on the severity of the phobias, they can be very debilitating. As someone who suffers from a number of them, I would know. That being said, the information I can give you is based off of my own experiences and may or may not reflect those of other people, but in the very least it can give you an idea of what having a phobia is like.

            The very worst part of having a phobia is knowing that it exists, because they are generally irrational fears. With a normal irrational fear, someone can use logic and explain to you how it is irrational and that helps you overcome the fear, but with a phobia, all it can do is make you aware that your response is entirely involuntary. There’s nothing worse than knowing that you can’t control your reaction to something you know you shouldn't be afraid of.

            Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is with an example. One of my phobias that I discovered when I was a teenager was a fear of heights. But not all heights, no, just a certain type. I could easily jump down from a ten foot balcony or have LARP sword fights with my friends on the angled (and usually slippery) pavilion roofs at the park, but to get up to that roof I had to walk across the narrow sides of two-by-fours which I discovered I could only do if I was holding on to something.

            Now, I know, that seems perfectly logical and is an intelligent safety precaution, which is true, but what struck me was that I actually couldn't move if I wasn't holding on to something. I have an excellent sense of balance and I had every confidence that I could even run across those two-by-fours without falling, but my body refused to move.

            Logic told me I would be safe; I had the confidence and the skill, but I still couldn't do it. This is the difference between a phobia and a fear. Here is a picture of the closest I ever got to defeating that phobia:

            It was taken as part of a series of pictures where I was having LARP dagger fights with my best friend everywhere. Of all the pictures, this was the only one that was posed (including one where we were fighting while standing on either end of a teeter-totter) because I couldn't stay standing up long enough to fight.

            I shouldn't say that logic is entirely useless in regards to phobias. It is wonderful for making them worse. There is one very common mistake that people make when trying to help someone with a phobia, and that is to give them logic. “Why are you afraid of X? Don’t you know that Y, which you have no problem with, has far more bacteria?” To which my response is, “Gee, thanks, now my phobia won’t let me touch X or Y!”

            In fact, being a logical person and having a phobia is probably the worst combination there is. One of my worst phobias is raw meat. Somewhere along the lines, I picked up that raw meat carried all kinds of bad... something. I don’t even know what it is that I'm afraid of, but I know I can’t touch raw meat. Or anything that raw meat touches. Or that that touches. It’s like there’s a force-field.

            Colleen and I went to the local Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago and we bought a couple pounds of bacon. It was nearly a traumatising experience for me and worse for Colleen once I pointed out to her what had happened (she makes every possible effort to not agitate my phobias. Isn't she wonderful?). The lady at the shop handled the bacon with her bare hands, which she then used to wrap the bacon before putting it on the counter. To clarify this in my phobia’s terminology, the bacon contaminated the lady’s hands, which contaminated the paper that was now, by my expectation, supposed to be preventing the bacon from contaminating anything else.

Good job there.

            Moving on, Colleen paid the woman, who took the money and gave change with the same contaminated hands. Taking the contaminated change, Colleen’s hands became contaminated, as did her wallet and everything in it when she put the money inside. Then, on the way home, Colleen brushed her hair out of her eyes with her contaminated hands...

            And that is how phobia logic works! It took every ounce of my self control and mental re-routing to stop my phobia from preventing me from handling money ever again (because I don’t know how much of it has been passed through hands that have handled raw meat). To be fair, that’s a pretty powerful phobia, but it should at least give you an idea what having one is like (if you don’t already have one).

            So, what can you do to help someone with a phobia if logic doesn't work? The best suggestion I have is to leave them to take care of themselves and to respect that their fears are rooted so deeply that it is more than a fear – it is an involuntary, often paralysing, reaction. People who know they have phobias know what precautions to take to prevent them from being too problematic (such as marrying a wonderful person who’s willing to eliminate all those spiders that want to kill them). In my experience, all you can do by trying to make the phobias go away is to make them worse.

            I hope this has helped you to understand phobias a bit better and that, if you have phobias, it hasn't made them worse.

            To that one despicable person out there who just opened their wallet and started rubbing all their money on a raw steak, I hope that whatever it is that my phobia insists I’m afraid of gets you instead of me.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Social Conditioning

            I’d like to take a moment to talk to you about social conditioning. It’s a term I like to think I came up with, though I'm sure someone beat me to it. Yup. I just looked it up. Wiki defines it as “the sociological process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by society”. Or, as I like to put it, a very mild form of brainwashing that not only has happened to all of us, but we participate in doing to other people every day.

            For example, if I were to ask you what colour little boys and girls wear, even if it isn't your answer, your first thought will most likely be that boys wear blue and girls wear pink. If I told you that mom is working around the house, you’ll picture her cleaning something, while if I were to have said dad is working around the house you would have seen him fixing something.

            Gender stereotypes are just the easiest way of showing social conditioning. They exist because they've been trained into us for generations. We are now trying to counteract it by saying “It’s okay; your gender doesn't matter, you can do any job you want!” but, even as we say it, a small part of our minds are rebelling. It’s true, gender doesn't matter, but these roles are so ingrained into our minds that we have trouble taking those words and putting them into action.

            When they were raising us, my parents made a great effort to keep my brother and I from even being aware of these stereotypes and they did a fantastic job of it! They both shared in the work around the house, they both loved to cook, they both worked at the business they both owned. I remember a time when I owned a doll and never thought anything of it. Then school happened.

            School is the first place outside our homes that we are exposed to social conditioning – and it’s not from the teachers. It’s from the kids who are spouting out what they've learned from TV or their parents or grandparents. My brother was older, so he went to school first. Suddenly we went from being the best of friends to fighting all the time, because he learned about sibling rivalry. After I started school, I gave my doll away because boys didn't play with dolls. Suddenly we were infused with all of these stereotypes and pressure to follow them that we’d never had before. Luckily, neither of us had what we were raised to believe entirely squeezed out of us, but we did take a fair amount of residual damage. Neither of us ever quite fit in. I know my brother was bullied a fair amount and, while no one ever outright said it to me at the time, I've learned that many people’s first impression of me was that I was gay, simply because I didn't care about being masculine. I was happier being myself than trying to prove I was a man.

            This is just a small picture of what social conditioning is and what it does to people. Where does it come from? Well, mostly it’s from children, or, at least, they’re the ones doing it the most and the ones most susceptible to it. Where do they get their information from? Other children, parents, grandparents and TV. TV is actually one of the worst sources, because children often follow examples. In order to entertain us, shows need some sort of conflict and, as a result, there are some very despicable characters that we are exposed to, meanwhile there’s a child sitting there and watching for examples on how to behave.

            Most people go though their whole lives blissfully unaware of social conditioning – not surprising, since the only way to notice it is to stop and wonder why we do some of the things we do. I've always felt that it’s important to consider my motivations before taking action, which is how I first stumbled across the idea of social conditioning. Now I often stop to think, am I doing this because it’s part of who I want to be, or is it because society has trained me to act this way?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

A Weekend in Geekdom

            I spent this past weekend selling chainmaille at Con-G, an anime/videogame/geek convention that has been taking place for the last five years in Guelph, Ontario. As a shy, introverted person, I have to say I’m amazed at just how much fun I had.

            First, I should explain a bit more about these events. Essentially, a hotel (or group of hotels) or conference centre is taken over by a hoard of the strangest (and nicest) people you’ll ever meet. At least half of these people (known as cosplayers) show up dressed as their favourite characters from shows and games – some of them even act the part the whole time they’re there! Others (like my wife and sister-in-law) have a different costume for each day of the event. Various activities are scheduled for these eccentric people, such as panels where people discuss their favourite shows/games or skills related to costume-making or art, gaming rooms for everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Pokemon card games to DDR, cosplay chess (where attendees are the chess pieces), dances and skits. Also always present are the Dealers’ Room and Artists’ Alley where vendors and artists sell their geeky wares.

            It’s funny, really, that this is a gathering from all walks of life of the people who the rest of society makes the most fun of – yet, as I said before, they are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. No one is judgemental; boys dress as girls, girls dress as boys, heavy people dress as skinny characters and no one ever says anything negative to any of them! Everyone is always complimenting each other and it’s very common to see signs declaring “Free hugs!” being worn by people – and, yes, they tend to get a lot of hugs.

(An awsome Ezio from Assassins' Creed)

(This girl made a perfect Sherlock)

            Being a vendor, I got to experience this event in a way that few people do. I stood still and watched to world go past, as it were, because sooner or later, just about everyone passes through the Dealer’s Room. That meant that I was able to see most of the fabulous costumes that people pour so much time and effort into and, even as someone who didn't recognise most of the costumes, I can say that of lot of them are phenomenal. And the people! Every now and then, someone would stop at my table and we’d get talking and joking around as if we’d known each other all our lives when, in reality, we didn't know each other’s names.

            One such experience was a guy who later introduced himself as Wallet. He had come to the Con without a costume and was piecing together an outfit as he went along. He spent quite some time at my table, chatting with me, and ended up deciding to buy a scale flower for a girl he knew. The problem was that he didn't know her favourite colour, so he’d have to come back later so she could choose one.

            Now, during this time, my wife Colleen had been spending a lot of time off enjoying the event. When Wallet returned with the girl he wanted to buy the scale flower for (Angel), I was surprised to find Colleen with them! It turned out that Colleen and Angel had met at an event and struck up a friendship. Not only that, but earlier in the day Angel had been talking to me and showing me a chainmaille bracelet a friend had made her! It was a craziest set of coincidences.

We ended up mashing up a couple of our items so Angel could wear the scale flower (red) as part of her costume for the next day. Needless to say, there were many occasions upon which we encountered Angel and Wallet over the rest of the event, including Angel borrowing a necklace and doing some advertising for us.

            Another experience was someone who took a video of my products and asked me some questions for a video about his experiences at Con-G for his Youtube channel. There were a number of people who kept walking by again and again, finally stopping to buy something when they could no longer resist. Some people came by every day just to say hi and tell me how they wished they had more money. I can’t tell you how many compliments I received on my chainmaille tie!

            Now, all the costumes and friendly people can be experienced by anyone at the event, but what really made the event for me was the other vendors. You can never know it without being behind the tables, but I’m convinced that all vendors are awesome people. From the moment you set up shop, you start talking to the people around you and what you find are a lot of people who are fun to talk to and are happy to share selling secrets and other events to attend. Within a few hours, you’re willing to leave them alone with your money to watch your table while you go get something to eat – and you know you have nothing to worry about.

            All in all, I’m very glad I went to this event. If you ever want to go somewhere where you can truly let down your hair and be yourself, or show of how weird you really are, while surrounded by friendly people who won’t even think of judging you, find yourself one of these conventions to go to.

            Then tell me about it so I can go, too, and sell you some chainmaille.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

 

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

How to be a Writer

            You write. It’s as simple as that.

            When I tell people I'm an author, they often look at me in shock and say something along the lines of, “You wrote a book!? Wasn't that hard?”

            My answer is, “Yes, I wrote a book. Actually, I wrote three and am currently working on a fourth.” As to how hard it was... only the first one was, and even then it wasn't all that challenging – the most difficult part was gaining the confidence to actually do it.

            I first decided I wanted to be an author when I was somewhere around the age of twelve – at least, that’s when I started to write my first novel. It was a disaster. Not because I wasn't any good, no, but because at the time I was attempting to emulate my latest favourite author: Brian Jacques. When you write a book about warrior woodland creatures, it’s a bit obvious that it’s a rip-off. When I became aware of this, I started a new book and learning my own style.

            The new book was good, but it had one major flaw – the protagonist had no weaknesses. Oh, I did my best to give him some, but it was a very futile attempt. This, coupled with my difficulties writing descriptions, caused me to give up on my goal.

            I still wrote now and then. On occasion I even took a shot at starting up another book, but the thing that really set me on the road to writing again was when I chose to take a high school Writers’ Craft course when I was eighteen. I was assigned a short story project and, as I wrote it, I realized there was far more potential for the story. It was then read aloud to my class for criticism, but they all got so lost in the story that they forgot they were supposed to be doing work. Then a number of my classmates asked when I was writing the rest.

            You’d think that would be the kick I needed to get writing, right? Wrong. I still lacked the confidence in my writing – sure, I could write something short, but a whole book? That seemed like an impossibility! Over the next few years I wrote bits and pieces here and there, but never sat down to write seriously. I lacked the confidence.

            It wasn't until January of 2010, when I was dating Colleen, that I started seriously writing. I made a deal with her – I would write my book if she would help me when I got stuck. That’s all I needed. So, I started writing. Not just sitting down to write every now and then, but every day. If I wasn't working on the book itself, I was working on background information, developing the world I was writing in further and further.

By the end of July, I had finished the book. Well... okay, it had several locations where [INSERT DESCRIPTION HERE] was written, but other than that... I had written a book! It was such an exhilarating feeling! After that, Colleen went through it, then I read and edited the whole thing, followed by sending it off to my parents for editing and I started writing the next book.

            So, it took me a long time to get there, but I learned a lot in the process. The most important thing, though, was the confidence. I knew I had done it before, so I could do it again! So I did, and this time the book was better and had far fewer [INSERT DESCRIPTION HERE]s. The same was true for the third book. It was a bit of a revelation for me that “practice makes perfect” applied to creative writing.

            In conclusion, if you want to write a book but aren't sure if you can, here is my advice:

-Go for it!

-Write a little every day, even if it’s only a sentence.

-Believe in yourself, or find someone else to believe in you for you.

-Don’t read it until you’re done unless you’re going back to check on details. Many authors will tell you that they don’t like what they write. This is because you are your own worst critic. You see things that only you can see because you were the one who put the words there in the first place. But! Leave those words sitting long enough (say, long enough to finish writing the book) and you’ll forget that you wrote them in the first place. I can’t tell you the number of times I've read something and been amazed that I was the one who had typed it! All those little things that you were picky about will still be there, but if they still need to be fixed, they can be fixed later. By that time, the book is already complete, so it’s too late to give up on it.

Happy writing!

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.