The anthology takes a new look at zombies – what if humanity found a way to use them or co-exist with them, rather than exterminate them? My story, Reborn, is set in a world where a powerful church controls the rebirth of the dead, allowing some to come back as mindless slaves put to work to serve society. A young widow clashes with the Church when she searches for answers to her husband’s suspicious death.

Are you a fan of zombies? What’s your favorite zombie book, movie or TV show? Or do they leave you feeling all dead inside?

1. Be Specific – My short term goal is to finish my current work-in-progress. In order to make this goal specific, I’m going to say, “Finish my 80,000 word YA fantasy novel, currently at 72,000 words (and just shy of the climax, plot-wise).” That means I need to write 8000 more words. But is that all? Nope.
2. Identify Roadblocks – When I think about writing those 8000 words, I know it isn’t that easy. What’s been stopping me from finishing is a thorny problem plotting the climax. So I add another goal: solve plotting issue.
3. Create measurable objectives – since I measure my writing in scenes rather than chapters, I break goal one down by figuring out how many scenes I need to reach 8000 words. Since I know that the average length of scenes in this book is 1760 words, that’s about 4.5 scenes (round up to 5).  I’m going to say it’ll take me two days to write each scene for a total of ten days. For the plotting issue, my objective is tougher – I can schedule time to plot by myself, or plan brainstorming time with my writing group (a brilliant band who have saved my bacon on plotting problems many times). I’m going to brave it out and devote one week to wrestling this plot problem to the ground by myself. Those objectives add up to 17 days of work.
4. Create a schedule – I know my real problem is understanding how to make the climax of the novel work. Until I figure that out, the writing isn’t going to matter. So I schedule the plotting session first, then start writing.
5. Can I do this? – the writing isn’t the hard part, it’s the plotting. When I’m stuck, it’s hard to get unstuck. I’m hoping that devoting time to the problem will help shake my muse up. So yes, I think the goals are attainable.
6. Commitment – I’ve personally committed to getting the book finished in the next month, and I think telling you all about my goals qualifies as committing to my goals publicly. I love using Twitter and tags like #amwriting to say where I am in the process on a day to day basis.
7. Resistance – Some of my personal sources of resistance are playing computer games, watching TV, reading (every writer I know has that one), general procrastination, and using that thorny plot problem as an excuse. By taking down the plot problem first, I’m hoping to eliminate it as a source of resistance. As for the others…
8. Rewards – I’m planning to reward myself with an episode of one of my TV shows, a chapter of a book, or a half-hour of a game every time I meet an objective, like finishing a scene. I’m hoping I can help stave off the forces of resistance by converting them into rewards instead. Haven’t decided on a big reward yet for finishing the book. Any suggestions?
9. Start now – I’ve entered these goals into a cool, free website called Lifetick, that lets me enter my goals and objectives, email reminders to myself, and keep track of what I’ve accomplished. Now it’s time to start plotting!

What are your writing goals? And how do you plan to reward yourself once you’ve met them?

Want to achieve your goals in 2012? It helps to have a plan. Below I’ve outlined 10 steps I’ve learned from past experience and gathered from best practices to help you on your way.

1. Create specific goals. Whether you want to write a novel, paint a mural, or redecorate your house, your goals need to be specific. “I plan to write a 120,000 word young adult fantasy about a teenage girl falling for a sparkly vampire” is more specific than “I plan to write a novel.” Not that I’m suggesting that you write that book – but you get the idea. Your goal should be specific because it’s easier to break specific goals down into objectives – the next step.
2. Create objectives. It’s easier to reach a goal if you break it down into small steps. Create objectives for your goal. For a novel, you can break the writing down into sections or chapters. There will likely be more steps to your goal – background research and plotting, for example. Figure out what the steps are, and break your goal down into manageable sections. There are many tools that can help you manage your progress towards your goal – even just writing these goals and objectives down on a piece of paper or in a Word file will help. If you want to get fancy about it, there are project management tools like Microsoft Project or Basecamp that can help.
3. Make your goals measurable. After you create objectives, decide how you want to measure your progress. If you’re a writer, you can assess your work in page count, word count, or number of hours spent working on your manuscript. If you’re an artist, measure yourself by time spent working on your piece, pieces completed, or whatever accounting works for you. Just so long as you use some measurement. Set a goal – such as 1000 words per day, or two hours a day – and stick to it.
4. Make your goals attainable. It can take time to find out what’s reasonable for you. For example, for some writers, writing a novel in six months is no big deal. For others, one novel a year is a better pace. And figuring out how many words or pages that breaks down to depends on how much time you can devote to writing. Everyone is different. Give yourself time to find out what an optimal goal is for you. Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t achieving your objectives right away. Don’t compare yourself to others, but do set goals that challenge you and let yourself grow.
5. Make a commitment. All the goals in the world will lead you nowhere without commitment. Make a commitment to yourself to meet the goals that you set. If it helps you, write down your intention to meet your goals on a piece of paper and sign it.
6. Tell the world. Further reinforce your commitment to your goals by announcing them to the world. Post them on Facebook, tweet them, tell your friends and family. Update your progress on toward your goals on all your social network sites. Partner up with a friend and help each other reach your goals.
7. Do your research. Before you start your project, know whether or not your project fits the requirements of your field. For example, if you’re writing a novel, understand the typical word count for the genre you’d like to write in.
8. Understand resistance. Resistance is that nasty little force that keeps you from reaching your goals. It’s that voice inside your head that says you’d much rather play video games or watch the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy than write your book or paint your picture. The bad news is that you can’t get rid of resistance. The good news is that you can manage resistance. Ignoring it does not work. Giving into it does not work. This is what does work (in my experience): acknowledge that resistance is there, that it wants you to stop, and then go on working. And watch Grey’s Anatomy only AFTER you’ve met your goal for the day.
9. Reward yourself. Every time you meet an objective, give yourself a reward. Martha Beck, author of The Four Day Win, recommends that you give yourself a small reward every time you reach a small goal and a large reward every time you meet a large goal. You decide on your own small and large rewards – small rewards can be time spent reading or watching TV, an ice cream cone, a bubble bath, a walk in the park or anything else you enjoy. Large rewards could be tickets to a ballgame, the theater, that expensive book you want, or anything else that means “reward” to you. Use rewards to motivate yourself.
10. Start now. Don’t put off creating your goals and objectives and making the commitment to succeed at whatever it is you want to do. The sooner you start, the sooner you will finish.

Next time I’ll use my goals and objectives for the new year to illustrate this method.

And if you are an RWASD member, don’t forget to register for the January Workshop on Writer Resolutions: Realistic Goal Setting for 2012.

What tips do you have for meeting goals and objectives? Have you set your own yet? What are your goals for the new year?

• When an agent calls, ask questions. According to Ms. Bradford, it’s important for an author to learn everything they can about an agent before they sign with them. Ask about communication style (and frequency), their process, their editing style (if they edit), how they submit work to editors, if they have an agency agreement, and which editors they plan to submit to. Ask them what their expectations are of their authors.
• While you are feeling the agent out, the agent is feeling you out. Ms. Bradford always talks to the author before making an offer—the offer is the last thing in the conversation. She wants to get a sense of who the person is first. She also wants to know that an author she’s thinking of signing is an active participant in their own career.
• Ask for time to decide. If an agent makes an offer, she recommends the author ask for a week to decide. Take that time to do research and determine if that agent is a good fit for you. Check with other agents you are currently working with. They will pay much more attention now that you have an offer on the table. E-mail them and let them know about your offer, and give them a chance to make an offer of their own.
• Once you get an agent, s/he gets to work pitching your book. Ms. Bradford creates a pitch list of the best editors to target. She usually can’t submit to multiple imprints at the same publishing house, which can limit the number of editors she submits to. Often she can do multiple pitch rounds, depending on the genre. She might use some of the material from the author’s query in her pitch, or she might rewrite the pitch entirely, considering another element of the book to be a better hook.
• The pitching process varies by agent. Ms. Bradford likes to call rather than email—she uses the phone call as an opportunity to build interest in the book and bring it to the top of an editor’s pile. After eight weeks she follows up with the editors. She has no set timeline for how long it takes to sell a book – her books have  taken from 24 hours to 16 months. The average is 3 to 4 months.
• Closing the deal. When she gets an offer, she may ask for a week to make a decision. She talks to the editors who still have the manuscript and gives them a deadline. Depending on the process of each editorial house, some can respond within that deadline, and some cannot. The decision of which publisher to go with is made by the agent and the author together, and depends on many factors, or deal points—— format, publication dates, advance, royalties, and options on the next book. She advises an author to make an option as narrow as possible. Instead of giving a publisher an option to all future books, for example, narrow the option down to something like “your next romance featuring these specific characters.”
• The Pros and Cons of Auctions. If more than one house is interested, the agent can call an auction. According to Ms. Bradford, auctions sound more exciting than they are. They don’t necessarily mean big money. In a typical auction, the editor who wins is the person with the most money — not necessarily editor who “gets” the book and will support the author’s career. Ms. Bradford conducts a “best bid” auction — one sealed bid from each interested party. She consults with the author and they choose a winner.

I learned a lot from Ms. Bradford’s enlightening talk. I thought her point that choosing a publisher is more than a monetary decision was thought-provoking. What did you find surprising or interesting about her advice?

For more on Ms. Bradford’s current needs and submission guidelines, please visit the Bradford Literary Agency.

• Do your research. Decide what kind of agent you want. Do you want a teddy bear who will hold your hand through the long process of publication, or a shark who will get you the best deal? Most agents are closer to one end of the spectrum than the other. Once you have a short list, find out about your chosen agents through conferences, organizations like RWA, websites like AAR, blogs, and twitter. QueryTracker has some information, but agents can’t post information so the data can be out of date. Word-of-mouth is another good resource. Books like Writer’s Market are also good sources, but can be out of date by the time they are published.
• Personalize your submission. She gets from 800-1000 queries per month. If you want to stand out, always personalize your letter. Refer to the type of material the agent is looking for, make sure your genre is one the agent represents, mention attributes of your book similar to an author they represent, say if you’ve met them at a conference. Show that you’ve researched this agent, and say why this agent is the right agent for your book. Personalization and research show a level of care an agent appreciates.
• What Kills a Submission: Addressing the query letter to the dreaded “Sir/Ms.”, instead of the agent by name. Not checking the agent’s submission policies before sending your material in. Nothing annoys an agent more than getting submissions outside the genres they are selecting for. Many queries Ms. Bradford receives are thrown out because they are for the wrong genre, the word count is wrong, etc. She can’t sell a novel that’s only 20,000 words long.
• On putting together your submission packet: When writing your query, boil the story down to its essence. Throw out confusing or distracting details. Get rid of any point that might be a red flag. For Ms. Bradford, the point of the  synopsis is to tell the agent where the story goes. She doesn’t care how long it is, but says to check other agents guidelines. Before sending in your sample chapters, have a second set of eyes look over your work — critique partners, beta readers, even a friend who knows grammar, punctuation, and spelling. If you have no one who can help you, she recommends a new site called Book Country. They have an online critiquing forum.
• Getting Past the Slush Pile: Whether or not she requests a partial is a gut reaction. “Can I sell this? Is it emotional appealing?” This isn’t something the author can know or prepare for. If she likes what she sees, she asks for a partial. If she likes that, she asked for full. Occasionally she requests a revised and resubmit. If she has a problem with the storyline, plot, voice etc. she will write a letter making suggestions to the author. She does not send out a lot of these. If you get a revise and resubmit, she advises that you do not make changes you do not agree with. Use your own judgement.
• How to submit to Laura Bradford: Check her website for the latest information, but in her talk she said she wants a one-page cover letter with a brief blurb on the story. Keep it concise. She also wants a blurb on the author’s publications and contest wins. It important to include the word count and the genre. In addition, she wants a synopsis, and the first 10 pages.

What do you think? Does personalizing a query help your success rate? How do you research agents?

In my next post I will cover the rest of her talk – her advice on what to do once you get that all-important “call”, what questions to ask a prospective agent, and how she goes about pitching her author’s books to editors. See you next time.

• cool new header image
• the ability to subscribe to my blog posts via Feedburner, either as an RSS feed or through email
• better links to my Facebook and Twitter account

I tend to struggle with WordPress a bit. One of the things I learned while redesigning the site was that many of the problems I thought were WordPress problems are actually issues with my ISP. So I will be changing ISPs sometime soon.

I learned this from managing another WordPress site for a friend, and using another ISP. With that provider I do not have the problems updating my pages that I have with my ISP. I breathed a deep sigh of relief to discover that “it’s not me – it’s them.”

So please let me know what you think of the new site. Like it? Hate it? Any features you’d like to see and don’t? I plan to keep working on the site and start posting more, now that I have a handle on my WordPress problems.

Fire Season, an excerpt from my memoir,  is now available from Amazon in A Year in Ink, Vol. 4. It also contains works from forty-one fine writers including fellow SDWI regulars Nicole Vollrath, Charlie Daly, Scott Barbour and Cris Powell.

Fire Season is a story of how losing everything you own can lead to finding your true path. Chapter One, the excerpt in the anthology, starts with the Witch Fire blazing down the hill toward our Rancho Bernardo home while my husband and I sleep unaware in our bed.

I found memoir to have a different set of challenges from fiction – the haziness of memory, the desire for accuracy, the need for sensitivity to others, for starters. And of course there were the intense emotions churned up by writing about our narrow escape from death, and the destruction of our home and everything we owned. I am still working on the full piece – it is hard to dive back into that well of pain for too long at one stretch. More to come.

The anthology party  is at the Cygnet Theatre in Old Town, San Diego on Tuesday, Feb. 15th at 7 p.m. Fellow gorilla writers Cris Powell and Scott Barbour also have pieces in the anthology.

http://cygnettheatre.com/visit/directions.php

Hope to see you there.

1. Emphasize polarized (opposite) character traits to heighten conflict. If your heroine is a pacifist, make the hero a warrior. If she’s a control freak, make him a rebel. This works not only for the hero/heroine dynamic, but for your main character and all your secondary characters. Think about how you can tweak your characters to polarize them more. And if you are writing romance, make your hero the “worst guy possible” for your heroine – the guy who makes her want to pull her hair out. Sparks will fly!
2. Force proximity between/among conflicting characters. Once you have the right dynamic going, if you are writing a romance, make sure your characters stay together. Don’t send one of them off to Tahiti for an extended vacation. How can you keep them together? Here are some ideas: give them a reason to work together – a joint goal. Or put them in competition for that goal. Or have them fight against a common enemy, or fight together for survival. Keeping the hero and heroine together is especially important in romance – it’s hard to pull off a love story if the characters are separated for the first 100 pages.
3. Figure out how to strengthen the initial conflict. Every character needs to have his own agenda – including the villain – and his own things at risk. Challenge yourself to move past black and white thinking and instead think in shades of gray. Let your characters make bad decisions and give them room to grow. Don’t be afraid to make the initial situation worse, the bad guy badder.
4. Make a bad situation even worse. Once you get past the beginning and into the middle of the book, you need to up the tension even more. One trick is to shorten the fuse. If the heroine had three days to find a cure for her little sister’s rare disease, find a reason to shorten the time limit to two hours. Another trick is to blow the original goal out of the water. If the heroine’s goal was to find a woman who is a donor match for her sister, have her find the woman, only to have the woman die in her arms. And don’t forget that the middle is another place you can make the bad guy more powerful. There’s nothing like having the hero thinking he’s won, only to discover that the villain has come back, stronger than ever.
5. Remind the reader of conflict during “breather” scenes. You can’t have nothing but high-tension scenes in your book: the result will be reader fatigue. You need some “breather” scenes as well – scenes where your characters react, reflect, and plan their next actions. But how do you keep your readers engaged in the conflict storyline while in the these scenes? You can use symbolism sprinkled through the scene – for example, if the character just escaped a serial killer, the symbolism of a spider waiting to pounce on his prey will not be lost on the reader. Another technique is to have the characters allude to the conflict through dialog – just a line or two, and in a context that flows naturally in the scene. A technique that may work, depending on the preferences of the editor, is to use an epigraph (relevant quote, phrase, or poem) at the beginning of the scene to keep the conflict in the mind of the reader.

Ms. Thompson’s talk certainly got me thinking about my own novel, and how I could apply these techniques. I found that I naturally use polarized character traits most of the time (regardless of whether the characters are in a romantic relationship), and that the relationships where the characters have polarized traits are the ones that far and away work the best. The ones I am having trouble with are the ones that don’t have polar opposite traits.

How about you? How do you think you could use these techniques in your novel?

Some interesting market tidbits were tossed out by the panelists:

• Romance was 50% of the market last year, this year, so far, it is 56%
• science fiction is 7.8%
• Suspense/mystery is not currently selling well
• Paranormal/dark stuff is selling well
• YA is selling well
• An author’s first book published is on-average the 5th book that author has written
• 70% of books never make back their advances
• The profit margin on books is between 2-5% (note – I’ve seen this higher – at 7%, by comparison, the profit margin on hospitals is 3.6%, personal computers is 7.5%, and cigarettes is 17.4%) *

The panel discussed the issue of piracy – sites posting free or unauthorized, for sale copies of author’s work. This was characterized as a large problem, but difficult to quantify in terms of how much income authors and publishers are losing due to both illegal sales and potential lost sales due to free copies downloaded by potential customers. It is also frustrating for authors to see people making money illegally from their work, and although the author can issue a takedown notice, these sellers just move to a new email name and start again. The counterpoint opinion was also debated – authors such as Eric Flint and others in the Baen Free Library believe that offering one or two volumes of their early work will encourage readers to buy subsequent volumes. They say readership goes up. This is also difficult to quantify.

Personally I lean toward the Baen Free Library point of view. The Internet makes policing and protecting content impossible, as we’ve seen with the music industry. Giving away all your content, however, doesn’t make sense for authors. It probably doesn’t make sense for anyone, but some content creators, such as musicians, who have live concerts they can charge for, could give away recordings and charge for other aspects of what they do. Not so easy for writers. What the internet has proven to do well is a tiered system of content provision – a small bite of free content for everyone, more content for those who will pay. The Baen Free Library is a nice way to do that. It doesn’t solve the issue of pirates scanning all your books and selling them: if you want to solve that one, you are back to giving away your work for free. Until we build a new economic model that fits the new paradigms of the economy – the speed and ubiquity of Internet, the zero cost of digital files, the value of content, and the disappearing value of the middleman – I don’t think we will solve that problem.

The discussion moved to marketing. P.J. Haarsma mentioned the difficulty of marketing young adult books when the publishers seem to believe that the right people to market to are librarians, parents, and teachers – not kids. “They don’t seem to understand that adults are the very people kids don’t listen to at that age,” Haarsma said. Matt Pallamary recommended pushing your book on podcasts, because they go viral quickly and easily and get the word spread about your book. Eric Shanower mentioned hiring a publicist, and booking ad space in Radio-TV Interview Report. He and Matt Pallamary reported varying return on investment from their ads.

The panel also discussed co-op advertising deals between the publisher and Barnes and Noble (the only large chain left). B&N controls the co-op money from the publisher. The publisher has no control over what books are featured with the co-op advertising money. However, the publisher can pay directly to put an author’s book in an end-cap display.

The discussion on marketing mirrored what I have heard at other conferences: publishers may not do much marketing for writers. What they are able to do isn’t necessarily going to meet every author’s needs. The panel reinforced what many other writers, agents, and editors are saying; if you want your book to succeed, you have to take responsibility for marketing it yourself. That means you have to figure out the target market, decide how to reach them,  develop a plan, and implement it. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with your publisher: you must, of course. Just that you can’t sit back and expect them to do it all for you. Fortunately, we can learn from each other, and panels like this help that process.