Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Miss Snark's Greatest Hits (vol 21)

A snarkive trip focused on submissions.

Agents and international submissions, or the trouble with IRCs (International Reply Coupons).

Rejections of the love the writing, the idea is not right for us variety.

Synopses, less is more. Miss Snark likes them at 1,000 words or less. I'm not entirely sure I agree with her for F&SF where you have to go into more detail for both world and plot then you do for many other genres.

90 days before you are allowed to query on your requested novel MS, minimum.

Miss Snark wants you to skip the prologue when sending your first ten pages. Not sure how I feel about that personally but it's worth listening to her reasoning.

Movie rights, let your agent worry about them until somebody offers. Pretend they don't exist and work on the next book. Obsessing over them leads to madness.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"I love your writing but not your idea"

That's one of the pitfalls of editing a sci-horror magazine, too. That, and we get in a bunch of "stuff" which just doesn't fit in with what we publish. I created a macro in my email to drop in "story doesn't contain any discernible sci-fi element" or "story doesn't contain any discernible horror element" - although we do take straight sci-fi and/or straight horror on occasion, but it has to be good and has to fit the magazine. I have weeks when I just want to hit every author in the slushpile over the head with a brick. (I'm a nice person, really!)

it's probably better than "you suck, go develop an interest in the aerodynamics of kites".

Indeed. And that's so much nicer than my usual thought, "Break all your pens and pencils, throw out all your paper, sell your computer, get a dog and a day job." :D