christyoslund

Are you Joining your Guilds?

There is protection in a group of fellow writers.

Remember in the olden days when groups of crafts people or business people would form guilds for mutual support, safeguarding their way of life, and keeping an eye on what other people in the business were doing?

Actually, we still do that. Most countries, for example, still have a bread baker’s guild. Then there are trade unions which perform a similar role of organizing and trying to ensure fair wages, and for writers there are professional organizations, or writer’s societies.

Guild Coats of Arms from Czech Republic (Wiki)

There’s a professional writing organization that has been formed around each genre of writing currently commercially viable. I myself am a member of several writer’s groups.

Sisters in Crime, (particularly but not exclusively for women) writers of mystery/crime.

I’ve also joined The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, which includes writers of board and picture books, middle grade, and young adult.

If you write romance, then you’ll want to join the Romance Writers of…(America where I am, but other countries may have their own version.)

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has this nifty logo:

There’s also the Writers Guild of America East, and West, which represent screen writers and is still known collectively as The Writer’s Guild.

Technical writers have their own associations, which vary by the nation you live in, and sometimes by industry.

Why Join a Writing Association?

Aside from the comradery and opportunity to talk with people working in the same genre/industry you’re working in there are a number of very practical reasons to belong:

Educational opportunities including conferences and workshops

Funding for writing fellowships

Ability to enter association run contests for writing

Access to legal consult

Access to standard contracts

Support if you’re in a context of being sued or suing

More immediate knowledge of class action lawsuits around writing that might impact you

Medieval Merchant Guild House, Russia (wiki)

I think we’re all being reminded more often that we cannot take for granted that others will respect our work or pay us a fair wage for it. This isn’t a new problem and is at least in part why guilds go back for hundreds of years.

Whether people are taking our work to feed their AI or trying to get our money by convincing us they’re going to provide a service that isn’t real, the more we talk to each other and share information, the more we protect ourselves.

Stay strong, stay connected.

#PitchDis 2025

#PitchDis live for two days

For any fellow disabled writers who may not have this on your radar, #PitchDis is currently ongoing. I’ve taken the below block directly from an email they sent to me and bolded the dates:

Pitches will only be accepted September 9 through 8pm EDT September 11. When the pitch window closes, it closes for good. The form link will be emailed to subscribers on September 9, and will also be posted on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, and pitchdis.com.
Please remember to review the Eligibility & Guidelines page, as it has been updated since last year.
If you have any questions or need clarification about anything please email contactpitchdis@gmail.com

#PitchDis is an opportunity for unrepresented disabled writers to post a 300 character pitch for a finished manuscript, basically any genre (you will indicate the genre in the form provided when submitting.)

Each writer can post up to 2 projects. Any over that will be deleted. Agents and editors who are participating will then review the posts and reach out by email if interested in seeing more.

Photo by Antoni Shkraba Studio on Pexels.com

Pitch events are always a long shot, but if you have a manuscript that is ready to go, and enough time to put together a 300 character (not word – character, think 2 well written, tight sentences) pitch, then you really don’t have anything to lose. Plus, I think it is good practice to work on a tight pitch for a work you’re going to be sending queries out for anyway.

Learned the Hard Way vs. Failure: clear line or point of view?

Writing and axolotl keeping may have something in common.

A pair of axolotls

Sometimes we learn lessons we don’t want to learn. The example I’m using to demonstrate this is my experience of the past year + keeping axolotls.

Axolotls, also known as Mexican swimming salamanders, are aquatic and spend their lives in cool water – ideally 60 – 65 Fahrenheit. They eat worms and/or pellets, they are rather low intellect, with poor vision. They’re also dwerps, e.g. they will suddenly zoom around their tank or float at odd angles, or play in their bubblers. Some of us find them very appealing because of their looks and their enduring behavior.

One of life’s ironies is that some axolotls will survive horrible neglect: poor water quality, underfed, ignored. Others, seem to be doomed. They look good, receive good care, and they die. While water quality is vital to their good health, some survive water so bad it causes them to start peeling their ‘slime coat’ and others can look beautiful but become unalive.

Photo by Raphael Brasileiro on Pexels.com

Writing vs. Keeping Axolotls

Some of us work hard at our writing. We do the right things: attend workshops/classes, learn to improve our craft, study the market, read the comps, craft our query letters, use beta readers, adjust when our first queries don’t go well. We study, write, and rewrite. And still – we can’t seem to be in the right place at the right time.

Some of us who keep axolotls do all the right things and our lotls still cease to exist.

As a writer or an axolotl keeper, what do you do when things aren’t working out?

Options

Of course, one can always stop what we are doing. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think two of the things we learn from trying with little or no success is:

a) how passionate are we really about this craft, hobby, activity, life-plan

b) are we pursuing this for ourselves or others; are we still finding a sense of purpose in our pursuit?

Sometimes people frame trying something and not having great success with it as a failure. I tend to disagree. If you wish to be a good person but you spend all your time physically harming others, then you’re a failure. If you want to try writing and after several years or longer you aren’t enjoying it anymore, or need a break, you haven’t failed. You’ve learned a lot, improved your writing, read things you otherwise wouldn’t have and are emotionally and psychologically richer for the experiences. Time spent creating doesn’t seem to ever be a failure to me.

As for keeping axolotls…after some heartbreaking experiences over the last year I’ve realized that there is something in my very hard water in this region full of former copper mines that is not agreeable to axolotl life. Something that doesn’t show up in the little store test kits but that probably also contributes to the high cancer rates among people. So I’m going to quit unaliving these adorable dwerps and stick with my freshwater fish.

I am choosing to keep writing but to stop axolotl keeping. My writing is an outgrowth of my need to create and tell stories. Axolotl keeping was an extension of my enjoyment of fresh water aquariums. My fish are thriving, so I will continue with them; I will miss but no longer harbor lotls.

Sometimes it isn’t our writing, but what we’re writing that isn’t suited for the time and place. I’m running 6 home aquariums and 2 in my office and all are healthy. This isn’t the time and place for me and axolotls.

If writing sales matter to you, you may want to consider the popularity of the genre you’re currently working in. It may be that the type of story you’re writing isn’t as popular in the current market. I’m not suggesting you need to chase the market but that you ought to be aware that some genres or certain tropes within a genre may not be popular at the moment.

In writing as in aquarium keeping, sometimes it isn’t about what you most want but about what you are best able to do.

Good Old Fashioned Rejection

Be brave, be persistent, keep working.

Photo by Poppy Thomas Hill on Pexels.com

I’m old enough to remember a time when manuscripts were actually typed out on electronic typewriters. It took a week or more for one’s mailed manuscript to reach the physical ‘slush pile’ of an editor or agent, where it would wait for months to be read. Statistically, the thing most likely to happen next – if one had included a SASE (self addressed stamped envelope) would be a rejection letter, that spent a week or more making it’s way back to the writer.

It was a right of passage back then to attach the rejection letters to one’s walls, until one could basically paper a room with the palpable lack-of-want one’s writing was experiencing. So many of we creative types are already prone to self-doubt, morose thought patterns and moods, it is little wonder that so many have ended up self-medicating.

These days submitting is done online. Electronic files sent often through a platform like QueryTracker, where one answers questions about their genre, word count, comparable books, publishing history, biography, and tag line. Technically, this makes the still statistically likely rejection quicker. Recently I submitted and received a polite, ‘hell no’ within the same week. That’s impressive.

Here’s the funny thing about this process. We, as writers, know that the polite decline of our work is the most likely outcome of every interaction where we submit. We know it’s coming and yet, each rejection still feels a little bit like a soft sting. One more person who takes a quick pass on the manuscript you have labored over.

It’s all logical of course. Agents and editors are overworked, have limited resources, and can only take on projects they can passionately defend and promote. They also have to be able to reasonably expect sales of the final product. On their end they are looking for that needle in a haystack: the work that really excites them, and has a potential market, and has a high enough potential for sales to make everything invested in getting that product to market worth everyone’s time and effort. If they don’t love the work and immediately have an idea of how to market it, it has to be a no.

Note: this is a multi- part consideration. 1) do I love it, 2) how can I sell it, 3) can I sell enough of it to make my company a profit (has something too similar already been published) ?

Writers tend to focus on the first part of that when we’re rejected; omg, they didn’t love it. But it’s just as possible that they don’t readily see a way to market your work, or that they’re already marketing something similar, or that while they think the finished book might sell, they aren’t sure it will sell enough to make it profitable.

If one takes the time to submit their work to an agent or publisher, one is hoping for publication. Reaching that point though, can be a really long, hard road. Perseverance is key. Remember, the difference between most unpublished and published authors is that the published author sent out another submission after their last rejection.

Perhaps one day we’ll talk about when to consider that rejection may be trying to tell you something about a need for revision of either your submission package or the manuscript itself.

Steps on the Query Road

You’ve written your book – congratulations, that’s a huge achievement!

After all that effort put into writing, you then:

Worked with an editor and did revisions

Worked with some beta readers and did revisions

Have researched other books in your genre.

You’re almost ready to hit the query road!

You are now going to need to write some query letters and in order to do that, you need to research what book agents are looking for. Two good places to start with that are:

Manuscript Wish List: free to use

Publishers Marketplace: https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/: subscription required, with a more limited ‘quick pass’ available for short-term research.

You need to be prepared to compare your book to already published books in the genre, e.g. what books would your manuscript sit on a shelf with in a book store? Do yourself a solid and have a very clear idea of what your genre is and what comparable books have been published in the last several years. How is your book similar to these recent books and what makes it different? An agent will want to know this, just as a publisher will want to.

The query process is part creative, part business, and all of it needs to be handled professionally. Set up a spreadsheet to track who you’ve sent your query to, when you sent it, when you can expect to hear back, and the response when you do hear back.

If you hear back from an agent, they will almost always be saying thank you, but no. It can be tough to hear so many people ‘pass’ on the manuscript you’ve spent so much time on – a little like having someone look at your child and say, “I hope that’s not the only one you had – but either way, I’m sure someone else will like it.”

These are the preliminary steps to preparing a query.

More on the process and letter itself to follow.

Thomas Fuller: It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn…don’t quit now.

Publishers fold, Agents withdraw: how to keep writing and keep submitting when ‘it’ hits you

Publishers fold, Agents withdraw: how to keep writing and keep submitting when ‘it’ hits you

When you lose an agent or publisher, it’s time to work.

Writers spend a lot of time working in isolation. We’re also prone to self-doubt. We can quickly move from, “I just wrote something great! to “This is possibly the worst thing ever written, by anyone.”

Person sitting by lake at sunset — Photo by Download a pic Donate a buck! ^ on Pexels.com

When we finally find an agent who offers to represent us or an independent publisher who offers us a contract, there is a level of validation, a temporary euphoria unlike any other. We tend to think, “Someone else likes what I wrote; my writing is going to reach readers!”

[If you bother to submit to agents/publishers, you hope to find readers.]

Writers tend to be creatives, and many of us are not also business people. We love the art or our pursuit and can forget that much of publishing – the agents, the printing/selling – are business for people trying to make a living (even if most of them also love the art of it); the agents and publishers at least need to break even rather than lose money. And in publishing these days, not losing money is harder and harder to achieve.

Recently, for example, the independent publisher who had signed me to publish the first two books in my mystery series decided that he could no longer keep things afloat. He’s shuttering his business and working on returning book rights to over 30 authors.

Also in the past year a well-known author’s agency decided they were severing ties with a list of their represented authors who they deemed as not ‘financially viable…enough’.

This is tough news to get. We work so hard, think we’ve finally made another level, only to find that through no fault of our own the landscape has shifted under our feet and we’ve at least metaphorically tumbled down the hill. That’s what it can feel like. It can also feel defeating and hard to keep motivated.

How can we help ourselves when we feel discouraged?

Take a moment to grieve: it’s a good idea to acknowledge the sense of loss that one feels when something that one has worked so hard for is suddenly gone. Like any loss, rather than ignoring it, allow for acknowledgment of it. Remember though, there is a line past which acknowledgement becomes wallowing. If you’ve quit writing for more than a few days, you need to get back to work.
Work with other writers: I find that making myself sit down with another writer, or joining a writing group to meet once a week (even to just discuss a work in progress), can provide motivation that working alone does not. That doesn’t mean I enjoy making myself do these things, but I admit they sustain me in writing when working alone might not.
Set new goals: the past is just that. Whatever hard work and steps you put into finding your first agent or publisher, can be re-harnessed to do the job again. The business of writing requires time and effort.
When discouraged, remind yourself how far you’ve come: Hundreds of thousands of people are working on writing books. If you’ve gotten as far as having an agent or publisher, you’ve made it further than 90+% of them. Don’t give up now.
A better deal is ahead: Ask most writers and they’ll tell you the more/longer they’ve been writing, the better their writing gets. As you grow in your experience you will have more to offer an agent/publisher and that will open new doors to you. Something better is on your horizon, as long as you keep working your way towards it.

Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels.com

One cannot publish a book that remains unwritten.

If one writes a book, it will remain unseen by others without marketing (e.g. put it out there to agents/publishers or even directly to readers.) The book that eventually is published, though, just may find an audience. And that is an incredibly satisfying feeling.

Did you NaNoWriMo? Did it Work for You? Don’t worry if it Didn’t.

Things are rough out there. Writers hang on and don’t give up. Eventually it will get better.

This was a tough November in many, many ways. As if all the other corners of the world weren’t chaotic enough, things blew up over at the online site of NaNoWriMo. I won’t go into the details of that here, if you’re interested I’m sure an online search will enlighten you, or you can read through the discussion boards on the site.

What I will say is that personally, I was already struggling with the stress of a million other things and the online meltdown at the nano site just completely put me off writing for a little while. Certainly from participating on the site. I quit updating my word counts, and withdrew, which isn’t my preferred way of dealing with conflict but one does reach a tipping point where even a little more stress is too much.

I had something this year that I don’t typically have though – a writing buddy. We got together only once but just knowing that there was someone else out there also struggling, trying to chip a few minutes and words out of busy stressful days – somehow that encouraged me. And in the last few days, I’ve been thinking about writing, and then, actually writing.

Fellow writing folx, don’t hold yourself to other people’s writing timelines. Find what works for yourself and use that to get a few more words down on as many days as you can manage. Some days will be better than others, and sometimes we’re doomed to struggle through a whole lot of hard days in a row. Not giving up, that’s the key. We just have to keep going.

Not always easy, pleasant, or fun. But as long as you stick around, you’re in it to have wins on another day.

When you Make it to the Publisher’s Catalogue

Then the book will probably end up being a real thing, right?

Polis Books 2023 Catalog https://polisbooks-staging.s3.amazonaws.com/polis-books-2023-catalog.pdf

DEAD BEFORE THE END OF THE ROAD
Christy Oslund
Fiction/Mystery
Publication Date: September 19, 2023
$16.99 / $22.99 CAN • Trade Paperback • 320 pages • 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 978-1-957957-21-0
Rights available: World, Audio

Life in small-town Michigan is quiet. Despite the calm, no one hears the blow that strikes a man dead.
A riveting novel for fans of Chris Whitaker that will stick with you after the last page is turned.
Kara Heikkinen finds the murdered man while inspecting a farm for potential cattle-poaching evidence. She
is immediately determined to solve the crime because as both a sheriff’s sergeant and an autistic woman, she
requires a level of order in her world. Allowing the villagers in her Finnish-American town to kill each other
and dump the bodies in cow ponds isn’t orderly.

Unfortunately, the job of solving the crime technically belongs to the State Detective. Not that any of the
locals will communicate with him—they barely speak to each other. But she can use her connections to do
what the detective cannot—talk to locals like the dead man’s mother, a suspect’s neighbor, and her own
well-informed cousin who happened to employ the dead man. She learns of a well-hidden affair, a missing
engagement ring, the victim’s anger over drugs given to his cousin, and envy among ‘friends’ over the
victim’s girlfriend.

Can Kara solve the murder and put her world back in order before the murderer flees the small town on the
shores of Lake Superior and is lost forever?

Dyslexic, autistic, and good with animals, Dr. Christy Oslund wasn’t expected to go far in the academic world or writing. She
started killing people (on the page) during a COVID-induced layoff and decided writing was her new side-hustle. Now back at Michigan Tech University, she coordinates services for disabled students. Dr. Oslund has also taught at Northern Michigan University, Michigan State, and at MTU. She holds an MFA in writing and has published extensive non-fiction on disability. She lives with dogs and cats (and refuses to pick a side in that debate) in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. DEAD BEFORE THE END OF THE ROAD is her debut novel. Find her at christyoslund.blog and @ChristyOslund

To Rember, When Book Writing and Seeking Publication

The more writing and querying you do, the better you ought to get at doing what you’re doing. Sometimes the first written novel will not find an agent, but as a writer, you should also be working on your next book even while you are querying the first.

Practice Writing, Revise, Repeat

I’ve been writing a loooong time. When I was in high school, I was thrilled to be gifted an electronic typewriter with built-in correction tape [to be clear – this was state-of-the-art at the time]. By the time I was a senior, Dad, who was an early tech adopter, purchased our first family computer. I could not get him to understand how that didn’t help me as a writer unless he actually bought a printer. This was decades before publishers were taking electronic submissions, and with dial-up modems, it would have taken over a day to send a manuscript electronically and with the amount of electronic screaming the phone lines provided, no one would have put up with that for longer than it took to send a fax.

I mention this because newer writers sometimes ignore the foundational part of becoming a writer – practice writing. Lots, and lots, and lots of writing, revising, and reading, and learning, and practicing. I’m published now, but that took over two decades, three strokes and recovery from them, and time off for graduate degrees.

Malcolm Gladwell has posited that one requires 10,000 hours of practice to become established at something; this may not be true for everyone but when it comes to writing, there’s a lot to be said for practice, revision, and more writing.

It also helps to come to terms with the realization that some ideas are good without being novel-worthy and some characters are engaging but don’t have a story that’s compelling enough to earn readers.

Just because you’ve written something good doesn’t mean it’s good enough to find a traditional publisher.
Just because it’s good enough, doesn’t mean it will find a traditional publisher.
Your journey to becoming published requires as much persistence, research, and work as it does creative talent.

Perseverance and research

If your goal is to go the traditional publishing route, then writing the book is arquably only half of the work you have to do. Querying agents and independent publishers who are open to your genre and unagented queries, is hard work. I previously posted on how to write a compelling query letter – which needs to be on point at 300 words.

The first paragraph of your query letter should be changed to suit each individual and company that you send it to.

You may have to revise your letter 50 – 150+ times. Yep, it does get discouraging to get 75 people in a row telling you that while your manuscript is good, it’s just not what they’re looking for at this time.

I found this response on a thread where a new writer was asking people who had submitted, how many rejections they received:

“My first novel I queried -140 rejections, 0 offers. Second novel I queried – 40 rejections, 5 offers. Third novel- 10 rejections, 1 offer.

None of those novels were related, I just got better at timing and hitting the right audience during the hard part of research in the trenches.”

First Written Doesn’t Mean First Optioned

Sometimes the second book gets picked up; sometimes it is the third. You can always resubmit your earlier work once you eventually do have a publishing record. People – including Steven King and Ellis Peters – have done variations of this.

The ghostly presence of Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street by Mike Quinn is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

Caveat

Of course, you may also find that like Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, once you’re known for a particular genre/character, readers aren’t really interested in your ‘other’ ideas. Writers, like actors, can basically become typecast, e.g. known for a particular genre. Which is a bonus for sales of new work, and a curse if you want to write different kinds of things. Readers cannot be counted on to buy work that is outside the genre they initially loved you for.

Not that any of us early in our careers can really wrap our heads around the idea of resenting readers for loving us too much for a particular story we’ve created. That’s a future-you worry, right?