—Julie E. Czerneda
www.czerneda.com
(I had letterhead with my return address. —JEC)
January 16, 1995
Dear Sheila:
Thank you for expressing your interest in my writing during our phone conversation of December 8th, 1994.1 I am very pleased to send you the material you requested.
As I mentioned to you, my novel (A Thousand Words for Stranger) was very well received at Baen Books and did make their short list. Josepha Sherman2 asked me to be sure to use her name in our correspondence as strongly recommending my novel to you. The manuscript has received awards from two Canadian publishers through the Writer’s Reserve program—a program to help established writers try new fields. I’ve included some specific reviews and comments for you on my work.
I’ve also enclosed my non-fiction list as you requested. A biologist by training, I’ve been a full-time author since 1985, writing and editing science material for ages 8 to adult. My latest project is a high school science text. As you will see in my list, I have several titles distributed in the United States by U.X.L. I also do a considerable amount of public speaking, from teacher workshops to classes on creative writing.
Writing science fiction is something I’ve done for pleasure since I was a child. I sincerely hope you enjoy A Thousand Words for Stranger. I write science fiction to see what might happen, and I had a lot of fun with what happened in this story.
Thanks again for your interest. Please let me know if you require any further information. (For example, I am writing more science fiction. I doubt I’ll ever stop.)
Yours truly,
Julie E. Czerneda
Sent by FEDEX with the following enclosures: synopsis, novel manuscript, review sheet, and publication list. —JEC
A Thousand Words for Stranger3
Length: 117,000 words4
Audience: Suitable for adult and young adult readers of science fiction. Should appeal to readers of Andre Norton, Lois Bujold, and C.J. Cherryh.
Of Note: This novel is complete in itself. However I have a sequel, After Destiny, well underway.5
Synopsis
A Thousand Words for Stranger is set in a future where humans have formed a loose economic alliance (the Trade Pact) with several other species. One species, humanoids called the Clan, are not part of this alliance though they own property on human worlds. The minds of the Clan exist partly within a dimension called the M’hir, giving them the ability to send thoughts, images, and objects while bypassing normal space. The Clan prefer to live in isolation as much as possible.
The main character, Sira, is a female of the Clan who has been temporarily stripped of her memory and mental power by her own kind. Compulsions planted in her mind drive her to enlist the aid of a human named Morgan. Sira slowly builds herself a new, human identity in Morgan’s company. All the while, she is pursued by an official of the Trade Pact, Lydis Bowman, who suspects the Clan of manipulating other species and wants to use Sira to expose the Clan as enemies of the trade alliance. Sira is also being followed by Barac, a Clansman who was originally investigating his brother’s murder and now thinks a mutual enemy is after Sira.
The Clan despise humans and especially repudiate any with telepathic ability, feeling them a threat to the purity of the M’hir. Sira’s memory loss has made her the first of her kind to be able to deal with a human without this prejudice. She discovers that she and Morgan have a great deal they share. As her powers gradually return, the beginnings of an empathic link—the prelude to a Clanswoman’s coming of age—forms through the M’hir between them. This link holds the key to the survival of the Clan and the enrichment of humanity, if the return of Sira’s memory and learned prejudice doesn’t mean the end of their relationship first.6
Julie E. Czerneda,
January 16, 1995
Orillia, Ontario
1I was shaking throughout the entire call. —JEC
2 Josepha was an editor at Baen at that time who was wonderfully encouraging to me all the way through. —JEC
3 I never imagined this ‘working title’ would be used for the book. I liked it, but I thought it was probably too long and odd. Until needing a title to send out with the manuscript, I’d called it Story X, the Roman numeral. —JEC
4 After revising, the final draft manuscript was 135 000 words. —JEC
5 The notion of a sequel came up after Thousand was finished and circulating among publishers. There was back story galore to follow up—I’d essentially abandoned an entire species’ future to readers’ imaginations—so I began toying with that larger canvas. At this time, however, I considered the unrelated Beholder’s Eye my next project. Beholder’s Eye was my next sale to DAW. Then Sheila Gilbert bought the sequel to Thousand, with a new title: Ties of Power. One more followed, To Trade the Stars, and I now had The Trade Pact Universe Trilogy under my belt. The back story had only grown in the process and by the time I finished Trade I’d sold DAW two more trilogies, Stratification (a prequel) and Reunification (to finish it all.) Nine books. Who knew? Not, I guarantee it, when I wrote this synopsis, I. —JEC
6 Whether it shows here or not, I hate writing synopses. Why? You give away the plot. All that work to build suspense and mystery and—splot! There is it, exposed on the page. Spoils everything. Looking back on this one and the couple of others I’ve done, I can see I managed to keep back a fair amount, including what happens in the end. Of course this isn’t terribly helpful to an editor trying to decide what the book is about. Mine would laugh at me, kindly, then ask for something more complete—with the ending—if she had any concerns where I was going. Fortunately, we’ve moved past that. Sort of. We converse. I’ll give her some overall details, stop to mumble darkly about spoiling things and did she really want to know more because it wasn’t necessary to spoil things and … then I spill everything. It’s traumatic, but I’m learning. Maybe by the thirtieth book it will be easy? —JEC
***
Jacqueline Carey
New York Times best seller Jacqueline Carey is the author of the critically acclaimed Kushiel’s Legacy series of historical fantasy novels, The Sundering epic fantasy duology, postmodern fables Santa Olivia and Saints Astray, and the Agent of Hel contemporary fantasy series. Jacqueline enjoys doing research on a wide variety of arcane topics, and an affinity for travel has taken her from Finland to China to date. She currently lives in west Michigan.
Further information is available at www.jacquelinecarey.com. Join her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jacquelinecarey.author or follow her on Twitter at @JCareyAuthor.
How do you sell a 275,000 word first novel?
In the first place, it’s a bad idea and an endeavor to be avoided if possible. Publishers are understandably cautious when it comes to taking risks on unknown writers, and big, old doorstopper tomes increase the financial risk involved. The cost of production is higher and there’s less shelf space available. It’s that simple.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice. From its first inception, the novel that became Kushiel’s Dart was a big idea for a big book. It was big, it was compelling, and I had to write it. However, one of the secrets to writing a polished first novel is to write other ‘practice’ first novels. I had a couple other manuscripts that had made the rounds of slush piles and agency queries without success.
They were much shorter … and not nearly as good.
Still, it helps—a lot—to have a solid grasp of plot structure and how your own creative process works. And it helps to be working in a genre that’s more amenable than most to lengthy novels. There’s a term for them in the industry: BFFs, Big Fat Fantasies.
So I wrote the novel, then titled A D’Angeline Tale, and knew it was the best thing I’d ever written. Conventional wisdom holds that it’s as difficult to get an agent as it is to sell a book, and the best way to do the former is to accomplish the latter. While there’s a good deal of truth to it, I decided to try the agent route anyway. More and more publishers
were refusing to look at unagented submissions, and I figured a manuscript topping a thousand pages wouldn’t be regarded kindly as it hulked amid the slush piles of those who did.
Toward the end of the writing process, I began compiling a list of ten literary agencies that represented similar material, using Writer’s Market, Literary Marketplace and acknowledgements of other novels to gather information. Once I had finished editing, I wrote the synopsis that follows and sent queries to the ten agencies on my list, adhering to the submission guidelines of each particular agency. Most requested a brief synopsis and three sample chapters. All of them were cold queries—I had a lot of practice writing synopses and cover letters, but no contacts in the industry.
Out of ten agencies, two expressed interest in seeing the full manuscript; one only if I was willing to divide it into two books. Although I was prepared to deal with the possibility, I viewed it as a course of last resort, so I submitted it to the other agency first. There, at Jane Dystel Literary Management, I had the fortune of having my mammoth manuscript with its controversial heroine land in the hands of a literary agent who fell in love with it. “I kept expecting it to fall apart,” he told me. “And it didn’t.”
We spent the summer of 1998 polishing the manuscript, paring it down until it was under a thousand pages. In the fall, it went out on submission to a dozen or so publishing houses. Meanwhile, I began work on the second book in what would become the Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy. Although we submitted A D’Angeline Tale as a stand-alone, I had a clear vision for the arc of the second and third volumes, and my agent urged to me start writing.
And a good thing, too, because there’s not much about this process more suspenseful than waiting to hear whether or not a book will sell. I was glad I was able to lose myself in the writing process.… Although, of course, if the first book hadn’t sold, there wouldn’t be much point in what I was writing. Still, it kept me occupied. And as it transpired, several publishers were interested, and as the holiday season drew near, my agent called an auction.
Tor Books made a preemptive bid.
It was a good offer—and they wanted a trilogy. And they wanted to keep the book intact by putting it though an intensive line edit. Oh, and they wanted to change the title*, which was fine with me. Theirs was better, anyway.
We accepted it.
Sometimes it pays to buck the odds and defy conventional wisdom. Not always, not even often, but if a book leaves you no other choice, it may be worth the effort.
—Jacqueline Carey
*Published as Kushiel’s Dart in 2001, the first of many novels in the Kushiel’s Legacy universe. —CSH
A D’Angeline Tale
synopsis
Jacqueline Carey
A D’Angeline Tale is epic in scope, a speculative fiction novel of approximately 275,000 words, set in a feudal Europe at once familiar and strange, where well-known landmarks of history, place and culture emerge from a fantastic terrain, in a nation where the blood of wandering angels runs in the veins of their mortal descendants. It is an intricate tapestry woven by a single thread of narrative voice, undermining the traditional clichés with which the imperiled heroine is imbued.
Born with a flaw—a scarlet mote in her left eye—Phèdre is sold as a young child to Cereus House, oldest of the D’Angeline pleasure-houses that comprise the Night Court. Gauged unsuitable by their aesthetic canons, her bond is sold to Anafiel Delaunay, a brilliant, enigmatic nobleman with an uneasy relationship to the Crown. It is Delaunay who recognizes the scarlet mote as no flaw, but Kushiel’s Dart, the mark of an anguissette, one who has been chosen by the angel Kushiel to find pleasure in pain.
Expecting to be trained as a courtesan Servant of Naamah, Phèdre finds herself, along with Alcuin, another protegé, set first to the task of learning: History, theology, the languages of the realm—even barbarian tongues—and above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. By the time she reaches the age of consent and obtains patrons of her own, Phèdre is well-trained as a courtesan and spy alike, aided in both by the dubious gift of Kushiel’s Dart. The only knowledge she lacks is the true nature of Delaunay’s purpose. An aged King sits on the throne of Terre d’Ange, his granddaughter Ysandre his only heir; and somewhere in the past, with the death of Ysandre’s parents, lies the answer.
Skaldi barbarians raid the borders, held back by the warrior Duc d’Aiglemort, while princes and courtiers vie for the throne and Ysandre’s hand, and the beautiful, dangerous Melisande Shahrizai—scion of Kushiel’s line, Phèdre’s weakness and Delaunay’s equal in wit—plays a deep-laid game of her own. With the help of her childhood friend Hyacinthe, the self-styled Prince of Travellers, Phèdre seeks to solve the puzzle of Delaunay, despite a warning from Hyacinthe’s mother, a Tsingani fortuneteller, that she will rue the day she succeeds. Thus far, the only thing Phèdre rues is the appointment of Cassiline Brother Joscelin Verreuil, a disdainful young warrior-priest, to guard her.
On the day Phèdre is to complete her marque, freeing her from bond-service, the prediction proves horribly true. A messenger from the Royal Admiral sends Phèdre and Joscelin racing back to the house, only to find Delaunay slain and Alcuin dying. With his last breath, Alcuin tells them that Delaunay had sworn a vow on the ring of Prince Rolande—his beloved—to protect and serve his daughter Ysandre, heir to Terre d’Ange.
Now it falls to Phèdre … and she’s about to be betrayed, setting in motion events that will culminate in full-scale war at the very heart of the realm.
***
Chris Roberson
Chris Roberson is a New York Times best-selling writer best known for the Eisner-nominated series iZOMBIE, co-created with artist Mike Allred; for multiple Cinderella mini-series set in the world of Bill Willingham’s Fables; and his creator-owned series Edison Rex with artist Dennis Culver, and his work on Superman, Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes, and Elric: The Balance Lost, among others. He has written more than a dozen novels, three dozen short stories, and numerous comic projects. Chris and his wife, Allison Baker, are the co-publishers of Monkeybrain Comics, and the couple lives with their daughter in Portland, Oregon.
This novel had a strange and circuitous genesis.
It began life when I was part of a Texas-based writers’ collective called Clockwork Storybook. Every Labor Day of the groups’ brief and tumultuous existence, we took part in a combination writing exercise/publicity stunt that we called the Annual Clockwork Novel Weekend, in which we would write a complete (if short) novel over the course of seventy-two hours, posting chapters online as we went. Our small (but dedicated) group of readers could follow along as the stories progressed, interacting with us and with each other on our message boards, trying to guess where the stories were going next, catching typos, that sort of thing. We’d stolen the idea from Harlan Ellison, who did this stunt long before us, sitting in a store window and composing stories on a manual typewriter, manuscript pages taped up one at a time to the glass. Writing as performance art. Writing as a dare.
(It only makes sense that a certain kind of writer would be drawn to this sort of thing. Many of us, down deep, are frustrated rock stars, or actors, or comedians, hungry for applause that we’ll never hear. Turning writing into a spectator sport is just one way of filling this void.)
The result of my labors over the 2001 Labor Day weekend was the nucleus of this book, a novella of thirty-thousand words that carried the name Out of Joint. It covered Roxanne Bonaventure’s life in broad strokes, and shared with this final version the first chapter, the last chapter, and bits of the middle.
When our writers’ collective decided to start our own Print On Demand imprint, I thought it only natural that we should publish Roxanne’s story. At its original length, though, the novella was far too short to stand on its own, so I wrote an additional twenty-five thousand words, bringing the grand total to fifty-five thousand. This expanded edition (which added the chapters about Roxanne Grant, and Nigel, and Atalanta Carter) was released u
nder the title Any Time at All in 2002, to positive reviews in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Infinity Plus, and extremely tepid sales.
After the release of Any Time at All, I expanded Roxanne’s story yet again, adding another twenty-five thousand words (including the chapters about Tycho Maas, and Julien, and the death of Roxanne’s dad), and started looking for a proper publishing house that would be willing to print it. The revolution that POD technology had promised to writers and the small press had, I felt, failed to materialize, and I decided it was time to try more traditional routes. However, the expanded novel was rejected by several outfits as being “not commercial,” one even remarking that the book was “too smart.”
Enter Lou Anders, to the rescue.
Formerly the Executive Editor for Bookface.com, a freelance editor (responsible for anthologies like Outside the Box, Live Without a Net, Projections, and FutureShocks), and Senior Editor for the first two issues of Argosy Magazine, in 2004 Lou Anders took a fulltime position as Editorial Director for Pyr, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books.
Lou and I met a convention a few years ago. He first was a drinking companion (as most acquaintances at conventions are), then a frequent email correspondent, and before long a valued friend. In his capacity as editor, though, he’s something closer to a patron. By the time I’d sent him the following synopsis, he’d already bought a story of mine for his anthology Live Without a Net, my first professional sale, which at the time of this writing has garnered nominations both for the Sidewise Award for Best Short-Form Alternate History and for the 2004 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Fortunately, the synopsis piqued his interest to a sufficient degree that he went on to request, and then buy, the full manuscript. Here, There & Everywhere was one of Pyr’s first titles in its inaugural launch in the spring of 2005.
The Synopsis Treasury Page 29