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Recently I've had a number of letters from teenagers wanting advice on how to get their novel published and wondering whether their age will make it harder for them to get it into print. Specifically, would they be discriminated against because they were only thirteen/fourteen/fifteen/sixteen or whatever?
The simple answer is no. When you submit a query letter to a publisher or agent you don't have to tell them how old you are. You'll be rejected or accepted on the quality ...
Posted by Justine at 1:08, August 13th, 2005 under Musings, New York City/USA, Ranting, Sydney/Australia, Writing & Publishing |
Of late I've been receiving quite a few emails asking me how you go about getting yourself one of those mythological creatures known as the literary agent. It's a question frequently asked of most published writers. You should also take a look at Ian Irvine's the
"Truth about Publishing" which explains how the publishing system works (be warned: it's depressing).
The short answer is that there is no one way to get an agent. Luck and hard work both play their part. But first you have to figure out whether you're ready for representation. Don't even think about pursuing agents until you have a finished novel. And make sure that novel is as good as you can possibly make it. ...
Posted by Justine at 1:10, July 4th, 2005 under Musings, New York City/USA, Writing & Publishing |
Whenever I open a book I go straight to the acknowledgements. And then when I finish the book I return to them. For me the acknowledgements are a strange kind of map to the book I've just read, or rather a set of clues to where the book came from, how it transmogrified from a bunch of ideas in some writer's head into a fully-fledged world that I can spend time in.
Acks are crucial. Yesterday, over at Tingle Alley the proprietress posted ...
Posted by Justine at 1:11, June 10th, 2005 under Musings, Writing & Publishing |
some thoughts inspired by conversations at WisCon
Posted by Justine at 1:13, June 2nd, 2005 under Cons & Other Gatherings, Musings, New York City/USA, Writing & Publishing |
a blog, a real genuine blog
Posted by Justine at 1:14, May 25th, 2005 under Bloggery, Musings |
I've had a number of emails on
the agent question, some from folks wondering how the search is going, wishing me luck or offering advice, and others wondering what on earth it is agents do anyway.
Thanks for the advice and agent suggestions and all the good wishes. Much appreciated. Here's the answer to the two questions:
1) How's the search going?
...
Posted by Justine at 1:15, May 23rd, 2005 under Musings, New York City/USA, Writing & Publishing |
I recently parted ways with my agent. It was very amicable. She was, and is, a wonderful person, a great agent and a good friend. I'd have no qualms recommending her. She's dedicated, smart and very good at what she does. But for all sorts of reasons it didn't work out. So now I'm looking for a new agent.
Gulp. Much much easier said than done.
First of ...
Posted by Justine at 1:18, May 12th, 2005 under Musings, New York City/USA, Writing & Publishing |
Scott's website relaunched last night with a (
mostly) whole new look. And guess what? We did it all by ourselves!
Deborah Biancotti, who designed this site and the
Midnighters section of Scott's site, was too busy to do it, so we did it. Scott came up with a design, showed it to me, and I used my puny Dreamweaver skills to turn it into a reality that had a passing resemblance to what he wanted. And I think it looks pretty much okay. Yay us!
Of course, ...
Posted by Justine at 1:17, May 12th, 2005 under Musings, Scott's books |
fun at MSG and Books of Wonder
Posted by Justine at 1:18, May 9th, 2005 under Basketball, Musings, Sport, Writing & Publishing |
what to do this Sunday
Posted by Justine at 1:19, May 6th, 2005 under Cons & Other Gatherings, Musings, Writing & Publishing |
Pardon me while I geek out about the diversity of the English language.
One of the cool things about writing a trilogy populated by Australian and US characters, and attempting to use both vernaculars, has been coming across differences between Australian and US English. Yesterday, while defining "bitumen" for the glossary of Magic Lessons, I learned that not only do USians not know what "bitumen" is, they don't call a
road made from bitumen a "sealed" road. I don't know ...
Posted by Justine at 1:21, May 2nd, 2005 under Magic Lessons, Magic or Madness, Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi!/Magic's Child, Musings, New York City/USA, Sydney/Australia, Words & Language, Writing & Publishing |
Yes, this site was down for almost forty-eight hours and my jlATjustinelarbalestier.com address with it. Yes, I was tearing my hair out. And my beloved stats took quite a dip (sob). If any important mail to me was returned, you can resend now.
Even without the whole site going off air, you'll have noticed I haven't been musing a whole lot of late. And if you're a mate, you'll notice I haven't been so great about email. I've been
deadline busy,
volunteer work busy, and
travelling far too much. This month things should calm down and I should be able ...
Posted by Justine at 1:22, May 1st, 2005 under Cons & Other Gatherings, Magic Lessons, Musings |
some stupendously good news
Posted by Justine at 1:23, April 17th, 2005 under Magic or Madness, Musings, Writing & Publishing |
Magic or Madness must really and truly be out because I'm already
getting complaints that a year is too long to wait for the sequel. Yay! If a reader's first response is to be eager for more then I'm doing my job. But, trust me, I understand about the whole waiting thing. Reading the first book in a trilogy and not being able to get my hands on the rest instantly drives me crazy. (
Robin Hobb's been torturing me for years.) But you should bear in mind that the wait for Magic Lessons is even worse for me because ...
Posted by Justine at 1:24, April 11th, 2005 under Magic Lessons, Magic or Madness, Musings, Writing & Publishing |
It's 7:30AM on Thursday morning and I've been awake for an hour, lying on the couch, watching a repeat of yesterday's cricket in New Zealand (NZ versus Sri Lanka) and reading
C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary. I watch Jayawardene batting beautifully, lots of lovely attacking shocks, including some quite exquisite cover drives while C. L. R. James (I love using all his initials) bitches about defensive, boring batting in the 1950s. (His theory: it was because the 1950s was boring.)
I'm having a lovely morning, ...
Posted by Justine at 1:25, April 7th, 2005 under Cricket, Daughters of Earth, Magic Lessons, Musings, Sport, Sydney/Australia |
This just in: the very first piece of documentary evidence of the existence of
my book in the real world. Woo hoo! This is a photo by
Stephanie Leary taken with her phone (I love the world we live in, don't you?) of the new teen fiction shelf at Barnes & Noble in College Station, Texas.
Not bad placement, eh? I'm very happy about the eccentric alphabetisation which has me next to one of the hugely-selling Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants books and Boy 2 Girl which is all the buzz ...
Posted by Justine at 1:26, March 24th, 2005 under Magic or Madness, Musings, New York City/USA, Writing & Publishing |
I've just heard that
Geraldine McCaughrean has
won the contest to write the sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. This is astonishingly good news because Geraldine McCaughrean is a far better writer than J. M. Barrie ever was. McCaughrean is a genius. Every sentence she writes is pure gold. Here's hoping that winning the contest and writing the wonderful book that she will, of course, write, is going to bring her the fame and riches she deserves.
And here's hoping (double plus a billion) that her entire backlist ...
Posted by Justine at 1:29, March 19th, 2005 under Musings, Reading, Writing & Publishing, young adult literature |
For the last few months there's been just one topic of conversation on
John Scalzi's blog: the publication of his first novel,
Old Man's War. He's asked his readers to
send in photos of it in the wild, he's
posted and discussed every single review that's appeared, made
his blog over so it looks just like the book (how
tacky is that?),
theorised about every slight movement the book has made up and down Amazon.com's rankings. It's been all Old ...
Posted by Justine at 1:30, March 4th, 2005 under Magic or Madness, Musings, Praising, Writing & Publishing |
a week at Clarion South
Posted by Justine at 1:31, February 11th, 2005 under Musings, Sydney/Australia, Travelling, Writing & Publishing |
Back in December I posted a
little essay about first novel advances. Thanks to
John Scalzi linking to it in
three different places, but most especially at
metafilter, thousands of people have now read all about what my mates got for their first novels and it's been
linked to all over the shop. The musing also seems to have served as a wee reminder to
Tobias Buckell that he promised to put together a database of first novel advances ...
Posted by Justine at 1:34, February 5th, 2005 under Musings, Writing & Publishing |
yeah, yeah, I'm a wanker
Posted by Justine at 1:34, January 28th, 2005 under Liquids, Musings, Sydney/Australia, Travelling, Viewing |
the sequel to Magic or Madness is finished
Posted by Justine at 1:36, January 26th, 2005 under Daughters of Earth, Magic Lessons, Magic or Madness, Musings, Writing & Publishing |
the 2004 Aurealis Awards
Posted by Justine at 1:38, January 24th, 2005 under Musings, Sydney/Australia |
Deb Biancotti makes with the magic
Posted by Justine at 1:39, January 18th, 2005 under Musings |
the future of cricket's not looking too foul
Posted by Justine at 1:40, January 14th, 2005 under Cricket, Musings, Sport |
At the moment this is my favourite bit of dialogue:
"Is there anything you're afraid of . . . apart from dragon hunters?"
"Dragon hunters are just men. It is iron weapons Danzi fears."
"So you don't fear any creatures?"
The dragon was silent for a moment.
...
Posted by Justine at 1:42, January 7th, 2005 under Musings, Reading, Writing & Publishing |
I caught the ferry to Manly (a beach suburb of Sydney) with my friend Donna today. We walked along beside the ocean, watched waves splash against rocks, up on to the sandy beaches, watched hundreds of people snorkelling, swimming, splashing, playing in the water. But we couldn't help trying to imagine what it would be like if all the water was sucked away and then a
ten-metre high wave moving at 70 kph came crashing in on us all. Swimmers gone, snorkellers gone, hotels and bars gone.
What happened to the coasts of India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, Burma, the Seychelles, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania yesterday is past imagining. So many thousands of ...
Posted by Justine at 1:01, December 27th, 2004 under Musings, State of the World, Sydney/Australia |
some scary economic realities
Posted by Justine at 0:59, December 24th, 2004 under Musings, New York City/USA, Sydney/Australia, Writing & Publishing |
It's pouring right now. Buckets and buckets of lovely rain which I hope is filling
Warragamba dam all the way up. (Sadly, it's also raining in Brisbane which means no cricket. Sob.) I'm taking a tiny break from writing the second volume of Magic or Madness (tentative title: Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi!—my compatriots will understand why that's funny). The deadline of which just got moved forward. Gulp. That's one of the reasons I've not been musing much of late. (A friend of mine is not sure about my use of the term "musing"—she thinks of it as a "loathesome, villain-chin-stroking or fantasy-heroine-in-a-reverie kind of word" which is kind of why I chose the word in the first ...
Posted by Justine at 0:58, December 10th, 2004 under Magic Lessons, Musings, Sydney/Australia |
Some of my regular readers and friends (and not just the non-Australian ones) have tentatively suggested that I might want, perhaps, to refrain from writing yet another one of my
yay-I'm-back-home-in-Australia musings. They're tired of my overly rose-coloured view of my home country and wish for me to start dishing the dirt. As one of them put it: "Australia's not perfect, you know. Nowhere is. Not even your precious Sydney. Write something critical for a change. I'm bored."
Their wish is my command. Here are my trivial (not in the mood for being serious) objections to my homeland:
I was back home for less than two days before I heard an ABBA song. Did you ...
Posted by Justine at 0:57, November 26th, 2004 under Food, Musings, Sydney/Australia |
good news from St Stephen's Cemetery
Posted by Justine at 0:56, November 25th, 2004 under Magic or Madness, Musings, Praising, Sydney/Australia |
As I write this I am home in Sydney, physically anyway. The jetlag thing is putting a glass wall between me and everything else; the world comes to me slowly and full of distorted echoes.
One of the pings that has gotten through is
the winners of the US
National Book Awards, and I got to thinking about awards and the judging process and the controversies that the major ones often seem to generate. I have been on the shortlist for three different awards and, more importantly, I have been a judge on a number of awards.
But first: I am so thrilled that
Pete Hautman's Godless won the young adult award. ...
Posted by Justine at 0:55, November 19th, 2004 under Musings, Reading, Sydney/Australia, Writing & Publishing |
leave her alone
Posted by Justine at 0:53, November 11th, 2004 under Magic or Madness, Musings, State of the World, Sydney/Australia |
until Justine goes home
Posted by Justine at 0:52, November 8th, 2004 under Cricket, Musings, New York City/USA, Sport, Sydney/Australia |
A few people who don't actually know me read these musings. One of them sent me an email asking if I would write a description of an average day in my life, since I appear to write about everything but. What do I do on an average work day? Is it different depending on whether I'm in Sydney or New York City? My reader found it hard to credit that an average day for me involves sitting around contemplating the differences between Sydney and NYC after attending a Liberty game or a science fiction reading or convention or handing out voter registration cards during a blackout.
Point taken. (Except about contemplating the differences between Sydney and New ...
Posted by Justine at 0:52, November 7th, 2004 under Musings, New York City/USA, Sydney/Australia, Writing & Publishing |
One time
Scott was taking his niece Renee for a ride through Times Square in a pedicab. They'd just seen a Broadway show. He leaned back in the rickshaw and stared at all the lights around him, the neon, huge TV screens, advertisements several stories high. Scott's been a New Yorker a long time now, but living in the East Village he rarely does touristy things like Broadway shows or gaping at the electric splendour of Times Square, yet to his surprise he was loving it. From ground level, from the middle of the street, without having to crane his neck upwards, he could see how extraordinarily beautiful it was.
He sat in wonder staring, while ...
Posted by Justine at 0:00, November 3rd, 2004 under Listening, Musings, New York City/USA, Viewing |
I watched
Scott vote today. Went into the polling booth with him, pulled the curtain behind us, and watched him pull the big lever at the bottom from right to left, which turns on a light outside the booth to say there's a-votin' going on. Then he flipped little levers in a long column to indicate his choices for president, senator, and a whole raft of other stuff. When he was done and had checked it and doublechecked it and then checked it again, he pulled the big lever down the bottom all the way back to the left to make his vote good and turn the light off, clearing the way for the next voter.
...
Posted by Justine at 0:49, November 2nd, 2004 under Musings, New York City/USA, Praising, State of the World, Viewing |
Justine triumphs in her own land
Posted by Justine at 0:48, October 29th, 2004 under Magic or Madness, Musings, New York City/USA, Sydney/Australia, Writing & Publishing |
Mely says I should announce this in my blog. So here it is:
On Monday, the 1st of November, me and
Barry N. Malzberg will be the double act for the
NYRSF reading series at the Melville Gallery in the
South Street Seaport Museum, 213 Water Street (between Beekman and Fulton), in the downtown Manhattan part of New York City. Doors open at 6:30PM and the reading begins at 7:00PM precisely. I'll be reading first cause I get too nervous if I have to wait. (Suggested donation $5.)
The Melville Gallery (pretty, isn't it?)
I'll read from
Magic or Madness. For those of you who don't know ...
Posted by Justine at 0:47, October 26th, 2004 under Magic or Madness, Musings, Writing & Publishing |
Keith Miller is dead.
One of the the
greatest cricketers of all time is dead. He could bat, bowl, field like the devil, play brilliant
cricket while completely hungover, and charm the crowd whether he scored a century, got five wickets, or out for a duck.
He was unbelievably physically gifted (he also played Aussie Rules brilliantly), gorgeous, funny, charming, and rebellious. He had Elvis hair that flopped across his forehead when he bowled, causing women (and, I imagine, not a few men) to sigh. He was tall (188cm) and built. The adjectives most frequently used about him are dashing, larrikin, and swashbuckling. Everything I've ever read about the man, makes me suspect that those writing about Miller were ...
Posted by Justine at 0:45, October 11th, 2004 under Cricket, Musings, Sport |
This is a blog.
What I said earlier, about this not being a blog, forget it. Almost as soon as I posted that much-lamented musing, my friend Ray wrote me to point out that I'd "made the same kind of mistake that
Langford documents in his 'As Others See Us' sections [of
Ansible]. ("It's not really science fiction. It's the world 30 years from now, in which for 18 years no human child has been born, for unknown reasons...')."
Guilty as charged. The logic runs like this: science fiction/blogs are not good therefore this cannot be science fiction/a blog. What a load of rubbish. I'm embarrassed that I fell for
that line of thinking while I tied ...
Posted by Justine at 0:44, October 8th, 2004 under Bloggery, Musings |
In Buenos Aires almost everyone I met eventually talked about
La Crisis, about waking up one morning and finding that they had two thirds less money than they had had the day before, about having to drop out of university, about losing their jobs, their apartment, their house.
One woman was in Germany in 2001 at the time of La Crisis. She rushed to the bank to get out what money she could, but from the time she joined the queue to the time she got to the bank teller, the Argentinian peso had dropped even more. Her life savings were no longer enough ...
Posted by Justine at 0:43, October 4th, 2004 under Musings, New York City/USA, Praising, Travelling |
The New York Liberty make it to the Eastern Conference Finals
Posted by Justine at 0:42, September 29th, 2004 under Basketball, Musings, New York City/USA, Praising, Sport |
I'm homesick.
I wrote in a café today and at the table next to me, three women—none of them native New Yorkers—talked about their immigrant experience, about living far from home. A huge wave of homesickness washed over me, for a moment I could smell the jasmine and honeysuckle coming into bloom in Sydney, see the view from the bottom of my parents' street, of the timber yard, Bicentennial Park, Rozelle Bay, the Glebe Island Bridge and the city beyond it. Glass skyscrapers reflecting the intense daylight (never mind that in Sydney it was dark and the wee hours of morning), container ships loading and unloading, the enormous Moreton Bay fig trees by the water, and maybe some pelicans floating in ...
Posted by Justine at 0:42, September 27th, 2004 under Musings, New York City/USA, Sydney/Australia, Whingeing |
and other excuses
Posted by Justine at 0:39, September 20th, 2004 under Basketball, Food, Magic or Madness, Musings, New York City/USA, Praising, Scott's books, Sport, Whingeing, Writing & Publishing |
a love letter to New York City
Posted by Justine at 0:38, September 14th, 2004 under Musings, New York City/USA, Praising, Scott's books, Sydney/Australia, Writing & Publishing |
the panels
Posted by Justine at 0:36, September 8th, 2004 under Cons & Other Gatherings, Magic or Madness, Musings, New York City/USA, Scott's books |
I'm one of those people who's not wild about having their photo taken. I'm not neurotic about it, like certain folk who cover their face, turn their back, or run away (how do they escape in a world where phones take pictures?). Even so, there are many things I prefer to do with my time: clean public toilets, eat thumb tacks, become a politician, ghostwrite a book for a big-name author whose work I loathe.
I blame my sister,
Niki Bern. She's a visual effects artist who's worked on films like The Quiet American, Charlotte Gray and Matrix Reloaded. She started as a photographer.
She first caught the photography bug in her early teens. We lived in the same house, ...
Posted by Justine at 11:09, August 29th, 2004 under Musings, Sport, Writing & Publishing |
Posted by Justine at 11:21, August 7th, 2004 under Musings |
Posted by Justine at 11:14, July 5th, 2004 under Musings, Sport |
