Thomas McAuley is a San Antonio fantasy writer. He is the web designer for and a former board member of the San Antonio Writers Guild. thomasmcauley.com centers around his writing blog that follows.

Too often, beginning writers hear is, "Story must have conflict." The later understanding is that the conflict can come in many shapes and sizes. Conflict can be a direct interpretation of the word, like someone being chased by a knife-wielding crazy person, or an argument or a quest like you have in Lord of the Rings. But it can be, and often is, more subtle -- a man with ADD's struggle to appear normal.

Hrm...too close to home, perhaps.

The point is that every effective story has to have some reason to have been written. A story about a man standing, walking across the room, pouring himself a glass of water and sitting down at a table isn't a story at all. It's a description. It might even be written poetically, but to be a story, there needs to be some...conflict. Dammit.

Possible conflicts in this simple scenario:

• The man would need to have some difficulty in moving.
• He has made a bet that he could go a whole day without drinking water, so he knows that drinking the water would mean losing the bet.
• Maybe he's locked in the room and the crazy person who put him there only gave him water laced with drug that will force him to reveal a secret, thus making the decision to alleviate a trade-off.

Fun. This, really, is the part of writing that I tend to like -- the planning and justification of motivation and action.

And THAT'S why I was so shocked that I had totally neglected to do so in a recent story. I had an evil force descend on a situation and do a bunch of cool nasty stuff. The nature nasty stuff was so cool by itself, thought, that I forgot to give a reason why this particular evil person had decided to descent in this particular place and torture this other particular person.

Crap and damn.

Looking back, I realize that not only does the story have to have a conflict, it also has to have a reason for the conflict and a reason for selecting a place, and selecting a victim.

For the same reason that a character's actions must follow a logical stimulus, every element of the story must also have a logic justification for existing in the place and with the other characters in the story. Otherwise, you may as well be rolling dice.

So, I had a great story concept and a couple of great characters (all imho) but I failed to show why they were there and why they were pitted against one another. No concept or characters can overcome such a vacuum.

Moral: Right up front, give every story character specific, uncontrived justifications for his/her presence and deeds. The same can be said of setting, time, and plot.

The break over the holidays can officially be declared a success. For the first time in -- well, ever -- I was disciplined enough to actually step away from work for the full two weeks and dedicate the same number of hours each day to writing. I can say that not since my days painting in the loft studio overlooking 1st Avenue and the Cumberland River (before the Titans statdium, mind you) have I enjoyed, in essense, full days dedicated to art.

In that time, completed a 3500-word story and a 5000-word edit. If you knew anything about my writing struggle over the last few years, you'd know that one of these would have qualified as a huge accomplishment, but to have pulled off both -- unthinkable. Completed a story in less than a month has felt like a turning point. Finishing a satisfying story in fewer than 5000 words also feels like an important event, but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet. The finished edit to the other story, just proved that I still have the discipline to do the thankless part of this craft.

So, as this is a writing blog, I feel obligated to share what made this time successful. I wouldn't have thought much about it had I not been asked about my writing by an author recently moved to San Antonio.

In my response to him, I realized that I can be blind and stupid and slow to manage my emotions.

(In the interest of humor, I should stop there but I won't.)

No...I just related that I had never written a story until '06 when I first decided to begin writing seriously and professionally. I wrote and wrote, sucking every inch of the way, until in '08, I wrote my first good story for a contest, Spirit and Speck. It won honorable mention in the contest I entered it into and the rewrite got published in an online mag.

Enter emotions. Foolishly, but not entirely unexpectedly, I felt that I was unstoppable, that anything I wrote would knock people over. I had just begun. I wanted to show the world how great I was and that meant entering contests.

Not too quickly, after a series of better-than-average but not winning results in 24-hour contests, I learned that I'm not at my best when I write quickly, that my strength comes from my passion and ideas, not my speed. I believe that the contest stage also damaged my writing psyche. Now, instead of thinking entirely about the story, I found myself thinking more than I ever had about people's reactions to my work, as if I had people waiting for my next work. I believe it took finally completing Forever By His Side, the 15k work that took me a year and a half to finish, to bring me back to my right artistic mind. But it wasn't until the two weeks at the end of 2011 that I was able to use that new, smarter energy to some productive end.

For the first time since before Sprit and Speck, I feel like an artist. And that HAS to continue to be what it's all about. It just sucks that it took me so long to get back to this point.

I began this his blog back in January of 2008. The very first post was called My Writing Process and Environment. in which I spoke highly of Monroe Product's wonderful ambient slash meditative product called The "So" Chord. It's a two-track CD of ambient noise with their trademark Hemi-Sync sound underneath that is designed to "balance and focus the mind."

Whether or not the tracks balance and focus my mind is up for debate. I can only say that I've written pretty much non-stop for now nearly four years and The "So" Chord continues to be in my heavy writing time rotation. It effectively blocks out the surrounding spiking sounds of a busy coffee shop and a home life filled with barking dogs, the idiotic goings-on of two teenage boys and too-frequent reality TV.

But as man can not live on bread alone, or in this case, two ambient tracks, I've spend a good deal of my non-writing time finding other sources of ambient and atmospheric noise blocking...noise. I can now rely on a collection of 43.2 hours of audio tracks -- yes, I did the math -- two Internet radio stations and one usually terrific podcast (Ultima Thule) all of which help me create an ideal writing environment no matter where I choose to BIC (that's Butt In Chair).

That should seem like enough, right. Well I write most days and I write for hours at a time when I do. So again, relying on our friend, Math, we can easily figure out that since January of 2008, I have written somewhere between three and four thousand hours. That means I might have listened to every one of my ambient tracks somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 times in those years. Suddenly my vast audio collection seems rather...vlow (slow, for the vlow among us).

Well, I found another source. I finally got my iPhone at the end of November -- you can't imagine how much I hated my old phone, but that's a story for anther time. Since getting it, I have been poring through the immense catalog of available apps.

Recently I found a terrific app that called my name. It's called Relax Melodies. And I'm talking about the Premium version -- $1.99. It is a collection of "white noise ambiance for sleep, meditation & yoga," according to their own description. Its intended use is to give you something to meditate to or to relax to as you go to sleep, but it's turned out to be a wonderful tool for my writing.

Here's what it does. Primarily, you have a group of 82 smoothly looping ambient tracks that -- I estimate -- run about 5 minutes long, so you never really feel even a minor jolt at the start/end point. You can listen to any one of them by themselves. Fine. But the real power is in being able to not only play as many of the sounds as you like simultaneously, but in being able to mix the level of each sound you add. Then, on top of the 82 sounds, you get those extra spooky Hemi-Sync-esque underneath tracks: Concentration, Relaxation and Pre-Sleep. You can create the perfect bled of sounds from nature, hippie music and laboratory magic then save your audio cocktail into a sound library. Genius.

FYI...Right now I'm listening to a mix I named Concentration with Brown Birds. It's, perhaps obviously, the Concentration track mixed with very low "Birds" and something called "Brown Noise," a lower-toned, less staticky version of "White Noise" and a touch of "Light Rain." Ahhhh. 

Ambient? More like Damn-bient.

Buy Relax Melodies Premium in the app store for $1.99 and tell them Thomas McAuley sent you.

Recently I took another look at the blogging aspect of my writing career. I had a good run this year, blogging nearly 5 days a week for a number of months. I had built a pretty good habit and got a little of a following going; however, that all came to a screeching halt last month when I realized that blogging was factoring at all into whether and how much I would write on any given day. Blogging was fine when I had something to say, too, but around the same time I made the realization about it affecting my writing output and time, I also found that I was spending more time than I could accept -- namely ANY time -- hunting for interesting content to blog about.

Why was I doing it? Platform? Pride? Boredom? Was I writing as a result of writing fatigue? Yes to all, probably, though I wouldn't guess at proportions.

After reevaluating blogging and writing, I've decided to admit that I headed down a road that didn't gain me much in the way of following or building my writing. As I had said in a blog entry sometime this year, there are benefits to writing something -- anything -- every day and that blogging does bring one closer to one's real voice, but if that blogging interferes with the more important work of writing and honing fiction, then it's got to be reigned in.

Sigh of relief.

Now, after taking a couple weeks off from pushing myself to write three pages each day -- a wonderful habit that one of my perpetually unnamed writing buddies practices -- I am officially back in the saddle. Just today I finished up the second draft of my witch/tattoo story. I'll let it sit for a couple weeks before rereading it and making what I hope to be final edits. During that waiting period, I'll be writing a story that I quickly synopsized and outlined in the wee hours only two days ago. Needless to say, I'm excited to get into a new story, not only because it's not the same story I've been working on but because it's so new an idea to me that it's glowing with exciting energy.

(The new story is another witch story but one that looks at the type from a different angle than I've explored before. She's every bit as dark as other evil, magical women I've written about -- in fact, she's probably a good deal darker -- but there's some dim light about the application of her evil.)

As with any hiatus, I rediscovered my love for the craft. I have a tendency to do anything I do with maniacal energy, thus quickly burning myself out. Maybe this time around, I won't do the same. I believe in a gentle float downstream when it comes to my own artistic endeavors but I have a difficult time feeling good about it when others around me can produce such ridiculous word counts.

Grant me the discipline to keep gently paddling forward even as speedboats pass me by, threatening to upset my Zen.

I've got to say I'm impressed that I can post from my new iPhone. I would have expected the experience to have been more difficult, but no, typing -- once one gets used to it -- isn't so bad. And the tools show up well, if a tad too uncomfortably small.

But what does this have to do with writing? Nothing. So, to the writing.

Not having posted for most of November may have led some to think I hadn't written either. That was not the case. I have actually been fighting with the end of a story I had writes the first draft of earlier this year but had abandoned in lieu of Forever. I got back to it and realized that most of the negative critique it received was in fact warranted. It isn't a bad story, but the first draft was tedious, especially toward the end. This rewrite has been both enjoyable and, for the most part, successful.

thank goodness for Forever. Having stuck with that story turns out to have been worth the struggle. Though I haven't heard back from any of the places I submitted to, I can tell that, sale or no, I emerged from the long difficult experience not only a better writer in regards to skill but a better thinker and a better self-critiqued (in the good sense, not in the way that I can't write or otherwise function.)

still, as I said, I'm having trouble with the ending. Part of the problem is that the original impetus for writing the story was not well-documented. The other reason is that, because I ran into and learned how both recognize and solve logic problem and other literary shortcomings, I discovered a few not small problems with the story's structure and action.

this isn't a bad thing. I'd rather know what and where the problems are so that they can be fixed, but they do need to be fixed and that almost inevitably takes time. I think the biggest obstacle that I'm facing right now is that the original story suffered a bit from a non-ending and my lead -- as is commonly the case in my early drafts -- was too much of a passive observer. Both problems are fixable but require a but of head scratching.

Fun fun fun.

I'll keep you posted. I have a deadline of two days (three?) for this draft, so I'd best figure something out soon.

Please grant me a non-writing related rant today.

They say that any publicity is good publicity. I may have found a situation where publicity can't possibly be good for business. At the beginning of September, GoDaddy announced their intention to drop support for ColdFusion. This effectively leaves thousands of ColdFusion website users stranded or at least scrambling. They are forced to either take GoDaddy's luke-warm offer of a cheap upgrade to some other technology or change hosts.

As a biased person, may I strongly suggest the latter. Jump ship because GoDaddy has been a crappy ship for a long time. Granted, it's been a loud crappy ship painted in bright colors -- TV commercials filled with stars and Hooters-esque hotties -- all in an effort to hide how crappy they are.

Where does all this anger come from? I have been a website designer for more than a decade now, so this story bothers me on two levels.

About three years ago, a friend of mine started a gym in the area. I decided to give him a website look in exchange for allowing my wife to workout there for free. He already had the name hosted at GoDaddy, so i figured we'd just keep the site there. Let me tell you of the nightmare that ensued. There wasn't a single thing about the experience that wasn't riddled with delay and help topics nested sometimes -- no joke -- 20 levels deep. I counted. If I had billed for this work, I would have lost my shirt. As it was, I nearly jumped out of a window. From that time, I have outright refused to deal in any way with GoDaddy. I'd rather lose thousands than deal with that weave of madness again.

The second thing that bothers me about GoDaddy dropping ColdFusion support is how they gave CF a kick in the ass on the way out. They couldn't simply drop it quietly. They had to fib about CF:

ColdFusion requires an abundance of resources to maintain, so we have decided to entirely discontinue its support from our shared hosting accounts on November 29, 2011.

A] That's not true; and,

B] GoDaddy had an ulterior motive for saying all this. It all comes down to marketing. Microsoft owns the competing technology .NET and they have enough money to sweep CF under the figurative rug. Apparently, MS didn't like the world's largest free hosting site offering the superior CF alongside their half-baked .NET. Someone whispered to someone at GoDaddy that they'd like CF to disappear and presto, no more CF. What makes that more sad is that I've found that most folks who use GoDaddy aren't highly savvy about the Internet, so they'll understandably believe anything that they're told. GoDaddy stating that CF is a technology worth abandoning then following up that false statement with an offer to switch to something else for a discounted price is nothing less than deceptive.

My suggestion? Move to ICG Link. They've been hosting websites since '95 and have -- and will continue until the last CF user is left standing -- support ColdFusion websites. A combination of affordability, redundancy and great support has allowed them to survive the tech bubble and two market crashes. They serve thousands of hosting clients on every continent -- with the possible exception of the stupid one with all the penguins.

Here's a page with more about the topic and a few easy ways to switch your site to their reliable hosting.

http://www.icglink.com/godaddy-coldfusion-support.cfm

At last week's Drafthouse critique, one of our members announced that she would likely not be writing for the remainder of 2011. There followed a palpable pause. Judging from the members' expressions, the general take was that this unnamed person had spoken something akin to blasphemy.

To not write is in itself unthinkable. But not to write for in excess of two months? A fella could get shot for less.

Then I thought about it. All this member actually said was he wasn't going to write, the implication being "new stuff." He could edit, submit, research, anything really. He just wouldn't write new stuff.

Now, instead of hunting him down and gutting him, I found myself thanking him for giving me something to consider.

I have a pretty substantial backlog of unfinished stories. I suspect I could get a whole lot more accomplished editing than writing new material. It's not like I abandoned most of those older stories because they were bad ideas. Some, sure. Truth be told, I abandoned most of them because my skills didn't measure up to the promise those stories held. I stopped because I had more work to do. They weren't as much abandoned as given over to better parents until I sorted my shit out.

Well I'm sorted out now. So instead of writing new material, between now and the new year, I'll make determinations about which of those older stories are good candidates for reworking. In the background, I'll continue to submit the stories that I completed this year -- sadly only the two. Susurrus and Forever By His Side -- but I'll dedicate most of my energy to polishing the old stuff that's been in storage all these last few years.

I apologize for this being the first post in almost two weeks, but I couldn't pass it up. This is a license I spotted in front of me. I'm not sure if they're the luckiest or the unluckiest folks for having 469-WET. I guess it depends upon their temperament.

This is entirely unrelated to writing, so forgive me this once. I just wanted to relate a bit of fun my older son and I had last Friday. But first, a little back story.

My older son, Addison, 19, learned that he could save a ton by going to a specific unnamed bank. Being the money-grubber he is, he was all in. To accomplish this, he was told to gather up all the necessary paperwork based on a list given to him by his mother, a woman who has worked in the automotive finance industry for nearly two decades. On our first visit, he brought some of the paperwork. He was surprised to find out that he, in fact, needed all of it and acted surprised that he didn't get partial credit for what he had brought.

We tried again a few days later. If he had remembered his registration or even if he had driven, thus proving we had the car in question, we could have completed the refinancing then and there. I happened to drive and he did not remember said registration. A third visit would be necessary.

I might have punched the young man. It's foggy.

Dear reader, you'll be happy to learn that we did, in fact remember everything on our third, supposedly charmed visit. However, Addison and I had by this time become jaded to the whole bank thing. We had seen too much of them and had gained too little in the process.

It was outright unwise of them to drag our visit out as long as they did.

One thing after another either went  wrong or took too long to accomplish. Scans wouldn't scan. Faxes would go through after the third attempt but come out cut off on the other end. Calls to clarify details -- with the bank we were leaving or the wife who would have been justified to leave me for how helpless I am when it comes to matters of money -- each required multiple tries and usually long hold times. The young lady helping us admitted to us that she had nearly lost all of her short-term memory due to her unplanned pregnancy, so um sorry.

So by the time the loan officer showed up on screen, Addison and I were tired, hungry and raring to stab the next thing that moved.

Let me clarify that last statement. Not the stabbing part -- the on-screen loan officer part. I'm not sure how common the practice is, so forgive my naivety if thinking that having the most important person in our long drawn-out bankmare was piped in from some call center was a little strange. I get that staffing every bank branch with its own person might cost more and that passing those savings on to customers is just good business, but the bank was poking sleeping bears at this point.

So we were served up a lovely 60ish-year-old woman who Central Casting would have used 90 out of 100 times to play Nice Grandmother. I'm confident she'd never said a word in her life worse than "poop." She had that look about her that told of skilled pie-making and quaint curio collecting. We said our hellos. What a friendly smile, I thought.

Then, to my surprise, our real-life banker got up, required to leave the room so Addison and I could discuss private details with the television.

"Thank you, um..."

"Addison," Addison said.

"Right. Addison. Thank you."

Hand shake.

"And, um..."

"Thomas," I said.

Hand shake.

"I'm sorry."

"No problem," I said. "The pregnant thing."

Laughter.

"Buzz me if you need anything."

"I'll try not to, but thank you," I said.

She left, wondering how to take my comment. That left Addison and me on one side and Telemom the other.

I got an idea. If I'm careful, I thought. If I get the placement just right, Telemom will never know. I set about drawing a fancy  mustache on a Post-It®. The next time we were put on hold -- and Lord help me if we weren't put on hold half a dozen more times -- Telemom would be the proud new owner of a fancy mustache.

I drew it. I placed it. Now the only thing I had to do was keep a moderately straight face when Telemom showed up again.

Let me tell you one thing. There's NOTHING more effective for getting rid of the doldrums of a waiting room than seeing -- nay, doing BUSINESS with -- the sweetest woman in the universe while said woman is sporting a fancy handlebar mustache. More than a few times, either Addison or I would have to turn away from the screen to gain our composure. And more than a couple of times, Telemom laughed "with" us, apologizing.

"I know," she would say, smiling, "But we're almost done. I'm so sorry for all the delays."

No. PLEASE don't hurry now. Not now that it's getting good. PLEASE take your time. But, as luck would have it, Telemom fixed us up. The car was refinanced and we were free to leave.

I still have the Post-It® mustache in my wallet. I can't seem to let it go. I have a box in which I keep all the movie tickets and other mementos of fun times. I guess I'll need to add the mustache to the collection now. Maybe with an explanation. I'd hate to get pregnant and forget why it's in there.

I'm going into this weekend far less frightened about the submission process, thankfully. If you'll recall, I was running into a mental block trying to decide which publications would be the best fit for me. I had outlined all sorts of problems I was having.

Well it's all behind me now, all because of a game I used to play when I was a kid.

For whatever reason, I used to be obsessed with bracketed competitions. When I would bore of smacking my Matchbox cars together, I would dump them all in a pile and pick a random two. I would look at them and consider every one of their strengths and weaknesses -- shape, color, likely real-world speed. At one point I even assigned some special super power to each car and its tiny imaginary driver. I would make a judgment. I would discard the loser into a loser pile and hold the winner aside for the next round. After an hour or so -- whatever time that is in kid time -- I would end up with the top car in my collection.

Even then, I understood that I could only find the one best car, that I would need to repeat the process again, the best car excluded, in order to find the second best car in my collection. I was more than willing to do that, being the griming little work I was (and still am, to be honest).

So when I hit that wall I mentioned earlier, I decided to figuratively toss all the publications into a pile and weighed them against one another, two at a time. After about an hour, I had a winner. After a second hour, I had a second publication. Done.

(You see, I only am bound to submit to two publications in order to earn a cupcake -- or was it cupcakes. No matter. My perpetually unnamed writing partner and masterful bakestress, knowing that I am, if nothing more, loathe to submit, promised me cupcakage if I were to submit my novella to a mere two publications.)

The frustrating thing is that while I was tearing my hair out, worrying over publications, I read over the last half of the story and found one item that was glaringly unclear. So I'll probably have to take a little time to iron that out. But having seen that error gets me paranoid that others are hidden somewhere further on in the text.

Maybe another read-through. No. I must submit. Just one, though? Urg.

No homey don't play. My frequent workplace slash writing pad, Local Coffee in San Antonio just won Best Coffee in WOAI Channel 4's Best of San Antonio 2011 competition.

To anyone who has patronized Local Coffee since it's opening in September (I think) of '09, this comes as no surprise whatsoever. "It's all about the coffee," as Robby Grubbs, Local Coffee's owner told me early on. They begin and end with the coffee. Everything else is interchangeable. The baristas are friendly and trained in an ongoing fashion. The equipment is state-of-the-art. And the coffee, the main ingredient is vetted to ridiculous standards.

That is, of course, not to say that everything else falls off. The atmosphere is relaxing. Many folks like myself make Local Coffee their all-day office and we never get a tad of grief. There's plenty of seating so it rarely overflows.

The baked goods are top-notch. They have killer oatmeal, too. They serve wine and beer, all selections chosen with care. And if you want something besides a plain coffee, the list of more complex coffee drinks is expansive. They even make their own chocolate and caramel syrups if you want a shot of sweetness.

There's indoor and outdoor seating. And they even have musical events ranging from open mic to established artists. And, not surprisingly, local artists show their art on Local Coffee's walls.

What else? Oh, they're environmentally friendly and buy local whenever possible.

So if you're planning on running with Local Coffee, you'd better bring your A game. I'm proud to be even peripherally associated with them. Congratulations, Robby and crew.

That's right. Simultaneous submissions hurts my brain. Allow me to clarify that odd statement in the form of a performance piece by 70s duo Shields and Yarnell. 

Kidding. But do allow me a quick aside.

My wife is enrolled in night college. She's currently taking a composition class. To meet her, one sees an witty, clear-thinking, articulate woman. A lady with a real confidence and at times a room-stealing presence. One would never imagine that behind closed doors she is an utter loss when it comes to her weekly assignments. She, being at times painfully left-brained, once struggled with a 2-page paper for the better part of a day, nearly breaking down along the way. I can't relate to the disconnect she experiences between the spoken and the written word, but I've seen it and know it to be real. She appears to not know some rule or set of rules that will tell her with certainty what she may or should write. Thus hours of unanswerable doubt.

I would roll my eyes or laugh, but I share a similar debilitation. That of keeping my biz organized.

Okay. I design websites, so one might think I couldn't possibly have an organizational problem. And you'd be right in a sense. It's very specific, my handicap. Over years of trying a number of different systems, I've been able to keep things straight when it comes to my work-related materials, files and such. But when it comes to new stuff, I tend to stare -- like my wife -- at spreadsheets and lists and paragraphs of directions for equally absurd, inexplicable amounts of time.

And that's what I'm facing now in submitting my novella. And I thought I was doing so well.

• I finished the novella. Check.
• I edited the thing. Check.
• I researched publishers. Even an agent or two, just in case. Check and a half.
• I read all the submission guidelines, paying special attention to quality of the outfit that I felt was of a particular quality, that matched my writing style and that allowed for electronic and simultaneous submissions. Checkaroo. Good boy.
• Time to make final choices. URT!!!

At this stage, my stupidity and self-bashing kicked in.

• How many should I submit to?  I always seem to show up on time for everything, even early, but I've made small clerical oversights often enough that I doubt whether I could be trusted to notify all the other places I've submitted to.
• A couple of the pubs SAY simultaneous submissions are okay, but the way they've phrased it, I don't buy that their heart is in it. Do I take them at their word?
• And contests vs traditional publications. How to decide. Should one decide between them or submit to both? And how do simultaneous submissions factor into contest. It's seldom specified. What are the implications of dual publication?
• Like that would happen. *slaps wrist*
• Can I trust their websites to reflect the actual quality of their organization? I build websites and have done a few great ones with the sole goal of creating the illusion that the client's small organizations is much larger or more successful than it actually is. Also, too often, large or serious, respectable organizations have the crappiest of sites, so the whole book/cover judging thing is out the window. How can one be sure.

This is where I faint. Well, this is at least where I pick up the guitar or the remote. *coughs* Or blog. It's a cry for help, I know.

What to do. I guess that's the other benefit of having a terrific critique group like Drafthouse and a great writers organization like the San Antonio Writers Guild.

Pic: Still from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Best Foreign Film NY Film Critics Circle: Spain, 1988; Director/writer: Pedro Almodóvar; Cast: Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas. Visit for more details.

Being specifically interested in creating a query letter for my novella, I did a little research into the subject and found that there are no substantial difference between those touting novels and those touting novellas. The formula is entirely the same, except you add either "novella" or "novel," as appropriate.

A book query letter should:

1. Be short. One Page max, but that seems too long as well.
2. Begin with a solid two-sentence paragraph that succinctly synopsizes the story and establishes the writing voice, mood and style. This will be -- or at least should be -- your greatest challenge in writing an effective query letter.
   1. The first sentence should:
      1. Inspire the reader to invest emotionally in the lead character
      2. Establish the inciting event.
   2. The second sentence should:
      1. Establish what turn causes the lead character's world to go to pot.
      2. Allude to a rewarding ending.
3. End with a second paragraph that lays out the business end of things.
   1. Assist the editor(s) in categorizing your work. Is it dark or funny or both? Is it genre or literary? Is it contemporary or historical? Those sorts of things, but only those that really need to be communicated.
   2. Avoid self-editorializing. No one cares that you or your mom or your friends really like the story -- of course they do. This includes comments that are intended modestly. But don't brag either. Keeping emotion out of the second paragraph while not coming off robotic is probably the best policy.
   3. Include the specs regarding attachments and willingness to be reachable at specific times, etc.
4. THEN REMEMBER TO:
   1. Attach the attachments
   2. Include contact info -- email and phone at a minimum. 

Putting all this together last night, I had an interesting thought. How much help would it be to stare at this outline before writing and look it over two or three times during the writing process to insure you're starting and continuing on track.

I can think of a few stories I've written for which a query letter would have been difficult to create. Maybe I didn't have an easily-synopsized the story or my conflict lacked focus. I'm guessing, because I haven't had a world of experience at this stage of my career, that if any one of these items presents a challenge outside of polishing the sentences, one of two things might be going on.

Either the author doesn't know his own story well enough or something key is missing in the story.

But keep in mind that even if you breeze through it, if you know your story and it has all the parts it needs to have, you're still wise to run the query letter past a couple more sets of eyes. Think of the query letter like any other written piece. When you first write it, you've written a first draft.

And you remember the old adage about all first drafts being crap. Don't send your crap out. Edit it appropriately and have it critiqued. You only get one shot at a publisher with any one story, so be thorough.

Though my wife would have preferred it to be otherwise, this weekend was dominated by chopping hundreds of words from my novella, Forever By His Side. I had planned to spend the time researching and submitting the story to at least two markets. I only got half of it done, though, as two of the markets I was targeting stated strict word counts of no more than 15k.

On Saturday morning, the story was 15.3k, so my focus changed to finding and killing 300 or more words. Bad ones, I hoped. Doing so required that I use all the gaps in both weekend days and that I sift through the first three chapters/sections.

But I ended up under 14.9k

The silver lining was that I found one or two places that I was happy to reword or excise. These first few pages being the most important from a submission standpoint, so though I didn't get to the cover letter or submissions, I'm happier and more confident about the story's beginning. It's a complex plot (for me) and insuring that all the necessary clues are clearly presented is key.

With Forever By His Side done, there was but one thing to do -- find someone to publish the thing. Thus began what I fully expected would be a couple low probability pitches to the two or three publications that touch novellas. And based on my initial search on Duotrope.com, my suspicion seemed to be justified. I found only two publications, based on the parameters I input and of those, only one paid -- token, 1¢ per word.

It's not about the money, believe me. If writing were most folks' primary source of income, you'd have a whole lot more extended families living together and/or a whole lot more dead writers. Still, it would be great to actually choose markets instead of have them dictated to me.

It's a little like marriage. If only two girls went to your high school, you'd be an idiot to think that one of them would be your soul mate. You'd know that you probably hadn't met enough girls to make that judgment. 

So...where to find more publishers?

That's where a network of fellow authors comes in handy. One writer simply can't know everything there is to know about the craft. He can't know about every book of interest that would best interest or benefit him. And he can't keep abreast of every industry and market development. Thor maybe, but not mortals. There just aren't enough hours in a day.

My wonderful unnamed writing partner, knowing my 16-month struggle to complete my story and knowing that I was ready to submit it, sent me three very helpful links that changed the game completely. Each of the links lead to sites that contain lists of links to publications that consider -- some that even specialize in -- novellas. Suddenly my list of pubs to consider grew from a measly two to now ten. And I haven't gotten to all the links yet. Very exciting.

Here they are. May they help you along your way:

• http://wordsofeward.blogspot.com/2011/01/finding-fiona-markets-for-novellas.html
• http://www.thejohnfox.com/bookfox/journals-accepting-novellas.html
• http://www.aubreyhirsch.com/2011/what-to-do-with-this-novella/

Now the lists are from as early as '09, so some of the pubs are closed now, sadly. And a couple of the others are closed, but that's always a risk.

This weekend, I'll try to get all my home-based chores done early and try to skip soccer so that I can get to all the remaining links and, if time permits, submit to at least two pubs, the best ones on the list, ones that accept simultaneous electronic submissions.

I'm still marveling over my eagerness to dive into this phase of being a professional writer. I've finished works before and have experienced exactly no excitement about finding a market. Finished was good enough, it seemed. But with Forever, I feel a real pull to get it out there.

I have a couple theories about why that is the case.

With only a few stories complete and knowing how slowly I write, I was afraid that if someone liked what I wrote and asked for more, I wouldn't be able to do more than apologize and admit I had nothing more. I've also considered that somewhere inside me, I've always known to what level I've wanted to write and that I simply hadn't gotten there with enough regularity deserve to have my work published. With Forever, I know I'm maybe not fully there, but I'm close enough to know that I can duplicate the effort.

Here's to a successful next few weeks of submission / sustained writing. Yeah, one must continue to write new material during the trying submission process.

Last night, I was in my bi-weekly critique with Drafthouse. We had gotten through one set of pages and had just started reading another when Da-ding! my phone da-dinged. I know, right? Obnoxious. Irresponsible. I can't remember the last time I forgot to either turn on or off my ring -- okay, that's not actually true. I forget now and again, but rarely.

Anyway...da-ding -- a text from my wife.

The reader stopped reading and everyone looked at me briefly, disapprovingly. Understandable. I apologized quietly for the interruption. Etiquette out of the way, the reader resumed reading. I went ahead and read the text.

Normally a text during a critique is a forgetful, forgivable error by a family member, usually a request that I stop for milk or meds on my way back home. I read the text:

Addison crashed on his bike. Thinks he may have dislocated his jaw. Taking him to ER to see what's up.

(Addison, being my older son.)

The time for etiquette past, I raised my hand for the reader to stop.

"Guys?" I read the text. "So I'm out of here."

Their astonishment and well-wishes were a fog to me as I gathered my things, stood and left.

During my speedster drive, I was thinking to myself a few things.

• What does a dislocated jaw look like? It sounds horrific. I hope it is not.
• An injury of this [imagined] magnitude could be traumatic enough to keep him off his bike. Crap. He'll give up on life. He'll get fat.
• The bike. Is it in two. Did they remember to retrieve the bike from the road? Will it need to be replaced. He'll be distraught.
• And, hurry.

In less than 20 minutes I had made my way from basically downtown San Antonio to the emergency room at Baptist Hospital outside the 1604 loop.

To get to the point, he fell off his bike and got busted up. But his injuries were minor relative to my expectations, thankfully. According to him, he was screaming around a corner during a night training session. Intervals, that is. Preparation for an upcoming race next Thursday in Austin. He recently finished 8th out of a starting field of 74, so he's eager to go back and "dominate," as he puts it.

To better gauge my state of mind, you need to know a bit more, possibly. As of this writing, Addison is 19. He's a CAT2 cyclist. For those in the dark about what that means, he's basically one degree of expertise from being able to race for a domestic team. Oh...his training intervals consist of 5 miles at full speed, 30 mph or 10 minutes, followed by about 1 minute at casual speed, closer to 20 mph. Not everyone's idea of casual. It was during one of the faster legs that he fell.

So, I walked in and basically saw Addison looking more embarrassed and gooey than traumatized or disfigured. My wife was there, smiling. He had called her away from her night school at Incarnate Word. No matter how tough a mother is, she doesn't smile in the ER unless there's nothing to worry about. I learned, after I had been there a while, that after his fall, he had ridden back home in his injured state. He had even showered before being driven into the ER.

None of this was in the text, mind you. Urg. In my wife's defense, she did try to tell me not to come, that there was no need.

"Tell  where 2 go when u can," I texted.

"You don't have to come. It doesn't look too serious. Heading to baptist."

"Fuk that. I'm there."

Here's the bottom line:

• He suffered lacerations to:
  • Below nose
  • Left side of jaw
  • Left shoulder, elbow, forearm (2 places), wrist, fingers (2) and knee
• He also seems to have suffered a crush wound to his chin

We suspected he had dislocated his jaw -- his bite has been modified a bit -- and that he'd chipped his chin bone -- it's felt like a piece was floating around loose in there, but neither of these more serious conditions turned out to be the case. He just took a direct hit to the chin, which swole his jaw enough to misalign his bite. The doctor assures us that it is a temporary condition.

But, true to his unflappable self, assured us that he'd still "dominate" at an upcoming race, next Thursday in Austin. Oh, to be young again.

So, since his starting cycling, he's suffered countless lacerations, two broken bones and whatever secret something that might develop from latest incident. It's a great sport, cycling, up until the point of impact.

Keep him in your thoughts, and as always, look out for riders of all types. It's their road, too.

Yes, the boy is finally blind. While everyone around me fell to poor eyesight -- my parents, my sister, my wife, friends and strangers alike -- my eyes remained in fortunate good health well into my forties. Then, in the span of a couple months, the optical floor fell out from under me.

I'm not sure what is to blame for the recent diminishment of my eyesight, but I finally broke down and bought some reading glasses today. They're basic Barnes & Noble frameless silver specs and don't weird me out too much.

To be honest, I'm still not sure I actually need them. If I encounter mouse type -- medicine bottles, etc. -- I tend to be able to read it. But I can't read it immediately. I can take a couple of minutes, working my way from arm's length closer in small steps, waiting for my eyes to catch up, then I'm good. Of course, I don't always have time or want to wait. Thus the glasses.

I've believed for years that poor eyesight is often our tendency to settle on certain focal distances and to let other distances go unpracticed. The fact that I can work my way into focus -- pretty perfect focus, by the way -- would argue that that might be the truth. In my case, at least. Saying that, though, I stand a good chance of being misunderstood and of pissing folks off. So let's move past it or pretend I didn't say it.

So, yay. I've got them. We'll see how it works out.

Oh...and I got a new pimp-ass tee.  (Piss off R.L. I'll post about my damned tees if I want to.)

My novella -- that's right, just a novella -- Forever By His Side has been a work in progress for a year and a half. I've done other work -- Susurrus, a 5k-word short story -- as well as two or three rough others that I'll be revisiting soon, but my primary work in that time has been Forever.

It's impossible to believe that I took so long to complete it, I did and I can't change the past.

I learned a lot in the process of its writing. More, I'd imagine than I'll ever again learn from a single piece of writing. It was a huge part of my writing evolution, the first story which I committed to getting right. The first which I committed to maintaining my original vision for it.

I had written other stories which, for various reasons, lost their way. They proved too convoluted or otherwise complex for my skill set at the time. Their plots proved impossibly perforated or otherwise flawed.

But from the outset, I knew two things. The story worked and, based on that one fact, I would see it through to completion.

This commitment was not only a test of my ability to commit, but it was a test of my ability to stick to a line, not to lose the story to sidetracks or substantial modifications, whether those came from myself or my brilliant critique group.

Even though I did it, I actually stuck to my guns and finished the damned thing, I find it difficult to give myself a single mark, one grade for my work.

For commitment, I earn a solid A. This was truly a journey of a thousand miles. I encountered every writing obstacle that's out there. And probably a few that I invented -- new, unlikely ways of fucking up. But I kept my eyes forward and I only stopped moving long enough to recharge my batteries.

For improvement, I'll be moderate and give myself a B. I would love to say that I emerged from this process as a seasoned, utterly confident writer, but I suspect that's not the case. I spent 80% of the time editing instead of charging ahead, writing blind and brave. I won't know how much the writing part of the equation has changed until I start writing my next piece.

For good sense, I deserve an F-. If there were a G, I'd earn that. No matter what, no story should take a year and a half, less a novella. I could let myself off easy. I've heard of some folks who spend ten or more years on their novels. And the language for this story was as much a feat of character acting as it was raw writing. I also worked full time and remained involved with my family, things that would have sped up the process considerably. But sixteen months? Other writers could have written this faster brain injured.

But, at the end of the day, the only grade that matters is the one I earn by finding a publisher and excited readers. Again my story being novella-length doesn't do it any favors. It's still difficult to find a publisher who'll do anything with that length of work. Even in this digital age in which length shouldn't matter -- at least from a physical production or store marketing standpoint.

So begins the next stage in the saga of bringing my story idea -- conceived in May of  2010 in my living room in San Antonio -- to readers.

Submission.

I've always loathed the idea of submission. It's office-work nature has never seemed worth the effort. I've never thought that the tiny bit of change I MIGHT make off a story justified the time I would loose. I could be writing, I'd thought. And what good would a story with my name on it be if it was floating out there alone. Even if someone were interested in my work, they wouldn't find anything else by me. Nothing of any substance, at least.

But it's different now. I'm not sure why, but I'm really excited about submitting this thing. I feel good about it. I think it's solid -- at least solid enough -- and the concept is not only good but interesting. I'd choose to read it instead of do something else if it weren't my own story. The other stories I have written, save a precious few that I'll soon be focusing on, haven't inspired me to share them in the same way.

So it begins. Tonight. Today. Whenever I can find the time. Submission.

To celebrate, here's my moral hero, John Lydon and his little outfit singing a little ditty called, what else? Submission.

As a writer, you can't suffer from being smarter. But easier said than done. Really...where to begin. You aren't doing yourself any favors by choosing a random direction and marching when there are resources out there that can quicken the work.

And to that end, Sam Spurlin's The Simpler Life (at www.thesimplerlife.net) is a great place to start your self-improvement journey. It's an article from 2009, but it seems to be pretty current still.

The following is Sam's own introduction. Read the rest on his site.

One of the values I try to live is “growth.” As part of that quest, taking control of my continued education and intellectual improvement is crucial. We live in an age of such democratization of access to resources that can be used to learn– we just have to take advantage of them. Lots of online self-education lists focus on giving the largest amount of links possible, regardless of how useful they actually are. Instead of copying that format, I decided to focus more on the quality of the websites. The following sites are a great base for your own growth as an intellectual individual.

As my last installment of Banned Books Week 2011, I decided to share the American Library Association's own list of the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books. Sadly the list is current only to 2009, but judging from the pub dates on many of these titles, the list probably hasn't changed much in two years.

My heart aches for kids who might encounter enough difficulty in accessing some of these titles to end up missing out on them.

I remember how Cather in the Rye changed my notions about what a classic book was. To know that such a snotty attitude could not only work but be considered the equal of others I had read by that time. And The Giver? My younger son -- twelve or thirteen at the time -- couldn't put the book down. I'm fairly certain it was the first book that had such an effect on him. Grendel? I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? Of Mice and Men?

The real offense is not their content but their exclusion.

Read the following list and try to keep a straight face.