Starting the Query Process

Starting the Query Process

by | May 15, 2025 | Uncategorized

I’ve started querying agents.  This might take a while.

I keep reading about how long it takes to get an agent, and that much of the time “no” doesn’t mean your book is bad, it just means it doesn’t fit the flow of what they’re doing this year.

And, I have to assume that most people who query don’t even know what a query is supposed to look like but submit anyway, i.e., most people who think they’re writers don’t actually have any idea how the game works (and it is a game). That’s got to be skewing the numbers big time.

When I wanted to get into the FX industry, I just went ahead and did it and ignored the people who said how hard it was or that I would never pull it off. The same thing happened when I went into the game industry, and when I wanted to get into UCLA Film School, and when I wanted to work in feature animation. I did all of them. The lesson I learned is that all the horrible statistics take into account the most wildly stupid and self-destructive applicants in each pursuit who never get past the front door.

Screening applicants for positions at the feature animation studio taught me that for each successful hire, there would be 300-400 applicants, out of which perhaps a dozen might have the basic requirements for the job, and only two or three might actually have everything we were looking for.

That’s only about 3% that make the “I’m not an idiot” cut. And less than one in three of those got hired. Which is FASCINATING, because that’s the same ratio of would-be authors who start a book that go on to see their work published. It doesn’t prove correlation, but it suggests it really f-ing hard.

It also suggests that I’m probably a lot closer to getting published than I think I am.  We’ll see.

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | The Search for Agency

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | The Search for Agency

by | May 14, 2025 | Books, Business, Writing

I’ve finished the third draft, and still frankly doing little tweaks here and there. I’ve learned that most agents, if not all of them, request the first three chapters of the book to read when you submit a query, so I’ve been polishing.  A word here, a phrase there, suddenly it all seems to have outsized importance.  And then, of course, it makes me want to go through the entire book and do that to every chapter.

When I’m alone with my thoughts, when I’m writing the story, that’s the sweetest, most engaging part of the entire process, but now I’m faced with having to do the one thing I’ve never ever been good at, the one thing that terrifies me more than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t involve doing something like playing electric guitar and singing on stage, solo, in front of an auditorium filled with my high school peers and their parents (this was when I was 17), encountering a band of thieves in my own home, led by someone I thought was my best friend (this happened when I was nineteen), or diving in the driver’s side window of my mother’s borrowed car to grab the emergency brake as it was about to dive off a cliff off the end of a pier into the Pacific Ocean (this happened when I was twenty), or having to pull over to blow out an engine fire on my way to work and then get back in the car and drive the rest of the way to work (this happened when I was 40).

I have to sell an agent on the idea of representing my book to a publisher.

I’m terrible at salesmanship.  Throughout my life, any time I’ve been confronted with having to do it, it’s always been a horrible experience and I’ve failed at it miserably.  But this time I can’t afford to fail, because the rest of my career as a writer depends on my being able to pull just one more miracle out of that dark secret place in the back of my trousers where flying monkeys come from.

I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to. I’ve gotten myself an annual membership on QueryTracker, which is a web site meant to help you find agents and keep track of whom you’ve submitted to and what they said, or didn’t say, afterwards. I’m considering entering BookPipeline’s unpublished author’s contest.  To be honest, though, I have no idea if that’s a good idea, or if it would help me in the slightest. They don’t even start judging until September, and that seems a very long time from now, and I’m impatient to get started pitching agents.

I’m told that I need to start working on my next book while I work on selling this one, because the publishing industry runs at the speed of books, which is to say, not very speedy at all. Even if I get an agent right away, which isn’t terribly likely, I might see my seventieth birthday before the book is published, assuming it ever gets there. This prospect does not fill me with confidence. I’m sixty-eight now. I don’t want my life to go by while I wait to see if I get to be a real writer. Frankly, the odds aren’t good.

I will tell you something, though. The reason most people fail at getting an agent is that their work isn’t finished before they submit their queries, or they query the wrong agents because they haven’t done any research, or they can’t follow simple instructions given them by the agents. Frequently they just have no idea how writing a novel works, and have written something unreadable, and their books are nowhere near where they need to be to submit. Your book doesn’t have to be in its final, polished, perfect form, but it needs to be as good as you can make it, and it should have been through the hands of a professional editor before you submit (mine now has). The odds of my getting an agent are probably far, far better than I believe they are, because most of the field is just self-disqualifiying.

Now that my manuscript is finished, the real adventure begins.

Wish me luck.

 

 

 

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | Second Draft Jitters

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | Second Draft Jitters

by | Apr 26, 2025 | Books, Writing

Now that I’ve gone through the whole book, replaced a chapter I shouldn’t have yanked, and found a bit over 1600 instances of filler phrases and useless sentences to either edit or remove entirely, now the manuscript is in the hands of my editor Lori Alden Holuta.

And I am starting to be faced with the questions of how do I pitch this thing, to whom to I pitch it, and how does the publishing industry work from this point forward. One important web site turns out to be QueryTracker, which is the natural evolution of an industry that is so swamped with people who dearly wish to be writers but don’t quite reach top tier who are looking for agents that there needs to be a service to help agents coordinate it all.

Gone are the days when you could go to a publisher’s office and throw the manuscript into the office over the transom and expect that it might get read someday. The publishing industry is now far far busier than that, and even just the fantasy genre by itself has grown over 40% in the past three years. It’s not just a river of submissions now. It’s a tsunami, made all the worse for people thinking that A.I. can write their books for them. I know publishers who have had to close their submission pipeline entirely while they wade through the sudden oceans of crap that weren’t in the pipeline just three years ago. It’s disheartening.

At the same time, it’s uplifting. Because while it’s harder to stand out than it was, when somebody does actually stumble across my manuscript, it will shine all the brighter. I might actually have a shot at getting agented, and if that happens, I could be published by TOR, or Baen, or DAW, or Dell.

I’m impatient. If this isn’t going to work, I want to know sooner rather than later. That isn’t how the publishing industry works, though. It might take two or three years to learn the fate of my first book, and that means that if I want a career as a published author, I have to start writing the next one whether or not I know that the first one will ever sell. That’s going to be a leap of absolute faith, or hubris, I’m not sure which.

But I’m not giving up, or stopping, or even slowing down, because the only option is to Keep Moving Forward. It might be a long shot, but it’s still my best possible future, and my best possible bet.

I’m taking it.

— Gene

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | First Draft Panic

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | First Draft Panic

by | Apr 10, 2025 | Books

It’s easy to say, “I’m writing a book.” Lots of people say that at parties. It’s hard to actually sit down and write one. This is why people treat the news that you’re working on a book with as much enthusiasm as they do a fart in an airlock, because the world is full of pretenders. And I mean full of them. A great many people want to be a writer, but don’t want to actually write.

And then when you say, “My first draft is finished,” now it’s a matter of both pride and fear. So many people never get that far. I’ve heard estimates that as few as 3% of people who start a book actually finish a first draft.

So, as you might have guessed, I have now finished my first draft, and it’s in the hands of the beta readers. And all I can do now is wait for their feedback, and I hate waiting, of course. And then too, some of the advice I’ll get back will be useful, or even vital, and some of it won’t be. And after I’ve gone through and polished the manuscript based on their recommendations and some of my own revelations, it will be time to either look for an agent, or prep it for publishing via a smaller publishing company that wouldn’t necessarily require me to use one, or self publish.

There are parts of the book, by the way, that ended up being cut because they don’t fit the story, but that will make wonderful short stories or novelettes. They might get included when the book publishes, and they might appear here first as a thank you for your continued support.

Running the radio station while I do this has been an experience as well, and I want to thank you for staying with me while I do all of this, and being with my team as we keep all the little wheels and gears from falling off. The station means a lot to a lot of people, and I don’t know if you’ve checked lately, but we are now the only science fiction themed radio station in the world, and have been for a while. You have earned the right to polish that particular apple, because it’s you and your contributions that make it all possible.

Second draft, here we come.

  • Gene Turnbow
The Ethics of A.I.

The Ethics of A.I.

by | Mar 13, 2025 | Technology

A friend once asked me for my opinions on the use of artificial intelligence.  I’ve been a big fan of A.I. for most of my life, and it’s been a popular theme in science fiction.  But now, we actually have credible A.I. in our social and commercial environment, and it’s time to address the elephant in the room.

Artificial intelligence is a tool, nothing more. One does not condemn a table saw because it can present more teeth to the plywood panel faster than a human could. Such assertions that it is somehow inherently evil are misguided and disingenuous at best.

Generative AI does depend on having been trained by observing the works of artists, and a great many of them. This, however, is also true of human artists, and we do not consider this theft or misappropriation. Those who present this notion as viable apply a double standard. The same is true of the written word. Generative AI learns by observing the work of others. It’s not a copy-paste machine. It does not now, and never has, worked that way, and those who imply that it is somehow “stealing the works of others” clearly do not understand how either artificial intelligence nor human creativity work well enough to make an intelligent comparison.

The areas where generative AI shines are the technical ones, writing code that runs, diagnosing complex networking issues, constructing database applications that perform specific tasks. It can also do miraculous things, like protein folding, and speeding the discovery of new, previously unknown materials.

That said, one does not just lay the wood on the table and press the button, hoping for a replica Louix XIV divan to come out the other side. It’s just a tool. It requires a human being to make the decisions as to where to cut, and why. Artificial intelligence is mostly useless when it comes to creative acts, for it cannot create, except under the express direction of a human being.

Those who rely on generative AI for their writing simply by typing a quick command and pressing a button have removed themselves from the equation, and presenting the output of generative AI as their own without any material guidance, in my view, are charlatans and cheaters. The same is true of those who use pushbutton AI to make images, and then presenting that image as their own work. There is a role for AI in image generation, but deceptively passing it off as one’s own creative work is an unworthy occupation.

The U.S. Copyright Office has clarified its stand on the use of A.I. in creative works. They have said that if A.I. is used as a tool to create elements used in the finished composition, that one may copyright such a work. But if the finished piece was created without the guidance of a human hand, it cannot be copyrighted, for machines may not author anything directly.

I use artificial intelligence when creating graphics, but almost never to create entire images. Instead, I do things like remove people or objects from images, or add missing features. I also use A.I. when coding, because frankly, most of what I have to do is grunt work, and my guidance to the A.I. comes in very precisely defining the task so that I get exactly what I want. It’s like talking to a very literal minded child.
I also use it in my writing, but never to create whole works, only to analyze and to help me organize what I have already written. I have tried, a few times, to have it write things for me, but the results are always mud-dumb, lackluster or outright wrong. And, A.I., no matter how hard you try to set up meta rules to combat this, tends to tell you whatever the hell it thinks you want to hear. This is not useful behavior in a creative, critical environment.

As I see it, the primary ethical concern with ChatGPT and its ilk is the abuse of the service from the standpoint of people trying to take shortcuts with it, or claiming its output as their own. This can range, therefore, from merely being sloppy and lacking in thoroughness to being outright unethical.

Tools, in essence, are tools. There is nothing inherently good or evil about them. It is in no one’s interest to anthropomorphize it and assign it moral or ethical behavior on its own. It is what we make of it, nothing more.

So, take what you want from this view, but remember that you can’t just declare something to be true in defiance of fact or objective proof otherwise.  See the situation for what it is, and plan and react accordingly.  No other approach makes sense.

– 30 – 

Did I make the header image for this article by pushbutton A.I.? I wanted something decent, and there had to be an image there, but I didn’t care much what. So yes. But I’m not claiming this as my artwork. It’s just generative graphics.