TECH: 101 Tips (67)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting 26 May 2010

Writers' Digest, October 2004, pages 26 to 33, has a collection of short "nuggets of wisdom" related to getting published. Maria Schneider is the author of the compilation. Take a deep breath, and here we go:

"Check out the scam sites on the Internet to eliminate those agents who are less than reputable. Look for agents in the acknowledgments of books that you respect that are similar to yours. Get referrals from contacts in the field. Check Publishers Weekly or websites such as www.aar-online.org (The Association of Authors' Representatives). Go to conferences. Hear agents speak and meet the ones who specialize in your genre." Lucienne Diver

Good advice. There are agents (and publishers, and editors, and writing magazines, and...) all dedicated to getting you to spend lots of money, rather than actually helping you to get published. As usual, one of the giveaways is that they are so eager to help you -- most reputable agents have plenty of business already. Anyway, there are various sites that help track agents and others who are mostly in the game to get money out of your pocket and put it in theirs.

EXERCISE: Finding the Prodigal

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 30 May 2010

One of the recent samurai dramas -- kind of like a western, except set in old Japan -- focused on an interesting problem. The rich older merchant was trying to find his daughter who had been missing for many years. In fact, his wife had disappeared with his daughter when she was very young, and she would now be a young woman.

On that show, he had advertisements, and a staff who were busily screening people who claimed to be his daughter. Mother's name, favorite pet, etc. all went into a test designed to find the real daughter. Of course, someone on the staff -- a senior assistant -- had decided to cheat and trained a young woman.

Unfortunately, the real daughter first was turned away because she didn't have fancy clothes. But the heroes got her dressed up and into the testing. Where she and the fake daughter ended up tied, and the rich merchant came to personally quiz them. The key question seemed to be how his wife had felt about returning. The fake daughter said that the mother had bitterly regretted leaving, and even as she died, told her daughter to come back. The real daughter said what nonsense, the mother hated him, and had told her so. He wavered, then made his pick -- the fake, who had fed him his dreams as related by the senior assistant.

Except... when he asked her to sing a lullaby that they used to sing together, she didn't know it. And when she tried to fake it, she stumbled.

Oddly enough, the real daughter happily sang the right song -- even if she did have rough edges aplenty!

Anyway -- your task, should you choose to accept it, is to make up a story about a rich person searching for his missing progeny. Perhaps adopted at birth, or separated later, but one way or another, he (or she) has misplaced their daughter (or son), and now wants to find them.

Feel free to put them in a setting that you prefer. Oh, a Vietnam vet who wants to find the daughter he left there? Or perhaps... Go ahead, imagine advertising, screening, and all that. How do you identify such a person? DNA testing? Sure, why not?

And what happens when the prodigal comes home, but isn't quite what was expected?

Go ahead. Imagine such a reunion. How do they get together again, and what happens when they do?

Write?