Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

After my original post I ducked back into the submission pile to help out on the remaining SF. So my final tally is 480 partial submissions. As far as I can tell I requested about 55 full mss. I say about, because I lost a few along the way to agents. One withdrew the ms completely and the others becomes directly represented to Angry Robot Books. That means the editors read the MS rather than the reader.

So far I’ve finished reading 23 full ms, so I have a bit to go before this task is complete. I like reading full mss so it is not too onerous. The time factor is the hard part with things like university starting, the day job and a science fiction convention to get started. Canberra won the right to hold the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in 2013. While the real hard work is a way off yet, there are things like venue, budget, website, guests, membership rate setting etc to deal with. As I am co-chair with Nicole Murphy we need to get stuff done too.

So the blog post is in progress and I hope to get it up by tomorrow. I was away for work on the weekend in outback South Australia so couldn’t work on it.

I mentioned in the previous post about how I started reading submissions and how at first I took it all rather slowly. As I progressed things sort of sped up because I started to be able to recognise issues in submissions and got more of an idea what the boys were wanting.

The first submission I picked up made it to the editors. After a couple of weeks I asked for feedback on that manuscript. Lee loved it. I did too. I am now a big fan of the author! I’d buy her books anytime. However, it was not quite right for Angry Robot Books. (sad face). However, I was happy that I was able to pick a good novel, a publishable novel. Pity I wasn’t quite on the money. In his feedback Lee said they were looking for intensity and tension. Right. Got it.  I interpreted that to mean: grabs me by the throat and doesn’t let me go. Well don’t all publishers want that? Maybe?

If you read the edgy stuff the imprint is putting out, then hell yeah! Do they want the writing turned up to eleven? Oh yeah! Zoo City won the Arthur C Clarke Award! Look at Kaaron Warren writing on the edge and Andy Remic with his nasty, funky fantasy.

So I got with the program.

I really like reading what I like and I can’t help being subjective in my taste. I’m me so it is very hard to exclude me from the reading process because I inhabit the brain that is reading. So I had to tweak my enjoyment levels a bit and raise the bar. Remember there were a lot of manuscripts and, hence, a lot of competition. Even if all 944 of them were fantastic there would still need to be a selection process.

This raising of the bar affected the number of fulls that I requested. I started being a lot tougher on the partials. My full request rate was a bit high. Initially I calculated it at 20 per cent. That didn’t seem right to me. In saying that I don’t mean I had a quota. I tried to analyse it myself a few times, whether there was some kind of pattern but there did not appear to be. I used to think it was two in ten, but then I’d read 20 and pick none and then read another two and pick both of them. I think the high rate of requests, meant that the quality of the submissions was generally high.

So what do I mean tough? Initially, if I read the partial through to the end, I’d request it. At this stage I would examine more thoroughly why I liked it. I like paranormal romance so I’d enjoy something along those lines. However, Angry Robot Books weren’t looking for that. So I’d usually say in my rejection. “I like this but it’s not quite right for Angry Robot.”

I seem to like interesting ideas and literary style, particularly if the setting is exotic. However, these tended not to be full of tension and intensity…but more whimsical…

By this time, too, I was really able to hone in on things like the tension levels, whether the story kept moving. This became a critical element for me. I realise it is very hard to balance character, action and tension levels, but you have to. Character is very important too. So if the character wasn’t grabbing me and the tension was not there and the idea wasn’t anything new, then it wasn’t going to make it through.

Sometimes, there was nothing technically wrong with the submission, it just wasn’t grabbing me. ( I will go into this in a later post). These were the most difficult for me and I agonised over them. Most of the time I didn’t write comments if this was the case. What could I say that wasn’t insulting or annoying? I’d try to and it got too hard and I didn’t have time to sculpt something tactful. It was better to stick to the standard format. I know I wouldn’t like a rejection that said: You write well but this story did not inspire me enough to request the full. (mind you I’ve had a few agents say that in their rejections).

I know I had a couple of good proposals that were very close to what Angry Robot Books had already published. Usually I said so in my comments.

In many cases, the story needed more work or the idea had been done to death and wasn’t adding much new. Sometimes I was too busy to write comments!

When did I provide comments?

This is the interesting bit for me. Sometimes it was the idea or the setting or the energy in the writing and there was something just not quite there. In these cases I tried to give feedback. For example, I might have said something like.

“This is a great idea and it is very similar to this author’s work, however, the frequent flash backs interrupt the flow for me and I can’t quite get seated in the character. Good luck with it.”

Or “This is a fantastic setting and I think what you’ve got has legs, but it’s not quite there yet. Keep an eye on the tension.”

If I thought the MS had promise but had issues and I liked the concept, writing and other things, then I did try to offer something useful. If I had to estimate I’d say a quarter of the partials I rejected had comments.

I might even at the partial stage reject but say I’d pass the author’s name on. I think I did that twice and I’ll probably do it for a couple of the fulls too that don’t make it to the editors.

Bottom line is if you got comments on a partial you excited me is some way with your MS or I felt you had something worth pursuing.

For those with no comments, the experienced writers among you know that you have something. That you write well and something wasn’t right for me as the reader. Of course you really want to know definitively what that is and you so wish that the reader pointed it out. But hey, readers are subjective. We are reading to a particular imprint. Your ms could be just right for someone else, just not Angry Robot. Our comments might not be relevant at all. I mean we are subjective readers all of us.

Generally though it could be the fit. You need to research your market in this case. It could be tension and it could be that I’ve seen fifty vampire detective novels in the week and yours is very similar to others.

If you are unsure, for example, you don’t know whether your writing is good, then do as Lee suggests on the Angry Robot website, get a beta reader (get lots) and choose ones that you respect and that won’t say “It’s fine. You are so talented, mate.” Ask for honesty and accept what is said to you. It may dent your ego but it will in the end make you a better writer.

Some writers wrote back to me thanking me for their comments.  A couple even said I was spot on.  Luckily no one wrote to me and was nasty.

Remember these are my thoughts and feelings on comments. Amanda will have her own views, I expect. If you are nice to her she might blog about it.

Next blog post will be about some of the common issues I noted. That will be tomorrow maybe…

Reading submissions—the process

A few bits of housekeeping on this first post.

Firstly, I am not employed by Angry Robot Books. I volunteered to read submissions. The views expressed here are my own and do not in any way reflect the views of Angry Robot Books.

I will not be able to comment on individual submissions although I am happy to answer general questions.

I am not currently contracted to Angry Robot Books. Yes, I have been rejected by them on a novel submission in the past. It hurt. I took it badly, but I moved on. So I do know how it feels to receive a rejection for your work. It was not the first time I received a rejection for a manuscript, either. Rejections are part of the business of writing.

Despite being rejected by the boys, I am happy to say they are great guys. I love what they are doing with the imprint. I’d drink with them anytime.

My motivation

What possessed me to volunteer? Sigh. Well I started a post graduate course in editing this year. I saw the boys were doing the open submission month and I figured it would be a huge thing. I thought I could help out by reading a few submissions (cough) and maybe I would learn something and have something to add to my editing CV. That about sums it up. Did I know what I was letting myself in for. No-sir-ree, I did not.

What experience have I had?

Elsewhere on this blog I talk about the fiction editing I’ve done, the beta reading for published author friends and reviews. I also had a small press for a while so I know how hard it is to sell a book once you have printed it. I have also read a number of Angry Robot books. Not all but quite a number of them. I’ve also been writing in the genre for over ten years and have finally become competent, I think. The other big part of my life is my day job. I do performance audits (called Value for money audits in the UK, not quite the same but near enough). Half the job is research, evidence gathering and analysis and the other half is report writing, editing, restructuring, copy editing, proofing etc. This is the main reason I am doing the course so I can be more useful in the office and help others.

The lead up

In the lead up to opening the submission door, Angry Robot, prepared a brief for the readers outlining what they were looking for and certainly pointing us to their existing list and the same submission guidelines that were available to those authors submitting. This briefing gave me a bit of a start because I had imagined I’d be reading partials and recommending to the editors that the full submission should be called for. (as it is the easy part) As it stood, readers were to request the full submissions, read them and then decide it was so amazing that the editors had to read it.

Specifically Angry Robot said they were looking for:

A “voice”, that comes from…
• Confident writing
• Pacy writing
• Characters that live, have real relationships and emotions, even in extreme situations
• A sense of vision, a rounded universe that lives and breathes
• Clever construction, good plotting, a couple of surprises even for us jaded old read-it-alls
• Heightened experience – an intensity, extremity or just a way of treating plot or situation in a way we’ve not come across before. “Goes up to 11″, if you know what that means.

Do all those, and it will be almost irrelevant that your story is one or other sub-set of SF, fantasy or horror!

So then the 1 March 2011 came upon us and we started reading.

Basically, the emails came in and were sorted automatically to what the subject line said, Fantasy, SF and Horror. Lee, I believe, did preliminary checking for document type and other stuff. We also had a Misc file for those MSs that did not have appropriate labels. These were all in date time of receipt. Readers read from these piles. So I mainly read fantasy and other readers read SF or Horror or a mixture. So in my case I mainly stuck to fantasy with a few forays into the SF pile and the horror pile to help out when I got too far ahead date wise.

I noted on a few forums people wondering what was going on and why theirs didn’t seem to have been read at a particular time. This is because there were a number of readers reading at different times in different piles.

Next observation is that literally hundreds came through on the first couple of days, then the submissions were fairly steady and then hundreds came in again on the last couple of days. So if you were in the last bit, that’s why it took a while to get to you.

From my perspective, I was reading and the pile just kept getting larger. I thought I’d read ten submissions, then when I saw the pile grow I though I’d read 50 as that’s a nice number isn’t it? Then it became 100 and then I’d promise to stop. Mostly because people were urging me to continue with my own writing etc. I even wrote to Lee to say that I would stop, or taper off, and that I had a number of full mss to assess and that I’d done enough but then I’d go against that and be there again, making new goals of 150 and then 200 and then 250. When I got to 300 I gave up with the goals and the trying to get out of it. I saw that there was 150 or so left so I went for it. I said bugger it! Just do it.

You see I actually enjoyed reading submissions. Sometimes I’d grit my teeth but mostly I wanted to find something amazing there, something that would be the new best thing.

While there were a number of readers at the start, it seemed in the end to come down to me and Amanda. I’d see her whittling down her submission pile (she seemed mostly to read in horror and SF), see her requests for fulls when I’d go to fetch mine and she inspired me to keep going. We don’t know each other, but I felt she kept me company when I felt it was too much, that I wanted to stop, when it seemed impossible. Somehow she made it seem manageable.

Lee certainly cheered from the sidelines and listened to my garbled angst as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do regarding submissions (read or not to read). I remember looking at them, seeing these huge numbers, counting them all and feeling I hadn’t made a dent. There were nearly 1000 of them. I’d say to myself, walk away, Donna. It’s not your submission pile. Then I’d think about the people waiting to hear back. I’d go surfing the net and look at the conversations, the people talking about their submissions and how they were waiting and I guess that kept me on task. Also, fortunately I am on semester break so I can get most of the full submissions assessed before I start back at uni. (that’s a very recent realisation).

I took time off reading submissions over Easter to have a mini writing retreat and a bit after that to work on my novel. Then while reading I did other things like take up edits to a few short stories that were being published, work at my day job, look after the house, renovate bits of the house etc. So I have been rather busy after all.

What did I give up to read submissions? My handcrafts, regular reading, watching DVDs (some but not as much as usual and wait for it—housework! Yep not much at all in four months.

The luxury about reading partial novel submissions is that they are easy to fit around things. For example, renovation and work men in the house are generally not good for me for writing time. However, reading submissions, yes, definitely.

My process

So what did I do?

Firstly I took it very slowly at first. I read slowly, analysed slowly and thought a lot. I would read a submission and then think about what was working and what wasn’t working. (More about how things evolved over time in a future post.)

I used technology. All the submissions were electronic so I used my ipad a lot. I would label about 10 submissions to me, write them up in my table where I kept a list of what I read and maybe some comments (not all the time) and then load them on the ipad. If you are interested, I used the Goodreader application, which reads rtf, doc and pdf files. This made the submissions transportable. My partner sleeps in a lot on the weekends (sorry Matthew!). I like to hang with him so I’d read submissions for three hours while he slept. Then we go to cafes and hang so I’d have my ipad and I’d read. Matthew is a writer so he reads or writes when we hang in cafes. No need to keep the conversation going. I’d read submissions before I went to bed. When my neck got sore I had to take the ipad to the table and sit properly, or revert to reading them on the pc, which I’d do of an evening. Some writing days I would read subs instead of write. If I found myself getting tired I’d take a break. If I couldn’t make up my mind or the submission wasn’t grabbing me I’d take a break and read it again.  I took the submissions to work to read in my lunch break, in the waiting room at the doctors, at the hair dressers, in the car waiting for my son while he had music lessons. So pretty much I read obsessively and didn’t think about much else.

The main thing for me was the writing, the quality of the submission but more about that later. Next post the vexed question of comments versus no comments.

There has been a lot of thought going into the cutback, reconstruction rewrite of Dragon Wine. A lot of that has been fueled by my work in reading novel submissions for Angry Robot. Yes I’m coming out of the closet. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 4 months (well in two days). So I’ve read over 435 partial submissions and 20 full submissions with over 26 full submissions to go.

What an amazing experience it has been. There have been highs and there have been lows (the sheer size of the pile) and every little bit that I did that didn’t seem to make a dent in it. However, I have to say that reading for Angry Robot has been the best leg up I have ever had in writing (and editing). I am going to share that experience and what I’ve learned over a series of posts. Just letting you know…

As for the grand snip? Today was my writing day (only half taken up with family stuff). So not only was I advised to cut back…specifically ‘how they get there isn’t important. It’s what they do when they get there…and from another editor, removing some detail to let the characters develop.

And reading the submissions pile. OMG what a perspective.

I can now see these comments in a totally new light. What is missing? Tension! Engagement of character! Forward movement of the plot and not just saying ‘hey look around in my world. The wow factor…”

So today I implemented some of that insight into the early sections of Dragon Wine. I had already cut stuff out. Now I had to refocus the character. Salinda was always too comfortable, even though she lived in a prison and was surrounded by violence and misery. Now I made her more sensitive to the threats around her. I gave her the will to leave and the rationale too. This also saved me practically a whole chapter because I was also able to move things along faster. ( I thank a long shower for that insight). Then I found that a chapter that is really well written and I remember the thoughts and the feelings I had while writing it and what it all meant to the story–the feeling of riding a dragon, the thoughts of Brill while riding it, info dumping here and there. So I trimmed it. And then I woke up one day and said to Matthew. OMG! That chapter is totally not doing what is should be doing. It needs to be cut! Maybe completely.

Now I love this chapter. Cutting it hurts. But on the other hand it is not doing its job. Today I cut most of it and I’ve highlighted the rest of it as a possible delete when I am less emotionally attached to it. Now it is more wham, bam, there you go, let’s get with the party, rather than lets go swanning about looking at dragons and thinking.

Don’t get me wrong this chapter served its purpose when I was drafting. But it doesn’t belong in the final draft because it isn’t doing anything. It helped me feel out the character of Brill when I wrote it. It helped me think about dragons and the world. Now I know that stuff it’s bye bye.

If an editor is looking for tension, for intensity of character, for wow. He wasn’t going to find all that in my ms. He found a nice, rambly epic fantasy with potential. Not the polished, focussed, action packed, emotionally engaging novel he was looking for. Hard facts but you know I’m accepting it and using it to my advantage.

Next time Dragon Wine goes out there it is going to pack a punch and be a lean mean fighting machine.

Word count was originally 167,200, then 164, 158,  162,900.  Now 159,283. Still up to page 53 and more cutting to go.