This is guest post by Donald Mead is part of the “Writing and the Martial Arts” series, in which other writer/martial artists talk about parallels between these two seemingly very different disciplines.

Donald Mead is a Writers of the Future winner, and his work has also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Strange Horizons.

You may be interested in the two earlier posts in the series, both by black belt, professor of History and Philosophy, and fantasy novelist Steve Bein: “How Do You Like Your Chances?” and “Writing and Punching.”

In Japanese martial arts culture, the pen and sword exist together as equals. This contrasts with the Western adage: “the pen is mightier than the sword.” The historical roots of the Japanese view come from certain restrictions imposed by the Tokugawa Shogunate and from Bushido, the philosophy of the warrior. Both of these topics are as dull as they sound.

I’ve found surprising similarities between martial arts and writing that are much more personal, in particular, the concept of mushin or empty mind.

Me? I have black belts in Shotokan karate, kendo, iaido and minor training in a variety of other arts. Thirty years of training in all, and I have to admit, I’m tired, but I’ve learned a few things.

One of those arts I mentioned is iaido, which is the Japanese sword art of drawing, cutting and returning the blade to its saya (scabbard). I’ve also had years of training in Shinkendo, which is an Americanized version of Japanese sword. Both of these arts make use of two-person exercises in which one person cuts at the defender, and the defender blocks. The number of cuts and blocks increases with the skill level of the students. Mind you, this isn’t kendo with its flexible bamboo swords and thick padding from head to toe. In this traditional art, the participants have no armor and use solid-wood bokken (wooden swords).

Once, we invited a Japanese instructor from California to lead a seminar. We learned a rather fast and dynamic two-person exercise–a series of cuts and blocks moving in a square. Step-cut, block, step-cut, block, cut and square up to your partner. Hard to describe–harder to do. There’s a lot to keep in mind in these types of exercises. The cut has to be aimed at the head or your partner has no reason to block. The block has to be at the correct height and angle or you’ll end up with a cracked noggin. And of course, there’s footwork. It’s a dance with consequences more serious than stepped-on toes.

After class, we treated Sensei to dinner and a couple of drinks. Someone asked about the footwork of the exercise and Sensei responded “Oh, there is no footwork in this art.”

This had all of us more than befuddled since Sensei had been pounding us about footwork for the past three hours. Here’s what he meant we eventually figured out. We learned a new exercise that required us to concentrate on technique: footwork, cutting angle, blocking, distancing and timing. We went slowly over the months, breaking down each move and smoothing out the bumps (figurative and literal). We celebrated small milestones like getting all the way through without tripping over ourselves. Later, we felt brave enough to speed up–not as fast as Sensei, but pretty good. Within a year, we were doing the exercise with no hesitation. There was no thought of our feet, or of getting

our fingers bashed or the effectiveness of the block. We were simply building and maintaining the energy of the exercise that flowed from one side to the other. That’s mushin–the mind doesn’t stop to think about technique or safety. That’s all built in now–instinctual. But you’re not empty-headed either. You have a partner, and you’re having a non-verbal conversation. To the participants the swords and footwork are gone, but the energy of the conversation is real and quite pleasant in most cases. That’s what Sensei meant when he said the art had no footwork. A student might begin with footwork, but at an advanced level, the footwork doesn’t matter at all.

I was a white belt when I started writing fiction. A beginner. I didn’t know that at the time; I thought I had all the tools I needed to write. I took one of my stories to a writers’ workshop at Chicon 2000 and had an eye-opening experience. I mean, what was this point of view thing the pros kept harping about? And what was wrong with my thirty adverbs per page? They didn’t even like my surprise ending where the main character wakes up, and it was all a dream. Yep, it was that bad.

I had to learn how to write step by step. Just like a martial arts student learning the cut, block and footwork, I had to learn the basics of prose, and that took concentration. My flabby verbiage had to go along with most of those adverbs and passive sentence structure. Then I had to think about my stilted

dialogue and how to smooth it out. Finally, I had to think of the story as a whole–the use of tension, the motivation of my characters, the believability of the fantasy element and a satisfying and logical ending.

You know that “million words” saying? I my case it applied; I wrote at least a million words before my writing noticeably improved and I started making sales. But by that millionth word, I wasn’t thinking about the prose anymore. All of those writing rules, the traditional ones and my personal ones, were all instinctive. I saw a picture of the story in my mind, and my hand moved over the paper. It wasn’t perfect mind you, a fact my critique group is quick to remind me, but the fundamentals were there now.

I bet you’ve been there–writing in the zone. When the story takes off and your hand can barely keep up. That’s mushin.

We’ve been having some lively discussion about three-act structure on Codex, a conversation that was spurred by Film Crit Hulk’s post on three-act structure being useless, an allegation I pushed back against in my recent post “Three Act Structure: Essential Framework or Load of Hooey?” (Film Crit hulk posted a rebuttal comment on that post that was worth reading, too.)

Summarizing everything I gleaned from our discussion, I came up with this Q&A which answers all of your questions. (You’re welcome.)

Q: Are there different structures that different people refer to as “three-act structure?”
A: Yes

Q: Are any of these structures useless?
A: Yes

Q: Are any of these structures useful to all writers?
A: No.

Q: Are any of these structures useful to any writers?
A: Yes.

Q: Is the version Film Crit Hulk describes useful?
A: No.

Q: Is the version Luc describes useful?
A: For some people, sometimes.

Q: What, if anything, is three-act structure good for?
A: Story arc, character development, keeping the reader engaged, suspense, and emotional involvement.

Q: What is the standard proportion of act lengths in three-act structure?
A: It varies, but some common ones are 25%-50%-25% and 25%-58%-17%.

Q: Are those proportions necessary?
A: No.

Q: Does three-act structure in any form, or for that matter any structure, fit all stories?
A: No.

Q: How about all good stories?
A: Still no.

Q: Does three-act structure completely describe a plot?
A: No.

Q: Do acts in three-act structure correspond to acts in a play?
A: Not necessarily.

Q: Are there other structures that aren’t three-act structure?
A: Yes.

Q: Are they useful to any writers?
A: Some people seem to like some of them.

Q: Do some writers produce three-act structure without intending to?
A: Yes.

Q: Do all writers?
A: No.

Q: Can a story use a viable version of three-act structure and still suck?
A: Yes.

Photo by ~jjjohn~

Back in July, Film Crit Hulk posted this discourse on the utter uselessness of three-act structure. In case you’re not already familiar with three-act structure, it’s an approach often recommended as a key tool for writing, especially with screenplays.

The version of three-act structure Hulk takes apart in his post (“setup, rising action, resolution”) is indeed pretty useless–but it’s not useless because three-act structure is trash: it’s useless because it’s been oversimplified to the point of being hopelessly vague.

Three-act structure certainly isn’t something a successful writer needs to follow, but it can be a hugely useful tool if used properly.

Act I
In effective three-act structure (says me), the first act constitutes pitting the character against the conflict. Generally speaking, the incident that defines the transition from Act I to Act II is the protagonist committing to taking on the central problem; before that there’s resistance, avoidance, lack of understanding, etc. Simultaneously, you introduce the reader/viewer to the protagonist and the protagonist’s world. Referring to it as “setup” is trouble, because that sounds like you’re supposed to dump a bunch of background information or move characters uninterestingly into position.

Act II
Act II starts with the protagonist doing something to join the action, which usually means actively striving to make the situation better. Act II comprises repeated attempts by the protagonist to resolve the central story problem, usually resulting in disasters that up the stakes (hence “rising action,” though “rising action” makes it sound like it’s supposed to be some kind of an upward slope rather than a cycle that gets bigger each time through). I agree with Hulk that the movie Green Lantern sucks on this count, as Hal in the movie is reactive to circumstances instead of proactively trying to do something. It’s much more interesting to watch a character push to try to accomplish something–even (or perhaps especially) if that something is ill-considered–than it is to watch the character get hit with a bunch of plot developments and not do anything meaningful about them.

Act III
Act II ends with the introduction of the final gambit: this is where the protagonist commits to an all-or-nothing bid to make the thing happen. Thus Act III is the character trying to make that last plan work and probably having to adjust or reframe right in the middle of it (since if everything works as planned, it’s kinda boring).

Five acts?
Hulk points out that Shakespeare wrote in five acts, but Shakespeare’s stories can also be considered in the light of real three act structure. The turning point between the first and second acts is where Romeo leaps the orchard fence prior to the balcony scene (Act II, scene 1), after which the two lovers commit to each other despite their families’ enmities. They struggle to be together, marry, have their moment of love, and Romeo has his run-in with Tybalt throughout the second act.

Act III is the desperate gambit, Juliet’s plan to fake her death and how that pans out (Act IV, scene 1). Note that Shakespeare puts act breaks in both these places.

Formulaic?
If you’re concerned that three-act structure is formulaic, I’d suggest that you can ease your mind. Three-act structure is a set of ideas about tension and satisfaction that suggest a way to structure a story. You can’t simply plug in details to get a good story: good writing always takes craft and artistry, regardless of whether it’s on a framework.

Not every good story fits three-act structure. However, it’s a very widespread and successful approach to story writing if properly understood. It has certainly been useful to me!

By the way, I later followed up this post with an additional one: Three-Act Structure: Answers to All Your Questions.

Continuing my series of quotes from writers I know through the online writing group Codex, here are some memorable thoughts from James Maxey, author of the Dragon Age trilogy and the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl. James’s latest feat, which floored a number of us at Codex, was writing the first draft of a novel (the sequel to Nobody) in a week. The resulting book, Burn Baby Burn, can be read in its first draft form as a series of blog posts on Maxey’s Web site. More on this particular accomplishment will show up in a week or two in my “Brain Hacks for Writers” column on Futurismic.

James is quoted often on Codex, so I’ll be breaking up the large selection of his quotes I put together into two or possibly three posts.

Swagger when you lie.

If the WRATH OF GOD couldn’t make this character give a sh**, I don’t know what might.

The worst novel you ever put onto paper is better than the best novel you are walking around with in your head.

On the other hand, I may be underestimating the appeal of my main character, a homosexual, drug-addicted, Republican, vivisectionist zombie. Sweet merciful Jesus, I wish that last sentence was a joke…

Momentum matters!

I can’t sing, play an instrument, dance, paint, sculpt, or act. So, in my early years, I drifted toward writing as my claim to some sort of creative ability simply because it seemed like the easiest talent to fake.

But a completed novel is always going to be haunted by the novel it might have been.

If you have affection and enthusiasm for your characters, then the readers will follow you into some very dark places.

If you and your partner find yourself co-owners of a project that gets optioned for a motion picture and I hear you complain about it on this forum, I will personally drive to your house and slap you about the head and shoulders with a rubber monkey until my envy is abated. And I can be very, very envious.

If anyone wants to power a time machine, the deadline for the first novel you ever sell from a proposal has amazing time acceleration properties. I can only imagine that committing to a whole series must propel you straight into old age.

My motto is, little by little, the writing gets done.

Is Batman really making the world a better place by wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants and clobbering muggers with boomerangs? I think that having your characters learn the wrong lessons from their private tragedies is the key to making them interesting.

… the key to writing a good novel is to first write a bad novel. You’re just piling clay onto the wheel at this stage. You aren’t spinning the wheel to turn it into something until the second draft.

But, I don’t yell. I write. I turn our presidents and judges and televangelists into dragons and I send heroes (or, more frequently, anti-heroes) out to slay them.

Look, I’ve had it up to here with people dismissing all Yellow-Eyed Beasts from Hell as “evil.” The idea that Judea-Christian labels for morality apply to creatures from the pit is an outdated, human-centric view of the world that I hope we, as a society, are finally outgrowing. Baby-eating and stabbing people with pitchforks may seem taboo to most Americans, but what right to we have to impose our values on the denizens of the underworld?

For me–and I can’t speak for anyone else–my formula was stupid stubbornness. I kept plugging along despite rejection letters and harsh critiques because I was too dumb to understand that I really was no good at what I was doing and it was time to give up and move on to something else.

The one thing you can do is buy a lot of lottery tickets, metaphorically. Every short story you write might be the one that wins you an award. You never know. Any book you write might be the exact book that a publisher is dreaming of publishing. Productivity is key.

If Jesus himself were to tell me the sky is blue, I’d argue the point. I mean, sure, sometimes the sky is blue, but a high percentage of the time it’s black, or gray, or white, or any of the zillion shades of pink or purple you find in the bookends of day.

Here’s the latest in my series of writing quotes from members of Codex, the online writing group I founded seven years ago; I hope you’ll find them entertaining and–who knows?–even pithy. On the other hand, it’s possible that I enjoy them so much only because I have so much context. You’ll have to decide.

Previous posts have featured the ever-sparkly Alethea Kontis and Joy Marchand, who loves filling the silence with paranoia. Today’s features recent Nebula winner Eric James Stone and talespinner/poet Helena Bell.

Stone's new book of short stories

Eric James Stone‘s recent Nebula award win for his novelette “The Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” is almost boringly predictable for those of us who have known him for years and had to put up with his repeated winning of Codex short story contests. His work has appeared in Year’s Best SF 15, Analog, Nature, and other venues; he is a Writers of the Future winner and a Hugo nominee; and he’s on the editorial staff at Intergalactic Medicine Show. Here are a few of his pithy remarks over the last few years. He can be found on the Web at ericjamesstone.com.

Unfortunately, too many people try going directly to procreating without having spent enough time amateurcreating.

I’m not sure how many hours of daylight you Arizonans have foolishly wasted over the years, but I’m sure it’s a lot. One of these days, the sun’s going to fail to rise in the morning, and you Arizonans will all be stuck in the dark while the rest of us use the daylight we’ve saved up.

If you can see an advantage of a worst-case scenario, it is not a worst-case scenario.

I generally time my public announcement of sales to when they will do the most psychological damage to Scott M. Roberts.

I have long been envious of Hel Bell’s name, and would probably have changed mine to that long ago if I had the face for it. Her work has appeared in venues like Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, and Pedestal and appears with titles along the lines of “A Face Like an Imperfectly Shaven Tennis Ball” and “[Insert Title Indicating This is a Poem about Bluebeard the Wife Murderer, not the Pirate].” Her Web site is www.nuetcreations.com.

I don’t kill my characters. I just find them that way.

“And the stab wounds?”
“There was a bee.”

There is just something awesome about eating beignets at 1 o’clock Sunday morning and then having a heart to heart with a drag queen.

I think I could make a living selling t-shirts with the stuff that James [Maxey] says on them.
Note: She’s probably right, and note that James Maxey will be featured in future posts.

In general I like to be positive, but that’s because I’m a good Southern girl who only talks bad about people when there’s little chance they’ll find out about it.

… No, it was not immediately obvious that the killer whale was autistic.

My friend Nancy Fulda‘s collection of science fiction stories, Dead Men Don’t Cry, was recently featured on Why Is My Book Not Selling?, where in addition to comments about the cover and about the title sounding more like detective noir stories than science fiction stories, Vicki (the author of the site) said this:

I was disappointed that the book stared with explanation about the stories. It’s interesting, so I wouldn’t cut it, but I would definitely suggest putting that at the end and starting right away with the strongest story.

This such immediate and powerful sense to me–not just for Nancy’s book, but for most books–that I was surprised I hadn’t come across the idea before. After all, when someone opens a book of short stories, or a novel, or a non-fiction book about ironclads, what they almost certainly are interested in getting is short stories, a novel, or information about ironclads–not the author’s reflections on the importance of the book, the process for coming up with it, gratitude toward dozens of people the reader has never heard of, etc.

I don’t mean that there’s no place for this kind of thing. Personally, I’m often interested in it, but not before I’ve read the main part of the book. I think using afterwords instead of introductions and forewords is a brilliant idea.

Of course, readers can always skip this material–but isn’t there value to a book where, when the reader opens to the first page, there’s something immediately interesting? Further, putting it at the end may get it read more often, as compared with the reader skipping it at the beginning. It also provides the author with a chance to mention some of their other work.

I’ve fallen into the introduction trap myself with my book Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories*. After all, what’s a more interesting start to a book … ?

INTRODUCTION

Of course I enjoy immersing myself in a really good novel, but sometimes there’s not enough time to wallow properly.

Blah blah blah–who cares what the author enjoys, especially before reading any of his work?

or

THE WAR WITH THE CLOWNS

Sure, there was some temporary anxiety when they took over Trenton and Allentown to carve out their independent nation of Clowninnia, but it soon settled down into a national joke, a prank on a revolutionary scale, a riffing topic for late-night talk show hosts.

This might or might not be your cup of tea, but at least it’s a story!

On a related subject, at a workshop back in 2001, Orson Scott Card advised us attending writers to avoid writing prologues. While my personal point of view is that these can occasionally work well (this may or may not match Card’s opinion), I think by and large no prologue is a smart bet. The typical reason for including a prologue is that the author feels there’s information the reader needs to know about before the story starts. However, it seems that readers are rarely interested in studying up on background information in preparation for reading a story that may or may not turn out to interest them. It would be better to start the story right off and hand out information in an engaging way as you go–even though this is much more difficult than just dumping it at the beginning. Alternatively, have the prologue introduce the central conflict early on in a gripping way. Prologues do seem to work well sometimes, but I believe they should prove they can earn their keep by grabbing the reader’s attention, or else they should go.

*Bam! also suffers from a title that advertises only that the stories are very short, something I was originally thinking might be a prime selling point but which I suspect prevents the book from engaging anyone because there’s nothing in that description that suggests the stories might actually be interesting. I hope to rearrange and retitle the book in the near future.

Joy Marchand is a writer, poet, and editor. I met her at the 2004 Writers of the Future workshop, where her terrific short story “Sleep Sweetly, Junie Carter” (written as Joy Remy) won her a spot in Writers of the Future XX. My “Bottomless,” a story of a young man exiled from his village located deep within a bottomless pit, appeared in the same volume, but Joy’s story of a woman trying to cope with more time than any human is made to handle may well be my favorite in the book.

Joy’s Web site, with a bibliography of her short fiction, is at www.joymarchand.com (although it hasn’t been updated for a while). Her blog, which is very much up to date, is at joymarchand.blogspot.com . Below you’ll find some of her sayings from Codex that I’ve found most pithy over the last few years.

I’m sure folks don’t mean to be a bundle of insecurities and make asses of themselves on an ongoing basis; I’ve certainly tried to cut down myself.

People do bad things, have naughty sex, make terrible decisions and sometimes hate their parents.

I’m a writer, after all. I have a great imagination and love filling the silence with paranoia.

Boring sex is boring sex, no matter who’s having it.

If the back story doesn’t influence a character’s entire world view, then I think it’s the wrong back story …

…we’re all here to produce pages. Some of us do it for love of language, for glory, for groceries, for attention, for love of hearing ourselves talk. Some of us have noble motives and social awareness, and some of us are navel-gazing solipsists, and we really don’t care about anybody else out there. Some of us use transparent prose and sell to Analog, and some of us are stylists and sweat to get our stuff published anywhere, including Bobby Joe’s Navel-Gazing Gazette if it’ll get us a little love. Some of us write from a place of peace and light and hope and puppies, and some of us hitch our gnarled demons to the plow and make those useful bastards work the back 40. And the only thing that glues us together is a smattering of markets we all submit to, and a vow to produce pages on a regular basis.

Asking me to write Patterson-esque potboilers would be like making a dog wear spanky-pants. Entertaining, but it pisses off the dog and ruins the pants.

The way some of us writers talk, you’d think agents, editors, and publishers were celestial beings who descend from the firmament at whim to generously bestow grace (in the form of a publishing contract or literary representation) on us undeserving, lumpen creatures.

The way other writers talk, agents and publishers are scam artists and parasites who feed off the blood, sweat, and money produced by writers.

So what are we to think?

Who’s in charge?
When I frame the two perspectives that way, you can probably tell I don’t really subscribe to either extreme. Literary representation ought to be conducted as an equal relationship. Here’s some of my discussion on the subject as responses to concerns I’ve heard about agents.

“It’s the author’s money”
Have you ever run a business? If so, reflect on how money came in: there will have been production (rendering the service, manufacturing the widgets, building the furniture, or what have you) as well as sales, billing, and support.

In an author-agent-publisher relationship, the author supplies the product, but a good agent sells that product to the publisher, negotiates (we hope) an appropriate deal, collects the money, keeps on the publisher to make good on commitments, etc. While it is possible for authors to sell their own books, when the author works with the agent the agent is generally doing the selling, and many authors cannot sell to big publishers without an agent. As such, the author producing the book doesn’t amount to a pile of poo, monetarily speaking, unless the agent sells it or unless the author takes on the agent’s job and sells it.

Production without sales and related services is worthless unless you have a business where your products automatically sell themselves, e.g., you inherit some kind of monopoly.

“The agent chooses the author” – or – “The author chooses the agent”
The author and agent choose each other. Can I go up to Agent X and say “You will now be my agent!”? (Well, of course I can, but I mean the average writer.) No. Nor can the agent come up to me and say “You will now be my client!” (Although admittedly, that’s more likely to work.)

This is what I mean by a mutual business arrangement. Neither party is forced into the arrangement and neither party has sole say in what happens.

“Agents used to get only 10%: why is the norm now 15%?”
When talking to a very successful writer in 2001, I was advised to only ever sign with an agent who made 10% for domestic sales (the percentage is generally a bit higher for foreign sales), but even that far back, almost all agents had already gone to 15% for new contracts: the famous author in question had gotten an agent in an earlier and different publishing environment.

My guess is that the change in percentage is because the real value paid by publishers for books (taking into account inflation) went down and agents couldn’t make a living otherwise. For instance, advances for first science fiction and fantasy novels appear to have been more or less flat from about the 80’s through now from what I’ve read (though some of the information going into that statement is anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt).

If good agents were able to survive on 10%, those good agents would have snagged all the good writers and left none for the 15-percenters, most likely, and though I admit that collusion and other methods could conceivably get around this, I don’t really believe anything like that happened.

My guess at why the value publishers pay for books went down is the rise of word processing: it became easier and faster to produce books, so publishers had more producers and product to choose from and had to spend more time sifting through submissions. If we want to point the finger at one factor that has lessened the power of individual writers in recent decades, the word processor is probably it. And yet, ironically, the word processor has also made us each much more powerful. Ah, the contradictions of technology!

“Agents have become irrelevant”
My personal sense is that agents will continue to be relevant to the extent that big publishing house tradpub continues to be relevant, and while I don’t see tradpub holding onto its dominance in the long term, I also don’t expect big publishing houses to die off entirely, so I think agents will be likely to still have a role. That said, selfpub seems to be taking an ever-growing slice of the pie, and agents are useless for that, so I sure as heck would not want to be starting a career as an agent right now.

It does seem to me that writers often have the habit of giving up their perception of power to agents and publishers when the writers’ work is what the whole publishing industry is founded on and the only particular thing it can’t do without. At the same time, I think it’s misleading to imagine that either party has all the power in an agent-writer (or writer-agent) relationship, or for us writers to imagine that the world revolves around only us.

The power approach
Codexian Jake Kerr has a different perspective on the matter that I think is also worth hearing. He says:

[It’s about] who has more power in the relationship. When you first start out as a writer, odds are that any agent looking at you sees you as a POTENTIAL moneywinner. How much of one depends on their confidence and your track record. In this scenario, I am sure they see you as little more than a calculated risk, and thus playing the “you work for me” card is somewhat foolish. You have no juice.

This changes dramatically as the money flows in. Then the reality is that the author has all the juice, and the agent really IS your employee. The more money = the more power you have over both your agent and your publisher.

Cartoon courtesy of Bificus

Codex is an online writing group I founded in 2004 that currently has about 200 active members, most writing science fiction or fantasy and all in the early stages of their careers, from some who have written a lot but not yet made their first pro sale to others who are seeing their third, fourth, or fifth novel coming out from a major publisher. Since the founding of the group, members have won major awards like the Campbell, Hubbard, Hugo, and Nebula, made hundreds (and possibly thousands) of short story sales, gotten top agents, sold their first book (or pair of books, or trilogy), made the New York Times bestseller list, achieved consistent financial and literary success with self-published eBooks, and so on. Some have transitioned to full-time writing careers, though most still write only when they can.

But I love the group not because of the amount of success of its members (which tests my envy tolerance on a regular basis) but because of the flood of wisdom, intelligence, kindness, encouragement, and enthusiasm that wells up every day through posts, e-mails, discussions, critiques, and in-person meetings. And while I can’t share all of that material, I can and will share quotes that have cropped up on our forum, with the permission [I originally wrote “position,” because my mental typing buffer is auditory … but I digress] of the originators.

So with this post I begin a series of Codexian quotes, which I hope you will find as entertaining, illuminating, and/or perplexing as I have. This first set is all from my friend Alethea Kontis, whose work includes a persistently delightful picture book called AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First (with illustrator Bob Kolar), the New York Times bestselling Dark Hunter Companion (with Sherrilyn Kenyon), an upcoming fantasy novel, and much else.

Alethea’s Web site and blog are at http://aletheakontis.com.

Never underestimate the value of Butt In Chair.

[on getting fit] “I’ve decided that every freaking day is just Day One all over again, so why bother numbering them?

I had a great time whipping 16 7-year olds into a complete frenzy. We ended up on the playground, drawing all over ourselves with Sharpies.

We are writers. We are meant to see and feel everything, the good and the bad, the best and the worst. We are meant to cut ourselves and bleed our souls onto paper and share them with the world. We breathe life into impossible cities and create alleyways of escape. We dredge up things that aren’t discussed at the breakfast table and serve them as entrees. We are creators whose purpose in life is to balance out the entropy.

[At the time of this quote, Lee worked for a book wholesaler] 1:30 p.m. — Weekly Staff Meeting. We decide it should be spelled ‘e-books.’

I smile at a baby in red socks and listen to Chris Martin from Coldplay tell me how beautiful I am. I know he doesn’t mean it, but it’s still nice to hear.

[in 2009] Imagine a world with 24356424 bazillion books and no brick-and-mortar stores, because everyone can publish their own grocery lists and advertise it on the internet (and then download it to folks’ PDAs). How will anyone be able to find a good book anymore? How do you find them today? That’s the part the publishing industry needs to focus on.

I FULLY EXPECT YOU ALL TO PARTICIPATE, OR I WILL CRY AND SEND YOU MY TEARS.

In a recent online discussion about dealing with literary agents, Codexian Erin Cashier offered a link to an excellent article on AgentQuery called “When Agents Offer Representation,” which thoroughly answers some key questions about dealing with literary agents. This is highly recommended reading for any writer interested in being represented by an agent, even if, as in my case, you already know a lot about the subject and/or have been represented before. The article covers subjects like:

• When an agent wants to offer representation to me and my book, how will I know?
• What happens if I receive an offer of representation from an agent, but I am still waiting to hear from other agents who also have my full manuscript? What do I do?
• Once an agent has made me an offer of representation, how long can I keep them waiting for my decision?
• Okay, so I understand that I have to alert the other agents who are reviewing my manuscript that I have an offer? What’s the best way to contact them?
• An agent has called and left me a message to call him back. Does that mean he is going to offer me representation?
• THE CALL: when an agent calls to offer representation, what do I say? What questions do I ask? How can I make the best impression possible?
• I have received an offer of representation from an agent, but he doesn’t use a written agent-client contract. Is that a bad sign?
• I have received an offer of representation from an agent, but he wants me to sign an agent-client agreement. Is that a bad sign?
• An agent calls and tells me she enjoyed my book, but she thinks it still needs some work …
• What should I expect from the agent-client relationship?