(no subject)
Jan. 23rd, 2004 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeThat was weird.
Okay, I have come to the conclusion that I hate query letters with a passion that borders on unholy. They're a pain in the ass to write, they're sometimes more important than the novel itself (which they shouldn't be, but hey), and did I mention they're a pain in the ass? My aunt, bless her heart, has offered to help me with the query letters for my novels. However, I am now faced with the daunting task of cover letter-ing my short stories that I've prepped for submission. Bollocks.
As a child I was raised by my mother’s family, all of whom spoke at least two languages fluently and had lived on at least three continents for extended periods of time. I was raised, essentially, with a strong multicultural influence. When I moved to the MidWest United States I found myself suddenly aware of the unusual upbringing I had thought completely normal at the time. I was faced on all fronts by a homogenized mass of people who, at best, considered me unusual. At worst I was stereotyped as a ‘Hard-Working Mexican.’
This alienation I felt, combined with my undergraduate background in anthropology and history, came through when I wrote [insert story name here]. The setting is fantasy, but the girl’s [insert plot here] is reminiscent of my experience with culture shock in what I thought should have been my home country.
When I was a child, my chiefest delight was constructing towns, villages, cities in the mud by the pond on my aunt’s farm. I would create elaborate structures out of sticks, leaves, and mud, and I would create equally elaborate histories to go with them. A discarded duck feather symbolized the half-hawk leader of a tribe of bird-men, a polished stone represented a henge, a shed snakeskin represented a basilisk. As I grew older my interest in creating vast worlds for my mind to play in led to a college career in anthropology.
In [insert story here]
Well, you get the idea.
Plus, I'm faced with the decision of whether or not to submit fiction from my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pawprintletters slushpile journal and take that as unpublished (which, from everything I've heard, it is) or just to make up a bunch of new stories and submit those. Argh.
Or, alternatively, I do what my aunt suggested and just finish editing the damn novels, and when my aunt's check gets here and I can go out and buy the book I was supposed to buy, work on the query letters and submissions for those. Argh. Decisions decisions.
Help?
Okay, I have come to the conclusion that I hate query letters with a passion that borders on unholy. They're a pain in the ass to write, they're sometimes more important than the novel itself (which they shouldn't be, but hey), and did I mention they're a pain in the ass? My aunt, bless her heart, has offered to help me with the query letters for my novels. However, I am now faced with the daunting task of cover letter-ing my short stories that I've prepped for submission. Bollocks.
As a child I was raised by my mother’s family, all of whom spoke at least two languages fluently and had lived on at least three continents for extended periods of time. I was raised, essentially, with a strong multicultural influence. When I moved to the MidWest United States I found myself suddenly aware of the unusual upbringing I had thought completely normal at the time. I was faced on all fronts by a homogenized mass of people who, at best, considered me unusual. At worst I was stereotyped as a ‘Hard-Working Mexican.’
This alienation I felt, combined with my undergraduate background in anthropology and history, came through when I wrote [insert story name here]. The setting is fantasy, but the girl’s [insert plot here] is reminiscent of my experience with culture shock in what I thought should have been my home country.
When I was a child, my chiefest delight was constructing towns, villages, cities in the mud by the pond on my aunt’s farm. I would create elaborate structures out of sticks, leaves, and mud, and I would create equally elaborate histories to go with them. A discarded duck feather symbolized the half-hawk leader of a tribe of bird-men, a polished stone represented a henge, a shed snakeskin represented a basilisk. As I grew older my interest in creating vast worlds for my mind to play in led to a college career in anthropology.
In [insert story here]
Well, you get the idea.
Plus, I'm faced with the decision of whether or not to submit fiction from my
pawprintletters slushpile journal and take that as unpublished (which, from everything I've heard, it is) or just to make up a bunch of new stories and submit those. Argh. Or, alternatively, I do what my aunt suggested and just finish editing the damn novels, and when my aunt's check gets here and I can go out and buy the book I was supposed to buy, work on the query letters and submissions for those. Argh. Decisions decisions.
Help?
