Literary agent Nathan Bransford posted a query letter “formula” for fiction writers on his blog today. He hopes it doesn’t result in 1,000 cookie-cutter query letters hitting his inbox, but it is definitely a good place to start in working out a query letter for your novel. I am, by the way, months—if not a year—away from writing any query letters for the books I’m working on, but I like to keep the fact that I’m going to have to write pitches, back cover blurbs and synopses in mind while I’m writing, so the middle part of his Mad Libs query letter is a great thing to be able to tape to the wall and refer to as my novels evolve:

[protagonist name] is a [description of protagonist] living in [setting]. But when [complicating incident], [protagonist name] must [protagonist's quest] and [verb] [villain] in order to [protagonist's goal].

You can see the full query letter on his blog.

I’ve found four free options for tracking your submissions to agents, editors and publishers.

The first is Sonar, by the same guy who does the yWriter novel organization software. It’s pretty straightforward and easy to use. And it’s only available for Windows.

Next is an online solution, Luminary’s Writer’s Database—very handy if you use multiple computers (or also access the web via mobile phone) because your data will always be available as long as you have an Internet connection. This means you can use it regardless of your OS. It also has the benefit of community, allowing users to share market listings with other users.

Slushomatic is an open-source submissions tracking system for, as far as I can tell, Windows and Linux. It can also format your manuscript according to standard submission guidelines.

For Mac users, there’s Manuscript Tracker. It looks like it covers your basic submission tracking needs. I’ll check it out over the next few weeks and let you know more.

I haven’t read Justine Larbalestier’s books (YA fantasy from the looks of it), but I did stumble across some excellent posts in her blog this week: How to Write a Novel, How to Rewrite and, for those of you who are emotionally stable enough handle your dreams of limousines and mansions being all but destroyed, First Novel Advances.

If that last bit got you interested in reading more on making money as a writer (a-ha! You are a masochist!), check out two of John Scalzi’s posts: “John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice” and “The Real World Book Deal Descriptions.”

Finally, if you’re at all interested in writing books, subscribe to the free Publishers Lunch daily e-mail Scalzi mentioned in one of those posts.

And now I have some research to do on pneumonia before I can get working on the next bit of Deadlock Rot….

Today’s resource you can add to your f-list: literary agent Jennifer Jackson, aka arcaedia, regularly blogs about publishing and agent-y thing on her LJ.

And speaking of agents who blog, Miss Snark stopped actively blogging last May, but her archive is full of useful information. You might also check out Bookends, Nathan Bransford, Jonathan Lyons, Kristin Nelson and nephele.

The first part of Deadlock Rot follows the bad guy¹, which means, I think, that he can’t really look like The Bad Guy. He’s not a super villain, and he’s not picking raw baby meat out of his back molars, so if I treat him like he’s the bad guy in these early chapters, I think he’d just come off looking like A Cardboard Jerk.

I’m not saying I want to trick people into thinking he’s a good guy either. I’m aiming more for Ambiguous Guy—is he the hero? the villain? an anti-hero? Maybe an anti-villain? I’d rather have the reader unsure of his place in the book than going, “Oh, yeah, this must be the baddy. Look, he’s kicking a pregnant dog in the stomach. La-de-da.”

What sets Deadlock Rot’s main story into motion is that this guy receives a phone call with some good news, which leads him on a journey, blah, blah, blah, death, destruction, voodoo, gay sex, chain saws, etc., etc., etc. But we don’t know this guy from Adam, so what do we care about his god-damned good news? Whoop-dee-do, right?

But you’ve gotta care, because you’re stuck with this guy for the first part of the book, and I don’t want you to put it back on the shelf and buy someone else’s book instead! I’ve gotta make you care. (And you know what? I’ve gotta make me care, too; otherwise I’m just doodling facial features and clothes on a piece of cardboard, aren’t I? AND YOU CAN TELL!) So for the first chapter, instead of having his phone ring, I put him into some trouble. Now when he gets that phone call in chapter two and thinks it’s going to get him out of that trouble, whew! That’s a good thing! Let’s see how this phone call is going to manage that! The reader doesn’t see it as “Yeah, yeah, lucky him, what do I care?” anymore because now the phone call doesn’t just come—it comes as the solution to a problem (that leads to many more problems–yay, story!).

And…I still have today’s writing to do (I’m in the middle of chapter three) and grocery shopping and twenty minutes of hating the concept of “fitness,” plus dinner to eat and time to spend with family and alla that, so…. Laterz!

¹I’m writing chronologically. Once I have the pieces all down, I’ll shuffle them around and see if it works better in some other order. But for now it’s chronological, and chronologically the bad guy comes first.

phoenix just posted about this today, and it’s so cool that I’m pushing today’s resource aside in order to share it with you.

Joe’s Goals is a simple system for staying on top of your goals. First, you have to break your goals into small, measurable chunks. Want to write a novel? A small, measurable chunk of that goal would be “Write for an hour every day” or “Write 1,200 words a day.” Then you log onto your account at Joe’s Goals and add that small, measurable chunk of a goal to your calendar. Every time you meet your small goal, click in the square for that day and a checkmark appears. You can add a checkmark for every time you complete that goal in a day–you wrote 3600 words? Great! You get three checkmarks today.

Additionally, you can set up negative goals. Want to quit smoking? Add “smoked cigarette” as a negative goal, and every time you smoke a cigarette, you get a frowny face.

Final cool feature: points. You can assign each goal a point value, so every time you meet that goal, you get points (or lose them, if it’s a negative goal). You’re in competition with no one but yourself, but it’s still nice rack up points, isn’t it? I’ve set three goals. Writing a certain number of words gets me 2 points, exercising for a certain time gets me 3 points and reading for a certain time gets me one. Yesterday I earned 14 points.

Some (but not enough!) of those points came from working on Deadlock Rot. It was a struggle to get my butt in the chair (and close the web browsers and email clients), but I got the first scene written. On to the next….

This is another way you can waste a buttload of time if you’re not careful, but if you’re smart and disciplined, you can get some great writing information and get out again while you still have time left in the day to actually write: the Absolute Write forums. If you don’t know where to start, there’s the “Uncle Jim, undiluted” thread, where in the second post you’ll learn that “There are twenty-five simple steps to becoming a published author.” Or you could hit the whoa!large post that has those posts from Jim in it, along with questions and discussion from other writers: Learn Writing with Uncle Jim.

Just don’t get so absorbed that you eat into your writing time. Better yet: write first, read later, as a reward.

Today I start writing. I also start re-quitting smoking. THANK GOD I HAVE ONE IF I CAN’T HAVE THE OTHER! But first, I’m going to crawl into bed and catch some sleep.

The free Notebook personal notebook application (available for both Windows and Macs) is what I’m using to keep track of character back story, locations and anything else that needs keeping track of while I write Deadlock Rot. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Ignore the IMPORTANT NOTE on the page I’ve linked to. It will bring you to a site that’s about the development of the next version of Notebook, but what you want is the current version of Notebook, available from the “Downloads” link on that page.)

What Notebook really is is a personal wiki. You’re not really going to get excited about this application if you’re not already addicted accustomed to editing wikis, but if you are addicted accustomed–whoa. It’s nice (if not slick looking). For the most part, Notebook uses the MediaWiki convention for marking up text (and offers HTML-like mark-up a well). And like yWriter4 (see yesterday’s entry), you can use the Pendrive Runtime application to run it off a USB flash drive.

The only annoying thing is that it won’t let you rename the “Home” page–at least not so far as I can tell. But it’s got these other cool customizable things, like you can define what you want to show up in the pop-up menu when you right-click on a page. You can also create “magic buttons” that execute commands. You can even do some scripting with it. And you can create “macros” (not the cat kind) that let you quickly add common information to pages, like say you want to add a link to the main “characters” page at the bottom of every character’s page–you’d make a macro once and cut down all that extra typing you’d have to do.

Most of these things you won’t find useful, though, if you’re just focusing on keeping track of information for your novel. For Deadlock Rot, I’ve set up the home page with a list of characters, locations, themes and plot notes, with each item in each section linking to more information about that. And of course since it’s a wiki, when I first mention Jeff’s name on David’s character page, I can turn Jeff’s name into a link to Jeff’s page. When I say that David lives in Marigny, I can have “Marigny” link to the info page on that neighborhood. I can also add images to the wiki pages–like a map of Marigny. (Notebook can only handle .GIF files off the shelf, but you can install an extension to add .JPG capability.)

As I progress, I’ll probably have to break the main page up into several pages–I’m sure I’ll be adding more sections as I go (in fact–there!–I just added a section for events going on in the area during the times the novel takes place).

I do wish it automatically created tables of contents for pages the way MediaWiki does, and I wish there was a way to sort the index sidebar besides alphabetically or by date (I’d like a hierarchy tree), but I can get by without these extras.

(One nicety I just discovered is that if you change a page name, Notebook automatically updates all links to that page throughout your wiki. This is great because I keep wavering on David’s surname.)

I spent the afternoon poking around “best of 2007″ book lists looking for stuff to add to my 2008 reading list. I’d set out to read 50 books this year but only made it through 37, so 2008’s goal is 37 + 6 (surely I can squeeze an extra half book a month in, right?). It’s frustrating how many titles aren’t available as ebooks (not even as Kindle editions–in a look at ten random books on my Wish List, only two were available for the Kindle), and it’s depressing how few of the “best” books of 2007 are catching my interest. (On the other hand, it’s not as though I’m running low on books to read. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME TO READ ALL THE BOOKS!)

The five books I enjoyed the most in 2007:

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (READ THIS BOOK)
Rant, Chuck Palahniuk
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
The Crimson Petal and the White, Michael Faber (despite the ending)
Cell, Stephen King (I even liked the ending)

¹This entry has no footnotes

I discovered this free software for organizing your novel back when it was just plain old yWriter, and now it’s up to version 4 (for PC and Linux only¹–sorry Mac users²). It’s actually more than an organizer–you can actually write your novel in yWriter4.

Every novel in yWriter is a “project,” and for every project you can include characters, objects, locations (settings), scenes and chapters. Dragging and dropping scenes and chapters makes it easy to reorganize the story.

Some screenshots (click for larger):

When it comes to scenes, you can get incredibly anal about them. In addition to a big block where you can type (or copy and paste) the actual scene is a set of tabs: Description, Status, Goals, Time, Scene Notes, Characters, Viewpoint Details and Overview. “Status,” for instance, is where you can say whether the scene relates to the main plot or to a subplot and say whether the scene is at this point an outline, draft, first edit, second edit or done. Under “Goals,” you can say whether the scene is an action scene or a reaction scene, and define the goal, conflict and outcome for the scene. “Time” lets you say when the scene happens and what time span it covers. “Characters” lets you select the characters who appear in the scene. All of this information helps you see the structure of your story.

This software is ideal for people who are anal and love to organize, but be careful: you can easily spend all your time working on information about scenes instead of actually writing the scenes.

Finally, if you already have a draft of a novel, yWriter can import it, provided you save it as RTF. Include chapter headings (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.) and scene breaks (***) in the file, and yWriter will automatically create chapters and scenes in the project as it imports.

Here’s the yWriter website: http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html. Again, the software is free.

In additional to all this, there’s one more very cool thing about yWriter: you can make it run from a USB flash drive. This is perfect for people who write at work or school and at home. After you download and install yWriter on your computer, drag or copy the folder to your flash drive. Then download the “Pendrive Runtimes” application at the bottom of this page. When you run Pendrive Runtimes, it will ask where the folder is. Enter its location on your flash drive (for example “F:\yWriter4″). It will install some extra stuff on the flash drive, and then you’ll be able to run yWriter from any Windows PC.

All that said…I’m not actually using yWriter4 for Deadlock Rot (though I will be when I start the Growl Mercy revision in the spring–different books, different needs). I’ll show you what I’m using for Deadlock Rot tomorrow.

Speaking of Deadlock Rot, dialog scribbles and scene notes are beginning to accumulate in scraps of paper around my desk. I’m happy to see them. :)

Also, I’ve figured out how to sum up the book in one word. I’ve been reading James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure this weekend (Christmas gift from my mom–isn’t she great?), and there was a point where he did the ol’ “Describe your story in a sentence or two” thing, which…I’m so not prepared to do with this story yet. I think I need to get through much, if not most–if not all!–of it before I can compress it back down to a few sentences. But I have a word now (which means I’m probably onto a theme, too): obsession.

Last night as I was falling asleep, I realized that that was the one thing my three disparate main characters had in common. (Okay, the one of two things: they’re also all male. But anyway) Derrel is obsessed with something he believes is rightfully his that has been withheld from him all his life. Jeff is obsessed with collecting refuse. Or, actually, he’s obsessed with staying right where he is; collecting refuse is a mechanism he uses to keep his life from moving forward. And over the course of the story, David becomes obsessed with his Tragic Hero. I think he was looking for a Tragic Hero all along.

David’s my narrator. I think he’s going to do an all right job.

¹Linux users should read the note on the Download page on how to get it working on their system.
²There is a similar program for Mac users: Jer’s Novel Writer.

I’m gearing up to start work on Deadlock Rot (that’s what I’m calling it this week) on the first, and that has me poking around at all the great resources for writers on the web–websites, software, whatever. There are so many! And such neat ones! I thought I’d start sharing them as I go.

The first one comes from tasyfa, who posted a link to this on Rockfic.com: Storytellers Unplugged. Storytellers Unplugged, to crib from their “About” page, is a group of thirty authors, editors, booksellers and publishing professionals who share their love of writing and “behind the scenes” tips at the rate of one column a day throughout the month, each by a different author. I’m old skool, so I just keep the home page of the site open in one of my many “if I close this I’ll forget it exists” Firefox tabs¹, but for those of who’ve gotten the hang of RSS readers (which are probably fantastic things, like del.icio.us, that I just haven’t wrapped my head around yet), the site does have a feed.

Contributors include David Niall Wilson, John Skipp, Elizabeth Bear, Mort Castle, Brian Hodge, John B. Rosenman and more. The columns aren’t always of interest to me, but the ones that are are worth the time I take to read the new entry every day.

Speaking of Deadlock Rot, I spent some time today…coming up with names for the characters (and writing down the bits of back story that have been rattling around in my head). You’d think what with having written a (really really horrible and completely missing a beginning) first draft over a year ago, I’d know who these people are–at least the ones who were “original” characters from the get-go, but sadly only one person retained her name from the original version to the new one (but her role in the story grew by leaps and bounds, even though her appearance will only increase by a page or three). Character names aren’t the only things changing either. The story has jumped forward twelve years, one fairly major character who was alive through 98% of the story in the first go-round now dies in the first act and a different character is stepping up to narrate. Also all of the characters save one have different occupations than they did in the first go-round.

And I love this story like I never thought I would. It was riddled with problems when I dashed through it for NaNoWriMo 2006–unforgivable problems, niggling unanswerable questions of why: why is this happening to this guy? Why was this woman killed? Why is this guy being blackmailed when he didn’t even freaking kill her? Why are these guys doing something so stupidly out of character? Why why WHY?

Baby, this time I’ve got answers. All that’s left to do come the first is sit my butt down in this chair and start telling the story.

I hope it doesn’t fall too far short of the vision in my head.

¹ Whenever I go to put my computer on hibernate or need to restart or shut down for any reason, I “end” the Firefox process through Windows’ Task Manager. I used to run the Session Manager add-on for Firefox, but version 2.0 made this unnecessary. Whether you have 2.0 or use the Session Manager, if you end the Firefox process through the Task Manager, Firefox performs a little magic trick where it makes a note of what web pages you have open in what tabs so that the next time you start it, you can just “Restore Session” and bam! be right back where you were. This is one of the Best Things Ever.