Interview with Kathryn Craft

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GLVWG "Write Stuff", Writing Advice, Writing Conference, Writing Craft

Author and developmental editor Kathryn Craft is one of the presenters at the 2023 Write Stuff Conference

Interview by Sara Karnish

Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, Kathryn served for more than a decade in a variety of positions on the boards of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, and was named the 2020 Guiding Scribe for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. Kathryn leads the Your Novel Year small-group mentorship program, has served as adjunct faculty for Drexel University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program, hosts writing retreats for women, and speaks often about writing. She writes a monthly series, “Mad Skills,” at the award-winning blog, Writer Unboxed.

Her debut novel, The Art of Falling, set in the Philadelphia dance world, a harsh microcosm of our society’s celebrity-driven expectations of women’s bodies, is available from Sourcebooks. Her follow up novel, The Far End of Happy, is based on true events surrounding the 1997 suicide standoff that resulted in her husband’s death. Originally meant to be a memoir, she decided to novelize. 

Learn more about Kathryn at kathryncraft.com or writingpartner.com. 

Kathryn will be facilitating a half-day workshop focused on dialogue, “Say That and More”, on Thursday, March 23. I sat down with Kathryn to talk about the importance of dialogue and so much more.

Q: Can you give us a sneak preview of your half-day workshop “Say That and More” at the Write Stuff Conference?

KC: Dialogue, if used well, can be an incredible multi-tasker. It can build characterization, deliver information, enhance conflict, further the plot, reveal the motivations of non-point-of-view characters, expose hidden loyalties and secrets, and more. In fact, if it’s only doing any one of these things, it’s not doing enough! By analyzing powerful excerpts of dialogue from bestselling novels, we’ll figure out what these authors have done so well, and then give each technique a shot with either prompts or characters from our own works in progress. It will be both fun and eye-opening!

Q: Why is strong dialogue so critical to a novel?

KC: We humans communicate with each other primarily through speech. Imagine speed-dating without it! The first “I love you” will change a relationship, for better or worse. A baby’s first word is joyfully celebrated. Asking for what we truly need can be nerve-wracking. Losing our voice before a speech or performance can be a tragic loss of opportunity. One’s dying words can carry a lifetime of meaning. We can feel lost when someone is desperately trying to communicate with us in a language we don’t know. Since such situations are common to all humans, well-written dialogue can gain immediate emotional investment from your reader.

But equally important to dialogue is what isn’t said. If that first “I love you” is met with silence, we know things aren’t going so well. Same if the baby’s first word is “Da-da” and the mom whisks the baby from “Da-da’s” arms to go down for a nap. By tapping into these universal human emotions through a rich tapestry of actions, memories, and setting, we can invite the reader to add up what’s on the page for themselves. After all, they’ve been reading signals during conversations their whole lives.

Q: Authenticity is key to capturing how characters speak, and sometimes this means writing regional dialect. How should a writer handle dialect, colloquialisms, and “folksy expressions” in a novel? 

KC: This has changed a lot over the years as the publishing industry has gotten twitchier. There’s the fear that today’s busy readers will no longer put up with phonetic spelling and dropped syllables, even though doing so brought the series characters of middle grade authors like J.K. Rowling and Brian Jacques to vibrant life. A more recent concern is the fear that trying to write dialect will come off as prejudicial, racist, homophobic, xenophobic—if there’s even a whiff of political incorrectness in the way you’ve presented a character as “other than,”, there’s a possibility you’ll cross a line and lose readers. 

One solution is to evoke the sound of the language without full-out transcription. If a young woman says she could listen to her daddy all night long, his dropped syllables making his stories roll like waves, a periodic transcription of his language won’t cause a problem. If you need to convey the speech of a foreigner with minimal English, study the syntax of his native language (lack of articles in Russian, adjectives following many nouns in French) and mimic it.

Q: You’ve drawn on your personal experiences for your novels The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. What are some tips for writers to capture personal experiences—events, even interesting dialogue—and possibly use them later?

KC: I give a separate workshop on this, which was a direct result of all I learned while obtaining my PhD in self from the School of Hard Knocks. Since our emphasis here is dialogue, I’ll share one pertinent story from The Far End of Happy.

After I’d already filed for divorce from my first husband, and within a month of his suicide, he said to me, “I guess you don’t like me very much.”

This line of dialogue was seared into my memory to the point that I wanted to include it in my novel. But when my editor read that line of dialogue, floating as it was within the fictionalized version of real events, it made less sense. “The scene reads fine without it,” she commented. “Just delete it.” 

That I couldn’t do. To me it had the feel of an important turning point in this couple’s awareness of what was (or wasn’t) happening between them. So instead of deleting, I went back several chapters to better set up this important moment.

My takeaways: 1) while listening to your editor is important, you don’t have to solve problems in the way they suggest, and 2) just because it was spoken in real life doesn’t confer power to a line of dialogue, and setting it up might be a long game.

Q: Dialogue aside for a second—you are a developmental editor through your business, Writing Partner. How do we maintain the tension throughout a novel and keep readers’ interest?

KC: This isn’t just a whole other workshop; I’m writing a craft book on the topic! Just about all fiction craft can be geared toward sustaining the reader’s interest. The most important foundational concept is what I call psychological tension—the relationship an author builds between the protagonist and the reader. A reader is hooked when a protagonist’s deeply desired goal raises a related question in the reader’s mind that she wants answered (“Can this character achieve his goal, given all the obstacles ahead?”). Now you have the reader looking around every corner to see how it’s going for the protagonist. It’s only once this relationship is created that the author can raise, dash, and reward reader expectation, which is the very definition of a satisfying read.

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This year’s Write Stuff Conference runs March 23-25 at the Best Western Lehigh Valley Hotel. Registration is open! www.glvwg.org

An Interview with Danielle Modafferi of Firefly Hill Press.

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Firefly Hill Press, Publisher, Romance, Writing, Young Adult

Article by Susan Monroe: 

 

Danielle Modafferi, CEO of Firefly Hill Press – LLC, a small independent publishing house who strives to find, publish, and market exceptional works of novel-length fiction, specifically in the Young Adult and Romance genres. Danielle will be attending the GLVWG Write Stuff Conference™ March 23, 2019.

Firefly Hill Press specializes in stories that feature heroines who are not afraid to save themselves – no damsels need apply! Our stories feature love and obstacles that enhance our protagonists’ journeys but in no way defines them. We like to believe that we reclaim the term “happily ever after” and illustrate how it is a unique pursuit and triumph to each character and her goals.

Susan Monroe had the chance to ask Danielle a few questions.

**********

If we were to meet at a conference, without using anything from the bio, what would you tell me about yourself that would be intriguing?

I have a pretty inexhaustible travel bug and have trouble staying in one place for too long! I started Firefly Hill Press as way to build a digital on-the-go company and pair it with my LOVE of books and writing. I have had the privilege of living all over the United States, in Paris, and in London and am always keeping my eyes peeled for my next destination and inspirational publishing location! If anyone has any good suggestions of what should be next on my list, come find me and let me know!

As an agent, you work with writers, hopefully, long-term, but who are strangers to you at first. Do you look at more than the work submitted to determine that relationship?

Absolutely! Since my company is small by design, I only take on authors with whom I hope to build a career and a future. Of course, it has to be an author whose work I believe in and am enthusiastic about, but more than that, I hope to foster a professional and working friendship with my team. Writing is hard and sometimes requires brutal honesty from both parties. I need my authors to know that those critiques come from a place of love and desire to make their work the best that it can be and the only way that happens is if trust is fostered between us. It is a pretty integral part of a successful working relationship, in my opinion.

Writers often say they became writers because they have to write. What drew you to becoming an agent?

Actually, I too started as a writer. I wrote and published a Young Adult Dark Fantasy novel titled The Girl in the Glass Box back in 2016, which is a fairy tale reimagination based on the Grimm’s version of Snow White. I earned my MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in 2014 and during my time there learned how exciting the publishing side of the industry is. Additionally, I come from a background as an English teacher, so I feel like publishing is an awesome opportunity for me to fuse teaching, coaching, and my love of writing with my interest in the ever-changing landscape of publishing.

When you get a submission, how far into it do you get before you know this one is not for you?

Truthfully, it’s pretty early on – within the first page or so. But out of respect for the writer and the submission, I generally read through most of what is sent to me, even if I know it’s not for us. There are so many things to be told from the first paragraphs: writing style, tone, craft, content themes, and so on. So, I always tell writers that if they are continuously submitting and they are not receiving any promising responses, to consider revising their beginning and perhaps starting the manuscript at a more active point in the story. I see so many manuscripts that just begin in the wrong place. Not to say that the stories are bad or deficient, just that they begin before the “real beginning” of their story should start.

What are your personal peeves when it comes to submissions?

Ooh, when writers clearly have not done their research and are just blanket canvasing their manuscripts to anyone and everyone regardless of genre or submission guidelines. It shows a total disregard for the process and for my time as someone considering this manuscript. For instance, if you are sending me a horror, sci-fi, erotica manuscript, clearly you do not know much about our backlist and what we currently represent. It is just time consuming and a bit inconsiderate.

What trends in the publishing marketplace attract your attention? (Such as, what genres are hot? Where is electronic publishing going?)

Wow – I am LOVE-LOVE-LOVING the resurgence of chick lit and the Rom Com. As a fan of these types of stories myself, I love the hopefulness of these stories and even more so, I am loving the trend that these stories are becoming more female-story-centric. Life is hard and stressful and difficult. Watching the news is NOT FUN (understatement of the year!) and people are becoming bogged down with the heaviness of everyday struggles, which is why light, fun, uplifting literature is really making its way back into the publishing arena.

In terms of what’s coming for e-publishing? Hmm… the hot topic on everyone’s lips for the past few years has been a skyrocketing in popularity in audiobooks. I am really eager to see the technological innovations in this area and am looking forward to more texts becoming more accessible in an audio format. For me personally, audiobooks (and podcasts!) make commuting so much more tolerable. I would love to see maybe even more authors reading their own work? I know it sounds crazy because, of course, the narration needs to be well done, but a big trend in marketing and publishing has been an increased accessibility to authors through social media and live streaming video feeds. No longer are authors these creatures who are holed up in their dark cabins in the woods pumping out pages in their solitude – they are interactive with their communities and readers have become increasingly responsive to it! That aspect of publishing has been really exciting to watch and to be a part of.

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Danielle Modafferi earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Since then, she incorporated Firefly Hill Press in 2014 and has been passionate about discovering and sharing incredible fiction through publishing ever since! She is a: Professor of Writing, Practicer of Random Acts of Kindness, Connoisseur of Cheese, Petter of Puppies, Professional Napper, and Lover of all things Harry Potter. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @danimod115

You can also follow Firefly Hill Press on Facebook.

 

 

Meet Victoria Selvaggio

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Editor, GLVWG "Write Stuff", Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, Writing, Writing Conferences

Once again, GLVWG’s Michelle Meeh spent some time interviewing Victoria Selvaggio, Associate Agent for the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency.  Vicki has a strong background in business ownership and over six years of actively working as a volunteer and Regional Advisor for SCBWI: Northern Ohio. Drawn to the publishing scene first as an author writing all genres, with her most recent publication in the 2015 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market, Vicki’s passion for honing the craft carried over into reading manuscripts for the agency. Currently, she is excited to read compelling manuscripts that will resonate with her long after she’s done.

*****

 

Michelle: Who is your most memorable writer?

Veronica: Stephen King is my favorite writer. I find his path to publication fascinating, and I find his published works to be more than enjoyment for reading. For me, they’re instruments/tools—I’ve learned so much on mastering voice, playing with a manuscript’s structure, and even pushing those standard writing rules a tad.

His publications encouraged me to write about the sweet and innocent, while weaving in the crazy and unimaginable. They helped me push my own limits as a writer–learning to not hold back, writing about my deepest fears, while sharing those things that show my vulnerability. And mostly, they encouraged me to be me–to write what I need to write!

Michelle: Do you have a particular quote that resonates long after the book is back on the shelf?

Veronica: While I don’t have a particular quote after the book is back on the shelf, I do have a favorite motivational quote:

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Harriet Tubman

MeetChristine Stroud

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Autumn House Press, Editor, GLVWG "Write Stuff", Writing, Writing Conferences

GLVWG’s Michelle Meeh had an interview with Christine Stroud, Senior Editor of Autumn House Press. Christine will be taking pitches at the GLVWG “Write Stuff” Conference on Saturday, April 9. (Advance registration is required.)

Christine Stroud is originally from eastern North Carolina, but currently lives in Pittsburgh and works as the Associate Editor for Autumn House Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and a BA in Literature from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She has a chapbook, The Buried Return, released by Finishing Line Press. Her poem, “You Called the Night it Snowed in April,” was published in Ninth Letter’s first web edition and she received the Best Thesis in Poetry award for her manuscript, Brick Wall.

*****

 

Michelle: What is it about poetry that resonates with you as a reader?

Christine: I’ve always loved the incisiveness of poetry. Even if a poem has long lines or spans for pages, I always find them acute because of the attention to language and structure. In a successful poem there’s a sense that after a great deal of thought, the poet found the right word. That being said, I love that despite poetry’s conciseness it’s also completely unrestricted—it can be fictional, it can be autobiographical, it can be both simultaneously. Even poems in very strict forms can be wildly imaginative and unconfined. A poem is a fun little puzzle, a quiet secret that pulls us in.

Michelle: As a writer, why is poetic expression so important?

Christine: The attention to language, for me, is the most vital aspect of poetry. We’re all talking and writing so much these days and I see that reflected in some of the literary work I read. Much of it is good, but lacks the love of language. I read very solid stories and poems that have interesting narratives or play with form, but the language falls completely flat. Poetic expression is important in keeping us focused on the necessity to connect with words, to push ourselves with language.

Michelle: What do you look for in a poem? In a fiction/nonfiction manuscript?

Christine: I look for something that takes me off guard—for work that displays a new way of engaging an idea or situation (This goes for all three genres). For instance, consider how many poems about nature have been written over the years. If you’re a contemporary poet you need to consider how to approach the subject in a fresh way. I come across a number of very well-written manuscripts that tell a story I’ve read before and don’t offer anything new to conversation.

Michelle: Not to restart the war, but how is southern poetry different from northern?

Christine: ((Ha, good question.))

Sometimes I’m not sure they really are that different in contemporary works except in evocation of place and the use of language/dialect. Other times I feel certain there’s a clear distinction. Even if we aren’t shaped by our culture (and I think we are), we’re responding to it.

I grew up in the South, but I’ve lived a large part of my adult life in Pennsylvania. At this point I don’t know if I would identify as a southern writer even though I write a great deal about my childhood there. Similarly, I don’t typically identify myself as a female writer even though I write about issues concerning gender.

Perhaps in the end, it really depends on the intent of the poet?

*****

Christine can be found at Autumn House Press, and her website, Christina Stroud.

 

Meet Katherine Ernst from Jasper Ridge Press

Tags

Jasper Ridge Press, Katherine Ernst, Skip to The Good Part

by Tammy Burke

Hi Katherine,

Welcome to the 22nd annual GLVWG “Write Stuff” conference!  I have to say, your background with psychology, law, travel (including being on four different continents), writing and publishing is quite an intriguing and eclectic combination. It is exciting that you will be joining us.

Jasper Ridge Press has quite a catchy unofficial motto “We don’t screw authors. We pimp them.” Could you tell us a little about how your company started? What makes you stand out from other publishers?

Katherine Ernst: Heidi Tretheway and I formed JRP in 2014 because we wanted to create the small publisher that we wished we could’ve found when we were starting out. We were hearing a lot of complaints from our friends about small presses who would take their work, slap a hastily put together cover on it, barely copy edit it (never mind developmental editing), and throw it up on Amazon with no promotion. But then we’d also hear complaints from other friends with Big 5 deals that they didn’t really feel cared about and they felt like just another cog in a machine. This isn’t to impugn all other publishers, but the fact is, we saw a void in romance publishing and we sought to fill it. We wanted to form a house that would only take projects we were truly excited about and that we would put a promotional budget behind. We see publishing as a partnership between author and publisher and therefore feel that we should put as much care and effort into publishing your book as you put into writing it. Otherwise, what are we doing to deserve royalties? Because of that vision, we also decided on a 50-50 royalty split. If this were truly a partnership, then that split is only fair. (Many small presses take 80% or more.)

 

Your ‘Skip to the Good Part: 20 Authors Reveal Their Steamiest Scenes’ is such a fantastic idea…for readers and writers alike. Could you share a little bit about this project? How it came about? Where do you see it going?  What do YOU like best about it?

Katherine Ernst: This project is actually what launched our publishing company. Heidi came up with the idea over a year ago, and we immediately knew we had to organize the project, but it took until the end of 2014 until we actually did it. I immediately loved the title and saw the potential because it’s truly a win-win-win for us, the authors, and readers. Basically authors submit 2k-5k word steamy scenes from their previously published books and if they are selected, their piece is featured in one of our collections. (The first came out in November and the forth collection comes out in March.) We pay royalties to each author in the collection and so we’re basically paying authors to promote their books. As with all of our books, each collection has its own publishing budget. Many of the authors from the first collection have already talked about a bump in sales of their full length novels because of readers of the collection reading their scene, loving it, and then buying the full novel. After the March collection comes out we’re taking a hiatus on the project in order to focus on full-length submissions, but I’m so happy we did these collections. They are *a lot* of work in terms of coordination because there are 20 authors in each collection, but we’ve gotten to know the work of so many great authors through it. Each collection features 6 New York Times bestselling authors as well as a handful of USA Today bestsellers and newer up and coming authors. We were absolutely blown away by the talent that wanted to take part in this project.Okay, so out of curiosity…any thoughts on the dreaded euphemism during sex scenes?

Katherine Ernst:  Honestly, I don’t think it’s much of an issue anymore. One of the best things about doing Skip to the Good Part is that I’ve now read *a lot* of steamy scenes. For every scene we published (80 in total by the end of March) we rejected approximately an equal number, so you can see that that’s a lot of reading. I think there was maybe one where the author used euphemisms (as in, love rod, or quivering staff, or whatever you think of with old-school romance). It’s just not really done anymore. Half of our submissions were from books the author considered “erotica” and half were from books the author considered “romance.” I didn’t see a difference in the heat level between the two, and everyone, for the most part, was very clear in what they were describing.

If you were to give an aspiring romance writer advice, what would it be? Would the advice be different than for an aspiring non-romance writer?

Katherine Ernst:  It would definitely be different. I think the publishing world of romance is very different from the publishing world of other genres/categories and I think what you need to do to write a great romance novel is different from what you need to do to write a great book in other genres/categories. I literally could write an entire book devoted to this question (perhaps I will one day), but the best encapsulated advice I could give that would actually apply to all genres is: keep writing. I know you hear that all the time, but I am friends with many many bestselling authors. Some are self-published, some are with small presses, some are with a Big 5 publisher, many are hybrids, but the thing that unites them all is persistence. I have one friend who got a huge advance from a Big 5 publisher for the first novel she ever wrote. (Everyone’s dream, right?) It bombed. Terribly. Her hope of selling another book in New York became slim to none. But she didn’t give up. She started self publishing. She tried a couple different genres and categories. She tried different promotional strategies, but she had book after book that didn’t sell well. Eventually, after her 5th or 6th book, she finally had one that hit it big, and she’s now a New York Times bestseller. I have another friend who queried agents for 8-10 years. Wrote at least half a dozen books. Nothing. Until she finally sold her “debut” novel, and it hit it big and is now being made into a movie. I knew both of these people while they were still unpublished so I saw their persistence firsthand when they were in no way assured of success. And these are just two stories of many I could share. The vast majority of authors struggle for a long time before they “make it.” Even those with heaps of talent. So just stick with it. If you don’t like writing without the knowledge of reward, you’re in the wrong business.

Okay, contemporary romance is what you are looking but you could consider paranormal, fantasy, or science fiction for the right manuscript or author. Anything within this parameter that you’d like to see? Anything you definitely would not be interested in?

Katherine Ernst:  We’ll definitely consider any type of steamy romance, although paranormal et al. is definitely harder to sell than contemporary right now. But, if your book is fantastic, we want to publish it. The most important thing is: is the relationship front and center? Is your novel truly a romance novel or is it a fantasy novel with romantic elements? If it’s the former, we’re interested. If it’s the latter, then we’re not the best publisher for you. This goes for contemporary as well.

So… how would you describe (maybe an example or two) what makes a hero swoon-worthy?

Katherine Ernst:  To a certain extent this question is unanswerable because there are always going to be love interests who don’t fit an established trope but who still make your heart go pitter patter, but let me mention an element that always makes a hero compelling to the reader. There has to be sufficient push-pull between him and the heroine. What does that mean? Well, all successful stories involve tension. If your book is about two people falling in love, what is the tension there? It’s about whether they’ll get together, right? (There are a few other types of love stories, but they’re rarer, so let’s stick with this for now.) If they get together at the beginning of the book and then go on picnics and horseback rides for the rest of the story, that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it? So there has to be either an external or internal conflict that’s keeping them apart. Well, now it sounds like I’m just talking about the mechanics of plotting, but this is also what makes the hero swoon-worthy. Every woman is reading a romance novel because she wants to escape into a fantasy. At the beginning of the book, the girl and guy aren’t together. The hero keeps pushing the heroine away. This is necessary for tension in your story, but if done properly then it also makes the hero very attractive. How many jerks in your life seemed to like you one minute, but then pushed you away the next? It was infuriating, but you still were very attracted to him. In real life the guy probably had mommy issues and wasn’t worth your time, but in a great romance novel it turns out that the hero keeps pushing you away because…he’s a CIA operative and is trying to keep you safe! Or, he has deep-seated issues stemming from a tragic childhood that he wants to protect you from, but because of your love, he’s willing to overcome them! Or, he’s a vampire and he can’t get too close because then he might eat you! It’s what every woman’s ever wanted. The guy isn’t “not that into you”–he has a valid reason why he’s pushing you away. And actually, it’s a noble reason. He was trying to protect you all along. Swoon.

On a personal note…Favorite Socrates quote?  And which continents are you missing?

Katherine Ernst: I know this is trite, but honestly my favorite Socrates quote will always be “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” I went through a phase in college where I became obsessed with ancient Greek philosophers, and Socrates was always my favorite. Of course I think I know a lot of things. (If I thought I was wrong about my beliefs, then I would change them, wouldn’t I?) But humility in life takes you a long way.As to continents, I haven’t been to South America, Antarctica or Australia. I’d love to go to Australia next, but who ever gets off enough time to make that trek?Thank you again, Katherine, for taking time out for this interview and I look forward to meeting you in person.

Katherine Ernst:  Ditto with you. These were great questions that forced me to say more than I intended, but I really wanted to give your readers real, non-trite answers. Cheers!

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Katherine Ernst is a successful attorney who has worked on billion-dollar cases. Five years ago she gave up the full-time practice of the law to pursue her real passion: publishing. More recently, along with her business partner Heidi Joy Tretheway, she has founded the romance publishing house Jasper Ridge Press. Their first series of books, Skip to the Good Part: 20 Authors Reveal their Steamiest Scenes, have featured over 30 New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors and have produced strong sales. In her spare time she is actively involved in her local community and was recently elected committeewoman in her district. For fun, she loves board games of all types, playing pub trivia, and travelingundefinedher goal is to make it to every continent; as of now, she’s visited four.

Jasper Ridge Press only publishes steamy or erotic romance, so first and foremost I’m looking for that. I am actively looking to acquire contemporary romance, but for the right manuscript and/or author I’d be willing to consider paranormal, fantasy, or science fiction. I’m also very LGBTQ friendly-I’d especially love a great F/F story. Here’s where editors usually tell you that they’re looking for perfect mechanics, a strong voice, and brilliant plotting. Well, of course I’m looking for that, but that doesn’t tell you a whole lot, does it? Here’s the secret to submission success that every writer is looking for (the following is assuming M/F romance, but the advice applies equally to M/M and F/F): I am looking for a hero that makes me swoon. Bestselling romances have one thing in common: they feature heroes that make readers’ hearts go pitter-patter. Everything else in your manuscript is window dressing. If I want to climb into your book and wrap my arms around your hero, you’re getting a contract even if your mechanics could use some work. Conversely, you could have the most beautiful writing in the world, but I won’t be able to offer you a contract if the romance isn’t sizzling. It’s as simple and difficult as that.

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Tammy Burke, GLVWG member, 2011 conference chair and past president, has published over 400 articles in daily newspapers, newsletters and regional magazines. As a journalist and also with helping with the GLVWG “Write Stuff” conference she has interviewed a wide-range of literary agents, publishers, authors, state and local government officials, business and community leaders, everyday folk and celebrities. Currently, she is in the revision stage for her first YA fantasy adventure book, Uriah’s Window, the first in an intended series. When not writing, she works in the social service field, fancies herself a student of the fantastic and mundane, and is a fencing marshal in the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA).