In this issue:

Writing Avenues

What's Not Good for You May Be Great for Your Writing
by Lon Prater

In a fairy tale world, we could wave a magic wand a few times and become Big Name Authors in one smoky poof of success. Too bad we're stuck in this world, where we'd be lucky to get a little upper body toning for our wand-waving efforts.

I won't tell you not to try it. Who wouldn't benefit from a little more exercise? Wand-waving could be the next TaeBo, after all. But don't rush out to buy the video and accessories just yet. Let me fill you in on a little secret first.

Applying the healthy body, healthy mind approach to your writing isn't going to make you a successful writer. In fact, the health-conscious approach is probably as bad for your writing as tobacco and sweets are for your body. Such old-fashioned concepts may even be stunting your development and creativity. So, what should you do instead?

Try the path of least self-control. You know the one. It's paved with reckless self-indulgence and lined on either side with the cheerful abandonment of rationality.

If you want to develop strong writing skills, try the two-pronged unhealthy approach below. With dedicated application, your flabby writing physique will become stronger and fitter than ever.

The First Step: Eat Every Word You See!!!

When you read, you are doing more than entertaining your imagination or gaining information. You're feeding the Inner Writer, aka IW. Your IW doesn't care about portion control or balanced meals. It just wants to chow down. You'll never find any self-respecting IW counting word-calories or pushing back from those oh-so-satisfying stories and articles. This character thrives on glorious, unbound gluttony.

Stuff your IW with lasagna-layered paragraphs every day. They should be oozing with spicy words and thick stringy sentences that hold the whole delicious thing together. But don't stop there.

Feed it a little bit of everything you see. This should feel like a buffet, or better yet: a smorgasbord. Make sure fiction is on the menu: Plot and theme are the meat and potatoes of any good meal. Besides being delicious, fiction also smuggles in lots of good stuff like Characterization, Dialogue, Setting, and Mood. You can't take in too much of something like fiction.

But don't pass over the non-fiction! In fact, don't limit yourself in any way. Feed from a wide variety of both fiction and non-fiction: magazines, books, newsletters, webzines, etc. Taste some of everything; even if it doesn't look appetizing at first glance.

Your IW will find something to savor in every written word on the menu: from Westerns, Fantasies, Classics, and Romantic Mysteries to Philosophy, History, Science, and True Crime. You never know which particular oyster will turn out to have a pearl, or which paragraph will surprise you with the seed of a great story idea. It's best to try them all.

While your Inner Writer is busy scraping every pan and licking the dishes clean, it is learning from those published writers. Make sure your IW chews every phrase completely before spooning in the next mouthful. Figure out what works and what doesn't. Why did the author string those particular words together like that? Try to reverse-engineer the recipe for every piece of published writing you read.

One last note on IW table manners. Your IW may want to play with its food. This should be encouraged.

Step Two: Abandon Reason and Common Sense

It's been said that psychotics build castles in the sky and neurotics live in them. Some folks define insanity as repeating the same actions but expecting different results. If these sayings are right, then every successful writer out there must be absolutely bonkers.

Look at what pro writers do. First, they wake up one day with the oddball notion that someone will pay them real money to publish a bunch of words they just thought up and put on paper. Then, as if that's not "castle in the sky" enough, fiction writers up the ante; they build a whole world out of thin air, making up the people who live in it as well.

Some writers are hard cases. They've toyed with the idea of being published for so long that this departure from reality no longer sounds weird to them.

If this is you, congratulations! You're almost crazy enough to succeed. Be careful though, the next part is a test passed by only the most irrational and obsessed. This is where the Psycho-Pro shifts into high gear, leaving the merely neurotic coughing in her dust.

To make it to the finish line, you have to be able to blank out the obvious evidence of your senses. By sensory evidence, I mean the stack of form rejections taking up more space than the last seven years worth of income tax papers. I also mean the condescending smiles you must endure when friends and family ask about your writing. A writer who wants to succeed will ignore these intrusions of reality like the latest round of "Bill Gates will pay you" emails.

The difference between writers who succeed and those who give up is that successful writers are much better at fooling themselves. Despite the rejection slips and smirks, the successful writer still believes that she can convince an editor not only to publish something she wrote, but to pay for it.

Day after day, she'll trudge out to the mailbox, hoping to find an envelope she addressed to herself. Week after week, she'll put postage on countless self-addressed envelopes and ship them off with queries, cover letters, and manuscripts that may have already been rejected a dozen times.

And so it goes. Long after the wanna-be has put away his thesaurus, the successful writer is still nose deep in blissful denial. Completely oblivious to the fact that no one wants to buy or print her writing, this intrepid lunatic will continue to repeat the same process month after month: writing and rewriting, mailing and remailing.

Eventually the right piece lands in front of the right editor and something gets bought and published. The elation of that happy event sends her skipping gaily along the edge of mania. Her irrational faith has been vindicated, even if only by fluke. She tells herself that if this piece sold, the others may sell, too.

Abundant and unreasonable hope will sustain her through the next round of drafts, revisions, and trips to the mailbox and post office. She will keep on doing what clearly doesn't work, always expecting a different response, until she makes the next sale. And then the next. And the next after that.

It amazes her that someone would be so foolish as to pay her to publish her writing. The only explanation she can come up with is that editors must be nuts!

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Lon Prater considers himself a lucky guy: father of two fantastic girls, and married to the only woman amazing enough to be their mother. In between work and play, he finds time to write speculative fiction. His short story "Head Music" will be included in the upcoming BORDERLANDS 5 anthology. He is looking forward to the August 2003 launch of Neverary, a Journal for Readers and Writers of Speculative Fiction.

Rhino's Amplified Dictionary
"Slobber Kisses"
by Ron Jones

Have you ever walked into the house to be greeted by your dog with a big, sloppy, kiss? Was her tail wagging faster than a runaway weed whacker? You should greet your reader with a similar enthusiasm. While wagging your tail to welcome your audience may draw the attention of your neighbors, few of us write well enough to communicate the visual effect of those happy gyrations. The hook is the "slobber kiss" an author uses to entrance the reader the moment she cracks the spine on that glossy cover.

You must grab your reader within the first paragraph, and preferably with that lead sentence. The old saw, "You never get another chance to make a first impression," was never truer than in writing. The first sentence should motivate the reader to keep turning your pages whether it's an article, a short story or a novel.

Ask yourself this: How many books will a book buyer open and how much will they read before they know they've found one worth buying? If they're in a hurry, you have very little time to grab their attention.

The same is true for short fiction. Few readers read every short story or article in a magazine. We don't have time. Try to make your first sentence intriguing enough that your story will become one they do read. It's equally true of how-to articles. The shorter the media, the more important your hook sharpening talent becomes.

It's not required that you blow up an ammo dump, or crash an alien space ship north of Roswell, New Mexico to capture that reader's attention, although both would work. Unless you're a brand name writer, that first paragraph must give a stranger some motivation to plunk down their hard-earned cash or valuable time for your work.

This hook can be almost anything. While action is the obvious hook, it can be an interesting idea, a funny situation, a puzzling statement, a mystery, or even an alien setting. I've seen all work equally well.

Take a look at the article in this issue of the Emporium Gazette by Lon Prater. He didn't explode anything. In fact he opened with a "poof" rather than a bang, yet I'll wager he grabbed your attention. While we all know we can't wave a magic wand and become a best selling author, how many of us have secretly wished we could? Lon's humor barely skirts reality for many writers, and that grabs our attention.

I remember one lead sentence that went something like this, "Fergus was dead, and he wondered why." Doesn't that leave you asking questions? The author went on to answer some in the first few pages, but left many to be revealed later in the book.

An example worth mentioning is the first paragraph of Dean Wesley Smith's and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Star Trek novelization, "Klingon." For the sake of your edification, I've included the entire paragraph.

"The Yridian pilot smelled like an abandoned fish processing plant on Balor 6. Layers of stink and dirt covered him and the raglike clothes he wore like coats of paint. He huddled his huge frame against a support pillar on the upper deck of the Promenade, trying to look as if he didn't stand out. But his odor warned anyone of his presence a dozen paces away."

They sold me that book with their first line. You thought I was rattling your cage about setting being a hook. According to Smith, one of the worst failings of rookie writers in short fiction is failing to set the scene adequately. Notice how they open by giving us a strong sense of being there. Face it, folks. Science fiction often falls flat on its oversized proboscis without the rich texture of setting.

The stories and articles I've enjoyed most have started with a powerful opening paragraph. Editors seldom get beyond the first page or two, and if you space down a half page on your novel to give the editor room to scribble notes, that gives you precious few words to catch the editor's attention. Your hook probably has more to do with selling your work than any other factor.

In my novel, "Black Breath of the Lutron," I tried the strongest opening I could find. "Every square inch of my body armor dripped with my fiancée's blood as I stood frozen at the edge of the jungle clearing. I screamed curses that no one heard, but the sealed helmet locked my rage behind its airtight bubble, giving it nowhere to go but inward."

Now that you've captured the reasons and technique behind creating a hook, I'll treat you to a little secret. Most writers know about the first hook, but buried somewhere near the ending you'll usually find a second. While the first hook is vital to selling your work, the second hook sells your next story and establishes your career with repeat readers. This trailing hook can be a twist or an idea that gets the audience considering the theme of your story in a different light.

For the sake of your career, remember to sharpen both hooks before mailing your manuscript. Maybe then you'll find one of Lon's magic wands that we all seek so desperately.

* * * * *

FROM ANOTHER ANGLE
by Susan Long Turner

DISCOVER THE SOS FACTOR
In the writing process, the more a story cooks the better.
~ Doris Lessing in New York Times

Your first proposed magazine article, cooked to perfection, sparks from revision, editing, and reading aloud for rhythm to catch the stumbles. The decision to give magazine articles a try came from The Complete Guide to Writing & Selling Magazine Articles by Peggy Moss Fielding and Dan Case, published by AWOC.COM Publishing. Case is the editor of the award winning online magazine Writing for Dollars, with approximately 44,000 subscribers. He also heads AWOC, bringing out books for writers.

Fielding has sold hundreds of articles and short stories, several nonfiction books plus both contemporary and historical romance novels. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma where she writes both fiction and non-fiction and teaches writing part-time at Tulsa Community College. Her former students have written and published more than 350 books. Peggy's latest book tells the writer how to write and sell today's Confession stories available as all AWOC.COM books through the publisher as an e-book or trade paperback.

AWOC has taken care of editing your manuscript with Robyn Conley's Be Your Own Book Doctor. Conley's precise and practical suggestions can cure what ails your writing. From a professional diagnosis to marketing, including the query letter, you'll find it in the pages of Robyn's book.

As a first time magazine article writer, it is best to write the entire article before sending out query letters. A seasoned pro can query from a well worked-out idea. Recently, Peggy Moss Fielding in her presentation as featured speaker gave a query letter prescription to those attending Abilene Writers Guild Annual Workshop in Abilene, Texas.

• Use 18 or 20 pound bond paper. Make the paper feel really good. Black print, no funny looking letters: Helvetica, Times, Courier font
• Block format. No indentation. Single-spaced, double between paragraphs
• Date
• Inside Address
• Salutation
• First Paragraph Body: 27 to 32 words, summary of the article, nonfiction book, or novel.
  Have name in Caps. No quote marks, no underlining.
• Second Paragraph: YOU! Do not put your degrees in unless relevant.
• Third Paragraph: Housekeeping paragraph. How many words? Any accompanying material such as photos, sidebars, graphs. When you'll deliver article to them. Unless manuscript is ready for mailing, don't give yourself any less than six weeks as a beginning writer.
• Close
• Four or five spaces
• Signature
• Your address
• Email addy
• Telephone Number
• Partial: cover letter, title page, 3 chapters (if book), synopsis, and bio with SAS

In The Complete Guide to Writing & Selling Magazine Articles, the authors make a daring promise. "If you do everything we tell you to do in this book, you will sell your first article soon."

Now you've discovered the SOS Factor. Oh, you want to know about the SOS Factor?

Study and use the books recommended in this column and take a look at others published by AWOC.COM Publishing. You've found your talisman--the Secret of Selling.

The moment has come to start a new article, story, or book cooking, and then let the SOS Factor send you sailing into the printed pages of a magazine or book.

* * * * *

Susan Long Turner is co-author with Russ Turner of "Wings Born Out of Dust" which is available now from 23 House Publishing and is also available in trade paperbacks and hardback at other major online bookstores. Visit her Website

Freelance: How To Sell Almost Anything
by R. S. Nailor

I was speaking with an acquaintance at a writing seminar and he said, "I write cheesy material." I wasn't exactly sure where the conversation was headed, but my curiosity was piqued and rather than let the conversation end, I queried, "Just how cheesy?" All was revealed and I discovered that he had written many articles about a topic that is very dear to him: cheese.

Yes, dear reader, there is at least one magazine available for almost every type of devotee's desire; be it cheese, basset hounds, model planes, carving, wines, running, even candle stick making.

Where would you sell cheese articles? There is a plethora of cooking magazines available; even a wine magazine could be wooed with an esoteric article about goat cheese. One should also remember the local farm magazines such as Farm Journal (www.farmjournal.com) and Ohio Farmer (www.ohiofarmer.com). Don't forget regional and state magazines like Traverse (www.traversemagazine.com), Sunset (www.sunset.com) or Montana Magazine (www.montanamagazine.com).

Need a bit more help? How about trade magazines? If you'd like a nicely listed grouping of different trade magazines, check out: http://www.resinets.com/media/magstrd.htm Some categories are limited, but others, such as computers, have many possibilities.

Freelancing is easiest when you write about what you know. It's a worn and haggard cliché, but the truth is there. When you write what you know, you're writing from the heart, which reflects in the final product and tends to make the sale just a little easier. Actually, the fastest and easiest money flocks to your mailbox when you already know the subject and don't need to invest a lot of time researching. Of course, research is always a good thing; especially if you want to give your article that extra special punch.

Remember, specialty magazines have lower readership numbers than Time or Newsweek. As such, they usually don't have the staff to create all the articles they publish. Hence, freelancing fills most of their needs and your coffers.

If you love it, you can write it. If you write it, they will buy it.

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R. S. Nailor is Poetry Editor and Production Manager for the Emporium Gazette. His manuscript, THREE STEPS: THE JOURNEYS OF AYROLD, is currently in the final stages of editing. He has short stories included in three ebook anthologies from 23House and numerous articles and poems elsewhere on the internet. You can visit him at Lore's Webs.

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PROSPERITY
by Jonathan Laden

In the peak of summer, you have to get out of the house just to breathe. By early afternoon the air inside is so thick and stuffy it'll burn your throat if you don't. Besides, the windows swell up, so you couldn't open them even if you wanted to.

I oversleep this morning -- might have something to do with Lester's new still he's been going on about, might not. I surely can't remember. Thank the Lord, Mary Lou thinks to come inside and fetch me out.

It ain't easy for her. She being only six, but sharp as a ten-penny nail. Takes after her mama, she do. If I could spend every waking moment just watching over her, I surely would. I don't know why I waste any time at all on that shit from Lester's still when she is about, but I do -- leastways I suspect I did.

Anyway, she pulls me free of the covers on my bed and tosses a handful of cold water at me. The shock of it bounces me right up to where I could stumble free of the house and onto the porch. I collapse into a heap faster than a puppet with no master.

Then she lays out atop me. It's almost too hot to breathe, even outside. I let her lay there; for Mary Lou I'll gladly sweat a river, even while my head throbs in time to the beating of her little heart.

We stay that way for maybe twenty minutes or so, in the sweltering mid-summer sun. I start to drift off, thinking a bit of a snooze might stop that pain at the back of my skull.

But soon's I do, she rolls right off a me. Propping her head up on her hands, her elbows digging into the splintery wood of the porch, she gets all solemn. Her serious face is so exactly like her mama's it sends a shiver down my spine.

"What is it, honey-bear?"

"Joey down the block's been telling tales. Have we always been poor, Daddy?"

Not always. I close my eyes and instantly I am in the before time, at the dawn of the age of magic. Leastways that's what they were calling it then. There was little machines that would darn your socks, keep you healthy as a robot, even spin you gold if you rumpelstilskinned hard enough. I was a young man then, ready to swallow the whole world in a single gulp. It was all so perfect.

Yolanda and me had been struggling something awful, then the government came in with the little black magic boxes. Suddenly, we was richer than Midas. If I'd only known then how short-lived it was all to be.

She pounds me on the chest. "Daddy, were we always poor? Was Joey talking true?"

I squeeze my eyes tight. Whatever did happen? That's right; the bigshots came back for our boxes and our nano magics. They looked at the boxes, and reversed every last thing the magics had done. The rich folk -- the old real rich folk that is -- they were rioting, demanding the right to be on top. Turns out it weren't enough to have everything they could possibly want. They needed to have more. More than someone else. More than us.

You just can't be prosp'rous unless you've got stuff some one can't get their hands on. The rich folks taught me that.

"Daddy. What's wrong? You're looking all sad like. We were rich, weren't we?"

When they took the boxes, we went back to our simple ways: eating two meals a day; slaving at back-breaking work through the long fall and winter. Then there was two months of nothing, when it was too hot even for a mule like me to labor: the peak of summer.

Then Mary Lou came down with something, something bad our corner doc' couldn't patch up. She was only two, and like as not to perish. I prayed and prayed, 'til my hands shook with the clasping, and my knees sprouted callouses.

Yolanda didn't pray, not even a bit. She got all determined like, and disappeared into the cellar. Darned if she didn't come back up with one of them magic boxes cradled against her side.

"You know we ain't sposed to have that," I said.

She didn't say a word. She just broke the seal and put the nanos onto Mary Lou.

My prayers were answered.

"Now yore crying." Mary Lou wipes at my cheeks. "We weren't rich then, after all." She has decided it: I can see it in the set of her eyes.

But we were. For a time after that we ate grand food again, and rumpelstilskinned gold when the urge took us. Yolanda's eyes lit up with a joy that was a sight to behold. She started keeping a bucket of bleach in each room. It was an old magic to ward off the evil spirits that had sickened Mary Lou, I assumed.

I enjoyed the food too, but I was worried. The neighbors must have noticed that Yolanda's clothes were looking finer each day. I tore my own all the more just to compensate. In the end it didn't avail nothing, 'cause the rich men's agents came a'knocking. They asked for the box kindly enough. Said it was their duty to prevent the rich folks from rioting. This was the best way to keep everyone safe, likely the only way.

"C'mon give over the box," I said to Yolanda, who squeezed it to her chest so hard, her knuckles turned white. "These mens is only doing their jobs." We knew it couldn't last. They would have to come for their magicks soon enough, and so they had.

She shook her head. "What if Mary Lou gets sick again?" She whispered. "I'm not parting with this. It's my birthright as a human bean."

"No, ma'am. I'm afraid I've got to take those nano-probes in for examining. And if they healed your Mary Lou like you say, we'll have to reverse the process. To keep the peace, you understand."

Quicker than lightning jumping off a bug, she dashed to the corner dunked that box into the bleach, just before the two mens' bullets ripped through her flesh.

Mary Lou tugs on my shirt sleeve, which by now is drenched in my sweat. "Answer me, Daddy, or I'm gonna believe everthing that Joey says?"

"No, honey, when your Mama was alive, we was as rich as any family can ever pray to be. The whole time." I wrap my arms around Mary Lou until she struggles to get away from me.

Even as her slippery little self pushes against my arms to get free she is laughing. Them rich folks can't lay a finger on my Mary Lou. Nor can anyone anywheres have my heart as she does. We ain't as poor as all that, not even now.

* * * * *