I stumbled upon this site today. You can type in the name of paying or non-paying publications and find their writer’s guidelines. Publications are also broken out into categories like historical, food and career. Check it out. It might be a one-stop shop for you when it comes to finding the information you need for your target market. And you might find some new publications to send to.
http://www.writerswrite.com/writersguidelines/
Angela Wilson – Wicked Wordsmith
I’m going to tell you something you won’t hear much at conferences. We are all told that if we hone our craft and become an excellent writer, we will be published. That is only part of it. Ultimately, it’s the story that counts. It’s stories editors buy. You can be a wonderful writer, your words can sing, but if you don’t tell an intriguing, spell binding story, those words are worth little. Of course, a good story without exceptional writing won’t sell either. Please don’t remind me of that horrible book you tried to read last week and threw across the room. That I can’t explain.
Let’s concentrate on creating such vivid word pictures neither editors nor readers can resist. In other words, show don’t tell.
As with all rules, there are times when we must break this one as well. Occasionally, it is necessary to get past something that has happened which we don’t wish to use as a scene. Sometimes dialogue will serve us better in this situation than narration or exposition, because we can show off our characters as they discuss what happened. Either way, there are times when you have to tell it and get on with the story. Only you, as a writer, can decide which occurrences need to be scenes that show, and which ones must be told.
Excerpts from my historical novel, AN ENEMY PRESENCE, still looking for a home.
Here’s the scene:
He awoke to a terrible silence. Across his neck lay a heavy arm and his cheek pressed into the frozen earth. He couldn’t move or feel anything. Thought he might be dead, or frozen so stiff he would never move again. He might only be a spirit lingering over the battlefield where the white soldiers had killed all the Beautiful People. But his leg hurt too much for him to be dead.
A moon set as the sun rose to show the bodies lying about some covered with new fallen snow.
Then he saw his friend White Elk and knew he was dead from the ghastly expression on his face.
Here’s how to show it, not tell it:
Silence hammered in his ears, more intense than the rumble of gunfire that lingered in his memory. An arm, heavy with death, lay across the back of his neck, pinning his cheek against the frozen, blood-soaked earth. He had no muscle or bone but sprawled limp, molded into the snow bank. Either he had perished under the white soldier’s vicious attack or had frozen stiff. Perhaps this was only a vision of himself alive, his spirit determined to take one final look at what horrors had been visited on the Beautiful People before they were dispatched to the afterlife. But surely he lived, for a vicious fire burned in his side and leg.
A stench of black powder and blood and gore hung in the cold air that earlier had echoed with the blue coat’s hideous shouts. To the west a silver moon poised like a plate on a shelf, then slipped below the horizon. Even as it disappeared a wintry sun burst to life, its golden light nipping at ghastly shadows that obscured the battlefield. Bodies, weapons and blood glistened with a coat of new fallen snow.
Still afraid to move, Stone Heart gazed into the grotesque face of his friend White Elk, who lay deathly still, arms and legs splayed awkwardly. Eyes wide and unseeing, mouth open in a silent scream; blood matted the ebony braids, a rime of ice frosted his flesh.
This scene is vivid with description buried within the mind of Stone Heart as he regains consciousness and realizes what has happened to his people. But it isn’t description alone, it pushes the story forward into what will, what must happen next. When he realizes he has been left for dead by the white soldiers who will surely return with the coming of dawn. For the purpose of analyzing this scene, it will help you to know that Stone Heart is the illegitimate son of George Armstrong Custer and a Cheyenne mother. A man who was raised white, but has returned to his mother’s people who, on the verge of extinction, struggle to return to their homeland. It is the final winter of the Northern Cheyenne.
Velda Brotherton has been writing in various genres for 25 years. Her latest book, Fly With The Mourning Dove, is creative nonfiction and tells the true story of a young girl growing up on a homestead in New Mexico after the turn of the 20th century. Visit her site, www.veldabrotherton.com. 
Contributor Lee Lofland recently participated in this blog. Check it out:
http://thelipstickchronicles
Angela Wilson – Wicked Wordsmith
It seems to me that locations for a novel are a must and, if used, must be so specific that your readership will know exactly the location you are describing. That is, they will know for sure if you are using a real city and not a dreamed up fantasy land as you would find in science fiction on some distant planet.
There is a Highway 1 on both coasts of the United States. You cannot write, “John drive west on Hwy 1 for four miles,” since that highway runs north and south. Interstates 70 and 80 run east and west. If you have a chase scene through Washington, DC, you must know which way the streets run and whether they are one way and in which direction.
When I had a talk with mystery writer Doris Miles Disney and told her about the chase scene in my novel, she admonished me that I could not write about a city if I had never been there and explored it. She warned me that I should not be so specific unless I knew about what I was writing. I assured her that I had a map of Washington, DC and at the time period of the novel, knew which street was one way north, south, east and west. I could not have my character get from the Jefferson Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial without driving on three streets.
Very few people realize that the Pentagon is not in Washington, DC, but Alexandria, VA, instead. Entry to the Pentagon’s parking lots is either from the north or the south. People are also unaware of the many stores and restaurants located inside the Pentagon just outside the doors into the security-ridden complex and just above the escalators from the subway. I didn’t know until I made a visit both as a person on a mission while in the military or shortly after being discharged.
In DC itself, the Forrestal Building housed the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and was located one street south of the old brick Smithsonian Building. The Forrestal Building is now home for the EPA. The Marine Barracks is just east Capital Hill and Southeast Washington DC is the smallest of the four quadrants that make up the city. There are more twists and turns in the city than you find in major mystery novels and if you use outside scenery as a backdrop, you must be correct or your readers will correct you.
If your plan is to use the ghetto as a backdrop, you need to know where it is located. Things have changed since the riots during the 60s. Old bars and restaurants I used to frequent when I lived in Virginia are no longer present; the national convention center was built in their place between the police station to the east and the bus station to the west.
Things change, so know whereof you write when using directions for a backdrop. Make that race through downtown streets real for your readers by having the directions correct from the beginning.
George Thompson is a regular contributor to Wicked Wordsmith. You can find his book reviews at www.PopSyndicate.com.
Does your character sweat? If so, when?
Sounds weird, right? Think about this: Your character is an assassin. He doesn’t break a sweat when he’s staring down the barrel of his gun, or knocking someone around, but his palms get clammy and he sweats like mad when a redhead walks by.
Angela Wilson – Wicked Wordsmith
I’ve been writing fiction for about 10 years now. I wrote a few bad novels and then started writing short stories. I’ve taken creative writing classes in Boston, Montana, and then at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I earned my MFA in 2002. I’ve now published about a dozen or so in various literary journals, mostly print and not online. For a long time I thought this would be how I’d get noticed, but after about 10 published stories, hundreds of rejections and no agent willing to come within a mile of my collection, I began to lose hope. At the same time, my attempts at writing a literary novel weren’t going so well. Basically, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. So I started writing my first crime novel, Jack Wakes Up and had a ball with it. I gave myself a deadline, finished the first draft before that, and then ended up spending the better part of 6 months revising it. When I first pitched to agents, I thought I’d hit gold: right off the bat, two wanted to see the whole thing. Then, when they got it, neither of them was interested. One suggested revisions, which I did and then re-sent it. I never heard back from the guy. It just felt like I’d written yet another project that I’d wind up tinkering at and revising until it drove me silly.
Then, about a year ago, I submitted a story to an online publication, Storyglossia.com. It was accepted and suddenly more people started reading my work than had ever before. I struck up a relationship with the editor and found out he had 2000 visitors a day and my story was consistently in his top 5. So I figured I’d better get a website and start putting up my work. All of a sudden it felt like a good way to find an audience. Around this time, a friend suggested that I try podcasting. I didn’t even know what podcasting was, but he introduced me to a few fiction podcasts, showed me the number of listeners some were drawing (over 20,000), and introduced me to Scott Sigler, the daddy of them all, who helped me work through the technical issues of production. I made a website and in July of 06, I started podcasting Jack Wakes Up. It just felt like a better process than spending my time sending out more submissions. I figured it would help me put the book behind me, read through it for final edits, and that once I had some listeners and success, it would only help my agent query letters. I felt like it was a way I could move on from the novel and start writing something else.
When I got through the 20 half-hour (at least) episodes of Jack Wakes Up in late fall, I’d learned A LOT about computers, site hosting, and sound production. I’d also drawn some recognition and over 500 listeners. I did this by getting help from other podcasters who ran promos for me, and by joining the site Podiobooks.com, which acts as a sort of library for podcast fiction. Then I went back to agents with my new queries, a ready-to-go manuscript and audience, and they brushed me off again.
So what did I do? I kept podcasting. Here’s the great thing about podcasting: during Jack Wakes Up, listeners started writing in, contacting me to say they liked what I was doing. That was the coolest thing ever! For the first time I was actually getting consistent positive feedback from an audience. I mean the goal of podcasting was to develop an audience, something I could say in a cover letter, like “I’ve podcasted this book to over 1,000 listeners.” But the thing was that podcasting became more than a means to a goal, it became something that meant instant promotion, a hard line relationship with an audience, and something that I was doing with writing that was fun!
Let me break it down: podcasting was
1) a way to feel like I was ready to move on from my first crime novel: while I was podcasting, I went over final edits, and came to feel like I was done with the book, that it was “out there.”
2) a way to read it through carefully and actually look at those edits
3) an exposure to a great audience: for the first time people I wasn’t related to were excited about what I was doing and following my work. People started to write in and get involved. I got to know them and they started helping me with promotions. Also, people wanted more from me: to know more, to read more, to hear more of my work. As a writer, it’s been great having that demand for what I write. So good that in the winter I started podcasting my stories.
4) Also, in market speak, I’m building an audience, growing my name recognition and “branding” Seth Harwood. I know a lot of my listeners would buy a book that I published. They’ve written in and told me so. I’ve seen Scott Sigler take his listeners and get them into a campaign that sent his second book to #7 on Amazon.com the first day it came out. He sold 4,000 copies in the first week alone, with no marketing budget, no money spent, and a tiny POD publisher. In each of my episodes, I’ve started talking about what I’m up to and asking my readers for help with things. For my second book, This Is Life, I’ve had listeners design the cover, add voices, make a pdf of Jack Wakes Up, and help me redesign my website. I now have a whole page of fan art on the site. It’s really cool. A lot of them want to do voices and like being involved.
5) Podcasting has been a great entry into promotions. This goes with 4, but basically by joining the podcast community, I’ve gotten to know a lot of other folks who’re doing it and since there’s not so many of us, we can all help each other. And people really are helpful. When I started my pitch to promote JP2, I was able to get a lot of people interested in having me on for an interview. It’s really helped me build momentum.
Now I’m asking published crime writers to come on and do cameo spots, introductions. They’re happy to do it because it’s free promotion for them in just a short phone call.
Now I look back at the hope I had of someone choosing my book from a submission and publishing it, and I know even if they had, the book wouldn’t have had any promotion. Now I am my own promotion, which makes me more attractive to a publisher because I know I can sell some books as soon as they come out. Has anyone woken up to that and signed me on yet? Nope. But as long as I keep building an audience, seeing my numbers grow up, and hearing from people who love my work, I’m finally able to be patient about it.
Seth Harwood is an an author and story podcaster. If you would like to know more about podcasting, or his work, visit his site at www.sethharwood.com to send a message.