Helpful Info

At a recent Dove Tale meeting, we were astounded and, I suspect, discomfited to learn that, for the very first time ever, the male participants outnumbered the female! Of course, we resorted to arm-wrestling to determine whose manuscript was best, drank a keg of cough syrup, force-fed ourselves nachos until we were dizzy, and slept out in the back yard. The police were called but placated. A good time was had by all.

But possibly more shocking was that I actually had some interesting resources to share with the group! To allow the shock to wear off I've waited a while to post it. You're welcome.

First, here are two blogs that, if you're considering querying agents at all, you must read. Often. They are:

• Miss Snark, Literary Agent (there's an indexed list of her topics here) - She's an honest-to-god New York literary agent who answers readers' e-mails and talks about her views of the business and her clients. Twice a year she directly critiques queries online. This gal tells it like it is.
  
  
• Publishing Rants - Not all literary agents are in New York. This one is in Colorado and has extremely interesting opinions on the business. She's really nice, too.

Here are a couple of other interesting people in the business, too:

• J.A. Konrath - A successful novelist who sheds a lot of light on many aspects of the writing life.
  
  
• Simon Haynes - An Australian SF author who is in the middle of publishing his series of books. He also develops software for writers: his free novel planning and query tracking software are also available somewhere from his blog.

Anyone else have some interesting links to share? Put 'em in the comments!

So that's the fun stuff. I also had a request to explain how I inserted a hyperlink in the comments on this blog. I'll give a short lesson in HTML here -- not wanting to insult anyone, of course; if you already know this stuff, ignore me!

The comments recognize a lot of standard HTML. That means that if you put tags around text, it'll look different. A tag is stuff surrounded by angle brackets (that is, the <> sign). On this blog, I'm going to use "[" and "]" instead of "<" and ">" because otherwise they won't show up!

For example, if you put [b] and [/b] around text, it looks bold. Put [i] and [/i] around it, it's in italics.

Links are created with the [a] tag. (Trivia: "a" is for anchor!) To create a link, do this:

[a href="http://www.theURLyouwanttolinkto.com"]The text of the link[/a]

Don't forget!

• The URL you want to link to is in quotation marks.
• You have to close the link with the [/a] tag.
• There's a space between "a" and "href" in the first tag.

Here endeth the lesson. Any further help, let me know in the comments. And I'll try to remember to check 'em more often...


Cheers
M@



P.S. Would anyone mind if I added myself to this blog so that I can post from my own blogger account? It would save me a lot of headaches every time I want to post something...