The 7x7 Link Award

Tim Riley and Rusty Webb awarded me with the  7x7 Link Award.  Basically this award involves looking back at old posts to find pieces of writing that made a mark, and I can appreciate this.

Most Beautiful:  I think that my most beautiful post is going to be the one that has (in my opinion) the best looking art on it. That would have to be my post on the art selected for the 2012 George R.R. Martin Calendar that I put up. These pictures by John Picacio are plain awesome.

Most Helpful:  I'd say this goes to "The Misunderstood Exclamation Point" which consequently is one of my better searches that seems to come up.  People googling it are probably pissed off that my post is such a smartass one. Honestly, for genuine writing advice, Moody Writing by Mooderino is the place to go. Here on my site, I don't feel I can add anything to the world of writing so instead I choose to be snarky about most things.  Mooderino is on a one-person mission to make every blogger into someone that writes Pulitzer Prize-winning prose.  It's too bad that the authors making millions will never adhere to any of Mooderino's advice. But college professors who sell five books a year are so on top of that.

Most Popular:  This is a huge surprise but blogger stats says it is my post on "The Eyrie".  I guess this must be because of the popularity of George R.R. Martin's writing.

Most Controversial:  My recent post on Understanding Men To Write Your Fiction. It got a lot of views and quite a few one-page comments.

Most Surprisingly Successful:  My flash fiction entry for Rachael Harrie's third platform-building crusade.  It got almost 90 comments.  I was pretty stunned.  It's the post with the most comments but not the post with the most page views.

Most Underrated:  I think my most underrated post is the one where I show what Wonder Woman can show us about writing.  It took a lot of thought and was one of my more interesting .gif parades.

Most Prideworthy:  This is easy.  My post on signing with Double Dragon Publishing for my upcoming novel.  I must have gotten rejected by agents fifty times (I think) before I gave up.  In there somewhere was a few partials, one full manuscript request, and comments like "LOL...I can't represent this," or "Hey there, I think if you go into a bookstore you'll find the kind of books that you want to write and answer your own question."

The last response came from a "big wheel" in the writing industry.  I asked him via email if being a debut author in this terrible economy coupled with a gay male protagonist was essentially "asking the impossible" from the Big Six Publisher from a pure marketing standpoint.  Needless to say, I did go out and investigate and discovered "my kinds of books" next to the restroom under the burned out flickering fluorescent light bulb.  No one else was in the aisle...the shelves looked dusty.  My "kinds" of books got the same treatment as the YA books that feature black protagonists.

So I decided to pursue small- to mid-size publishers. We had a discussion on Rogue Mutt's blog sometime this year about the benefits of going with a small- to mid-size publisher and the general consensus is that a publisher of any kind seemed "better" for most people than just self-publishing. So that's why I did it.  And I never felt better about my writing.

I was able to go back to the sequel and finish it and feel like it was going to be read.  I had closure on that first book that I wrote for the series because an actual editor liked it.  More importantly, I could stop hunting for ideas to pen yet another novel to query after the current one got rejected by all the agents out there (the third one that I wrote just this year...and yes it's finished but just sitting in a drawer. It's a fantasy instead of sci-fi and I've queried it to only 8 agents who rejected it).  Just for the record...what a bunch of bullshit that cycle is.  Writing a novel to collect rejections.  Exhausting your list of agents and then writing another novel to rinse/repeat.  Especially when you know that your previous novel is good...and you go back to it and read it again and guess what...it really is good.

I also honestly didn't think that my sci-fi book would ever find a home. I sent it to Samhain where it got rejected, then onto Mundania Press where it got rejected, and to the slush piles at both Tor and Penguin (which subsequently rejected it).  These last two were really slow.  When you submit your manuscript to a publisher, they frequently want exclusivity while considering it.  So Tor and Penguin each took 6-months (one year right there waiting for rejections on those two).  I also tried Bold Strokes Books and Dreamspinner Press and got rejected.  I'd always kept my eye on Double Dragon...but never got the guts to submit to them (and plus their submission requirements looked really frickin' hard).  I also thought to myself that if a genuine honest to god sci-fi publisher read my book and rejected it, then I should just hang up my writing and move onto something else...so that may have been a huge delay in me asking Double Dragon to publish my book.

Meanwhile, all I was doing was sitting around writing more books and haunting Rogue Mutt's blog where I have three times the amount of comments than anyone else that goes there because I can be an opinionated man who likes the world to know what his opinions are.  I guess that's the danger with all of us, right? People better not piss us off because we are writers and by god...every single one of us will log onto our blogs and yap yap yap our fingers off about what we think and then hit "publish" to the world.  I think my brother lives in fear that I'll put something about him up here and then have 100 comments on it from people he's never met.

PASSING ON THE BULLSHIT CHAIN LETTER...ERRR, I MEAN SEVEN MORE BLOGGERS WHO ARE WINNERS OF THIS OUTSTANDING AWARD:

Here is where I pick on bestow seven people to receive this honor.  I choose the following:

Steph Schmidt
E.J. Wesley
Sarah Ketley
Tamara Paulin
Danette Baltzer
Joe Vasicek
J.L. Campbell

Remember you winners that your thanks for choosing you above all others is not necessary. I know how overwhelmed you must feel. If you truly must thank me, never ever pick me for a blog award again. That in itself shall be sufficient.  However, if this be my fate, I too shall return the thanks whenever I get the opportunity.  I can promise that much.

Hugs and kisses XOXO  :)