Is Book Antiqua a good font for books? Personally, I feel it’s harder to read than comparable fonts. BA letters are taller, so you will be hard-pressed to fit as much space between each line. See this sample for more details.
Comic book villain who controls water that is a guy. Hydro-Man?
Why are so many superhero stories set in cities? Because superheroes need lots of people to save, and cities have more violent crimes that threaten lots of people. Most superhero stories have the heroes encounter crime whenever they go out on patrol, and that’s more believable in New York than New Hampshire. Also, cityscapes tend to look cooler than small towns.
I am on fire and need writing advice. I’d recommend dealing with the on fire thing first.
The screenwriter for Battlefield Earth has written an amusing article describing his experience. And, also, an unsuccessful search for love on a Scientologist cruise. No matter how bad your writing is, please rest assured that it’ll never be that bad. And, if it IS that bad, please find some other line of work.
1. Be quietly confident. Ideally, confident enough to encourage prospective publishers and agents but not so arrogant that working with you sounds difficult.
2. You need self-confidence to drive yourself through an emotionally grueling publishing process. Getting published will probably take thousands of hours of writing, submitting, rewriting and resubmitting. If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else can help you much.
3. Your query doesn’t need to say anything about you, and shouldn’t say much. Only talk about yourself if it makes you sound like you will sell thousands of copies. For example, if you’re professionally published (any medium), have professional experience relevant to what you’re writing (like a doctor writing a medical drama), already have a large audience (through a day job, perhaps), have worked in the publishing industry or have something similarly impressive, say so. If you don’t have any impressive publishing credentials, that’s fine–just focus entirely on what will actually impress the editor: namely, your book.
Kindergarten would have been a lot more kickass if I had had these when I was learning the alphabet. Most of these are pretty amusing, but I highly recommend D and X. Here’s Z.
How to Survive a Publisher’s Google Check (by editor Meghan Conrad). Your publisher will probably Google you before offering a contract to make sure you’re consistently professional and easy to work with.
More Query Blunders (by agent Laura Bradford) — among other things, be very careful about mocking/insulting authors or genres the agent or publisher works with.
Image is trying to promote its upcoming Invincible spinoff, Guardians of the Globe, and it hasn’t announced the team membership yet. However, it has released some teasers, which are pretty funny… especially if you’re familiar with Wolverine Publicity.
I get so many queries that read (literally, though this is made up for the purposes of this post) like this:
Character Name is living peacefully in Hometown. But then a life-changing event occurs that changes everything. Secrets are revealed that turn her life upside down. Character Name faces grave danger as she embarks on a quest to save her people. This novel is filled with humor and passion and suspense and romance, and there’s a shocking twist that leaves the reader breathless.
Being vague leaves an agent with so many questions: What are the secrets? What is the life-changing event? What is the danger she’s facing? What happens that is funny and suspenseful and romantic?
When all of these key details are kept hidden the query ends up sounding like… well, pretty much every novel ever written. And chances are an agent is going to move on to the next query.
Here are twenty sets of questions to help you check your writing.
1. Is the story easy to read through? Will readers understand what is happening as they read through it for the first time?
2. At the end of each chapter, does the audience want to keep reading? For example, perhaps you make an exciting revelation, leave a character in danger, leave a character on the verge of doing or learning something interesting, etc.
3. Do the characters have high-stakes, urgent goals? If not, check the pacing. When little is at stake, the plot tends to drag.
4. Does each paragraph develop a character or advance the plot? If not, rewrite or shorten or remove as necessary. One common offender here is unnecessary dialogue, such as niceties.
5. Does the plot challenge the protagonists? Is there doubt they will succeed? If the plot is too easy, you could make the antagonists tougher, make side-characters less supportive of the protagonists, make the protagonists less powerful, etc.
Agent Kristin has some suggestions for applicants to her literary agency, but I think they’re mostly applicable to prospective publishing professionals across the board. Even for applicants looking at the comic books/graphic novels side of the publishing industry.
If you’re looking for a low-stakes way to get a short story (up to 6000 words) published, This Mutant Lifemight be worth looking into. You can see its submission guidelines here. “Stories which deal with the everyday lives of people with unusual abilities or physical characteristics are ideal, and there will be a definite preference given to stories which present interesting and well defined characters and situations.” The pay is extremely low, though.
UPDATE: A Thousand Faces is a quarterly journal that also specializes in superhero stories. You can see its submissions page here.
One of the more frustrating things I see is when an author tries to give a character a guilty backstory but one he is utterly not responsible for. For example, the character’s powers might manifest by killing the town and/or pretty much everybody she knows. (Please see the TV Tropes Power Incontinence page for more examples).
If you want this character to feel guilty about her backstory, why not make her actually responsible for the accident? For example, instead of having uncontrollable poison-massacre powers*, which is merely awful luck, maybe the character has powers that he uses in a reckless or ill-conceived way. For example, maybe a flame-controller accidentally blows up a neighborhood by lighting up a gas line. It’s still unintentional, but at least this gives him a choice to regret and atone for. Overcoming that will be more dramatic than “Gee, I’m sorry I was born to be a town-killer.” If the goal of the story is to have the character atone for his sins, it probably won’t be too dramatic if he’s not actually responsible for the sins in question. Or, if the character’s powers are completely uncontrollable, perhaps the character played some role in acquiring them, like participating in some poorly thought-out scientific experiment.
*Which are a losing Superpower Lottery ticket if ever there were one. Pretty much everybody else in Heroes has something cool like superstrength or flight or time-travel. Poor Maya. Even the psychopathic serial killer has more control over his face-ripping telekinesis than she does. (Also, he spent a lot less time moping about his body count than she did).
Hello. If you haven’t seen my comic book’s five sample pages already, please check them out here and sign up for a chance to win a free signed copy when it comes out. Thanks! Having more interested readers will help me get published and I really appreciate your time.
Check out Fraggmented’s “Comic Book Insanity” category. Here are some choice excerpts.
Then, while passing a volcano, Carol comments that Wonder Woman’s invisible plane obeys her every command “like magic!” To which WW responds, “The magic of science, Carol!” This is bitterly ironic, given that less than ten issues earlier Kanigher had explained that Wonder Woman’s plane was made when a magical cloud turned a flying horse into an invisible airplane. But she goes on to explain that little computers in the plane make it obey Wonder Woman and only Wonder Woman, just like even smaller computers in the lasso do the same thing! (Those of you going, “Huh?!?!?!?” should probably take a little break from reading this. It doesn’t get any better.)
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In the original ‘X-Men’ #1, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, we open with a sequence of Professor X running the team through their training regimen. Beast has to do a difficult acrobatic routine, Angel must fly an obstacle course…then the young sixteen-year old Iceman gets a turn, but Professor X is “going easy” on him by merely requiring him to display his powers. Iceman frosts himself over with snow…and Professor X telepathically tells the Beast to chuck a bowling ball at his head while he’s distracted, to “test his reflexes”.
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At some point, logic dictates that he’s secretly trying to kill Iceman, and the whole “training exercise” thing is just an alibi.
Two things jump out at me here. First, the author’s royalty is proportionally much larger with e-books than hardcovers (20-25% compared to 15%, and even lower for paperbacks). Second, since distributing an e-book is cheaper, the cost to consumers should drop considerably.
Picture taken from the New York Times. Full article here. This statistic caught my eye: “The industry is based on the understanding that as much as 70 percent of the books published will make little or no money at all for the publisher once costs are paid.”
The Batman was terrible. If you’re mainly watching this for comedic potential, I’d get as many Spanish-speakers or gringos as you can find, and let’s learn about the difference between “el” and “la” with Batman. –There’s a spectacularly strange scene where Batman tries interrogating Riddler and Riddler bursts into a soprano rendition of Ave Maria. […]
–There’s intense violence but not a lot of feeling here. It’s not a very exciting movie. But it’s functional. It’s frequently tedious but rarely boring. Only the political sermons and Weasel are viciously bad. It’s definitely a huge improvement over the first movie. –Most of what sucked about Suicide Squad 1 was an overfocus on […]
1:30 – 6:55: Cyborg sees his Mother Box acting up. Then Mera sees her Mother box acting up. Then Amazon guards see their Mother Box acting up. Also there’s a Lex Luthor flashback where the computer shows him that Mother Boxes are plot relevant in case you missed that. PS: In the first 8 minutes […]
–Wonder Woman 1984 is not nearly as good at the original. Pluses: the cast is still very charming, and a few of the fight scenes are effective. I did actually like most of the first hour of the movie. –Setting: In the original Wonder Woman, the WWI setting contributes to a hard bleakness which effectively […]
1. I don’t know where to start with Captain Marvel. So many things went so wildly wrong that we’d need a presidential commission to get to the bottom of it. It’s like the Chernobyl of superhero movies. 2. If at any point you feel like your action movie would benefit from a character whose main […]
1. This version of Spider-Man is a useless toolbox who actively avoids doing interesting things, and what he does attempt is usually wimpy and/or incompetent. 2. Unlike most main characters, his choices don’t matter much. For example, he chooses to leave his supersuit at home (but his aunt sneaks it in anyway) and he tries […]
We’re up to 72 superhero movies since 2000 (current as of November 2017). You can download the full data here. Some observations: R movies are making up the quality gap with PG-13 movies. Superhero movies are improving. Over the last 5 years (2013-2017), the average superhero movie is averaging 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, up […]
