I’m such a huge fan of Sirens Conference, a fantasy reader-con that has created a beautiful inclusive community over the years. So I jumped at the chance to contribute to this year’s benefit anthology. All proceeds go back to Sirens Conference to fund scholarships for those who might not otherwise be able to participate.
And as soon as I saw the theme–Villains & Vengeance–I knew exactly which story I was going to submit. I wrote “Space Carrion” in 2016, shopping it around to folks who didn’t quite know what to do with it. It satirizes some gold-standard misogynist tropes in classic science fiction. One editor even asked me if the satire was intentional (“If you have to ask…you’ll never know!”).
Suffice it to say no queer people, women, or people from other marginalized communities are fridged in “Space Carrion.” In fact, I like to think of it as my way of avenging all their needless deaths. And for true fans, there’s plenty of space-geekery and fun tech. Because I really do love the genre, even if it hasn’t always loved me.
Here’s a little more, from the jacket copy. “The stories and poems in this collection speak of villains who seek to control or kill, survivors seeking revenge, and good people making hard decisions. Sometimes uncomfortable, often scary, this anthology has contributions across the spectrum of speculative fiction, including fantasy, science fiction, and horror, from ten talented authors who invite you into the worlds they have created.”
Villains & Vengeance: a Sirens Benefit Anthology featuring “Space Carrion” by fantasy author Julie Artz is out now.
In July’s newsletter, I promised something special and here it is: My FREE 12 Weeks to Your NaNo Win course! I’ve always wanted to take my readers along on my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) journey. And now I’m going to do it! Next week, subscribers will receive the first of twelve customized email lessons full of tips, tricks, exercises, and inspiration aimed at helping you find that elusive NaNo win!
The FREE 12 Weeks to a NaNo Win course includes the following topics:
Finding the elusive “high concept” idea
Researching genre and comp titles
Choosing themes
Creating a killer pitch
The Five major story beats
Mapping a character arc
Introduction to world building
First Week Drafting – Hooking your reader
Second Week Drafting – Everything changes
Third Week Drafting – Midpoint reflection
Fourth Week Drafting – HEA, HFN, or tragedy? You decide!
Now what?
My NaNo Wins
I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo for ten years now (!!), either during the month of November or during one of the Camp NaNo months (April and July). And I can tell you that fast drafting has been really effective in helping me silence the inner editor and explore a new story idea. But I have the best success when I do a little bit of planning before November 1. So I’m going to share my prewriting technique with you in a series of seven mini-lessons, then give you four drafting challenges during the month of November. We’ll wrap up with next steps, including an introduction to my revision process.
How do I sign up?
Subscribe today at pages.julieartz.com/nanowin so that you don’t miss out on this free 12-week email series or the tips, tricks, and giveaways that I’m only making available to my subscribers! And follow along on Instagram as I answer your burning NaNo prep and fast drafting questions all season long.
Need extra support as you draft? Check out my Six-Week Prewriting Intensive and coaching packages on my Book Coaching page.
In book coaching, every once in a while you get to work with a client whose story is literally life or death.
That was the case when I met author, entrepreneur, and tech marketing executive, Sonia Hunt in early 2020. The story of her life-long struggle—and eventual triumph—over life-threatening food allergies is one of inspiration, humor, and perseverance that will resonate with anyone who deals with chronic illness as part of their daily life.
JULIE: This story was literally life and death for you. Tell us why you had to write it.
SONIA HUNT: I beat the odds in many ways, especially because I eventually eliminated my severe food allergies. In my core I felt a need to share my story of trials and tribulations to ultimate triumph with the 32 million people in the U.S. who suffer from severe food allergies, so that they too can thrive. I want to give hope to people who don’t feel they have it given their health situation.
JULIE: Why did you hire a book coach to help you finish it?
SONIA HUNT: It truly does take a village, especially with a big project like writing a book. My philosophy was not to write this in a black box, but rather garner the right type of help. I’m a big fan of coaching in general, so it seemed like a positive direction for my book. In searching for a book coach, I needed to find someone who “got me” and understood what I wanted to put out into the world. Then together, I felt that we could shape the story into something magical. And we did.
JULIE: What was working with a book coach like?
SONIA Hunt: One word: simply amazing! Oh, that’s 2 words ☺ Thank goodness you were interested in my story and took the time to be interested in me and what my vision was. We had great chemistry from the get-go and created a process that was comfortable for me. You helped me to shape all of the “stuff in my head” into a beautiful story that was true to me and also stayed focused on the reader’s perspective.
Read the rest of our Success Story interview here.
I’m so pleased with my new headshots from the talented Krista Fleming at And One More Photo! Seattle-area creators should definitely check out her website. She made me feel relaxed and really captured my personality in a combination of formal shots and candids that I can use for social media.
Krista also does senior photos and family portraits, so she really can do it all.
I’m absolutely thrilled to be mentoring middle grade in Pitch Wars for the fifth year running! This community has meant everything to me over the past seven years and I can’t wait to meet the next members of our Pitch Wars family (shout out to #teamunicornmojo–I love you!). If you’ve followed me for a while, you already know about my book coaching and editing services, but mentorship is also something very near and dear to my heart.
Don’t know what Pitch Wars is all about? Pitch Wars is a volunteer-run mentoring program where published/agented authors, editors, or industry interns choose one writer each to mentor. Mentors read the entire manuscript and offer suggestions on how to make the manuscript shine for the agent showcase. The mentor also helps edit their mentee’s pitch for the contest and their query letter for submitting to agents. Mentors can participate solo or pair up and co-mentor.
During the agent showcase, each mentee is featured on a post that includes their pitch and the first page of their manuscript. Last year, we had 175 agents participate in the showcase. Participating agents view the posts and make requests.
Over the past nine years, Pitch Wars has changed many lives. Countless authors have been matched with agents and even gone on to book deals and successful careers. We’re over 500 successes as of 2020!! But most importantly, Pitch Wars has grown the writing community to connect author with author, creating an atmosphere of camaraderie as we go through all stages of revision and publishing.
All of my mentees have gone on to find agents, and several have book deals on the way. But more importantly, they had the opportunity to learn about the craft of writing, connect with a welcoming community, and make writing friends that will last a lifetime. I couldn’t be more excited to be part of it all once again!
Learn more at pitchwars.org, check out my book coaching and editing services, or ask me your burning questions in the comments!
I’m thrilled to be part of a new book coaching partnership between She Writes Press/Spark Press and Author Accelerator. These amazing hybrid publishers are providing authors with so many exciting new ways to get their books out into the world and now they’re bringing in a select group of Author Accelerator-certified book coaches to help get those stories ready for publication.
Now you can work with an Author Accelerator-certified book coach for your fiction or nonfiction project as part of the She Writes Press/Spark Press publication process.
“At Author Accelerator, we train book coaches to give writers the powerful 1:1 support they need to write books that readers want to read. We’re on a mission to help serious writers get their books onto the page, and we’d be delighted to help you as you prepare to publish with She Writes Press or SparkPress.“
This week, the world turned bitter, as if Mother Nature decided she’d given us a long enough reprieve from winter. And so she sent her sparkling frost, her freezing temperatures, a breeze sharp enough to cut through fleece and down. She sent ice skating across the surface of the pond, refracting crystals creeping up tiny shoots once green, bare branches creaking and crackling in the wind.
Safe inside, I wrap myself in blankets and kittens, distract myself with endless books, but my mind wanders elsewhere. To a place where my toes dip into the surf, where we leave a pair of happy footprints in the sand as we search for seashells. Where we seek a shady spot, the bite of ice-cold boozy fruit, a bit of breeze to cool our skin a brief reprieve from blazing heat.
A year ago, we did not know what was coming, that our chance for travel, for the solace of sand would morph from possibility to far-off dream. That our house, our refuge, might start to feel like a prison we cannot escape. A year ago, we did not know or else I might have raced back down to the water’s edge one more time before we left. I might have savored each moment just a little bit more. We might have never left at all. I wish. Oh how I wish.
I was lucky enough to talk with Brave Yes coach extraordinaire Shawn Fink about how I’ve learned to claim my authentic voice and own my story on her Brave Yes podcast.
As women, we are taught by media, peers, and society at large to put aside our dreams and goals to support others. But that isn’t our only option as women and storytellers. There’s so much more out there for us if we’re brave enough to say YES.
Listen to the story of how I let that false choice go, claimed my authentic voice and my calling, and am living a more fulfilled life in my 40s than I ever have before.
Writers talk a lot about revision. “Revision is where the magic happens.” “I’m going into the revision cave.” “I revised this 852 times before publication.” But to aspiring writers who are still hoping for their first chance to work with an editor, it all sounds equal parts mysterious and daunting. At least it did to me before I became a book coach and freelance editor and became the one sending the edit letters.
That’s why I’m going to give you a peek behind the curtain at the editorial process I went through with my recent short story, “The Wending Way.” Although I will talk in big-picture terms about the changes I made as the story went from idea to first draft to critique group to editorial, I’ll also show you how the first paragraph changed over three rounds of revision with my two editors. Ready?
The spark of an idea
I’ve written before about how the opportunity to contribute to Beyond the Latch and Lever came about. But the tl;dr is I was asked to fill a last-minute open spot and had a very tight deadline. I only had about twelve days to take it from the spark of an idea (a story about a goddess being called home after failing to save the human race) to a fully fleshed out story of around 4,000 words.
Photo and text courtesy of Glimma Publishing
So it’s no surprise that although I kept the first line mostly intact, much of the rest of the story changed through several rounds of edits. One of my favorite parts of looking back at these edits was seeing how the story deepened as I made more passes through it. I added verse. I made the world building more robust. And I tweaked the final lines of the paragraph, which (spoiler alert) are repeated at the end of the story.
The editorial process
I’m fortunate to have a group of writing friends who knew about my deadline and took a couple of passes through this manuscript on very short notice during those twelve intense days. Thank you, Drakainas — you know who you are and what you mean to me. So that’s why the first two passes I’ve outlined here happened based on critique group feedback. If you do not have fellow writers that you trade work with on a regular basis, find some ASAP. Check out local community places like libraries and universities where writers gather, or professional organizations that cater to your chosen genre, age category, and style.
After those initial two passes, I turned the story over to the anthology’s editors. We did a first pass with developmental feedback, and two subsequent passes for line-level edits and copy edits. This is a fairly typical process, although sometimes more than one developmental pass — to look at story structure, characters, and other big-picture issues — might be required. Because the copy edit on the first paragraph involved removing a single comma, I have combined those two editorial passes into one in the image below, which is color-coded by editorial pass. (Pass one is reflected by the red underlines and blue strikethroughs in the image below. Pass two, still with my critique group, is in green. Turquoise highlights are changes from developmental edits with my editors, and yellow is the line and copy edit rounds combined).
Image and text by Julie Artz
Of course, beyond this initial paragraph, there were deeper changes. I significantly revised a four-stanza poem in the story for both content and meter. I added an image system that reflected the celestial nature of the main character due to some excellent feedback from the anthology’s two editors. And I front-loaded a lot of the world building that was originally later in the story because it originally went on the page as I figured it out rather than in any sort of logical story order.
Expect some back and forth
Just like you can’t count on making it through with only a single round of developmental edits, going through the remaining phases of edits is not just a matter of clicking “Accept All” in Track Changes. Stet (short for “let it stand” in editorial parlance) is a writer’s friend. Use it sparingly, but do use it. Editors aren’t perfect, and sometimes their suggestions will not resonate. There should definitely be some give and take in the process on both sides of the table.
While writers should definitely shoot for being easy to work with, you can still stick up for yourself and your work if you disagree with an edit. And besides, editors make mistakes or miss a small bit of nuance from time to time. Your name is what’s going to be on the eventual story, book, article, or poem, so make sure you’re happy with the result within the bounds of your deadlines and common courtesy.
A closer look at craft
There’s a lot to learn about writing just from this short paragraph, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, for creative purposes or for a business audience. At the big-picture level, make sure you set the tone right from the first paragraph. My editors had me add “news that was bound to be bad” to establish that Aris was not expecting good news, which set an apocryphal tone that carries through the whole story. But also don’t try to say everything in that first paragraph. Even though Aris would be called home, and the move would be permanent, I didn’t need to put that in the first paragraph. It is something that becomes clear later in the story.
At the line level, check the mechanics. Replace indefinite articles like “it” with specifics where possible. Extraneous words like “now” (also just, but, then, so, and more!) can often be cut. Check that you’ve got commas in the right places. Make sure you don’t have pronoun confusion. Having both Maka and Aris in this paragraph meant that one instance of “her” was indefinite as well and needed to become Aris’s.
The line level and copy editing passes are often the most tedious part of this process. Placing commas just so. Adjusting use of proper noun vs. pronoun for maximum clarity. Reading the verse elements aloud ten times to make sure they flow just right. But the sum of each of these tiny changes is a stronger, tighter, more engaging story.
The result
After the frenzy of producing the story in only twelve days and blazing through five rounds of edits in less than a month, Beyond the Latch and Lever was released into the world in December 2020. And of course, I’m thrilled with the results. Here’s where that final paragraph ended up:
“Aristreal had felt the call coming for an age, like an ache in her bones that crept in slowly over time. She pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders and ventured out to check the boundaries of their land for news that was bound to be bad. First wars, then fires, plague, drought, and oppression — the list of transgressions humans wrought against the goddess Maka’s sacred lands went on and on. Now the earth shook at regular intervals as if to confirm all of Aris’s fears. When everything they’d done to try to Shift the mortals on Earth had failed, all the warnings falling on deaf ears, the Seers would leave. It was known. They’d be called and they would go. As it had been foretold.” — J. S. Artz, “The Wending Way”
I hope this article has helped demystify the editorial process for you by giving you a detailed look at the first paragraph revisions for a published short story. And hopefully you also picked up some writing tips along the way. I’m happy to answer any additional questions in the comments below. Happy writing!
More than twenty-five years ago, three friends and I drove round and round Monument Circle in our hometown of Indianapolis, convertible top-down and music blasting. It was 1992 so the Pretty Woman soundtrack was our music of choice. Of course, it was Natalie Cole’s Wild Women Do. The refrain was our anthem: “Wild women do and we don’t regret it / Wild women show what they’re goin’ through / Wild women do what you think they’ll never / What you only dream about wild women do.”
We were sixteen and the sense of endless possibility was as intoxicating as the cheap beer we snuck from our parents: the rush of freedom that came with the first of us getting our license, the power we felt as we experimented with fashion, with our new-found sexuality, with every limit we could test, every rule we could bend or break.
But nothing tames the wild heart like middle age and an enduring pandemic. Being at home, far from friends and family and travel and adventure, for an entire year threatens to smother that living spark under layers of existential dread, boredom, and struggle. Despite years of mostly living up to my sixteen-year-old self’s aspirations — traveling the world, falling in love, climbing mountains, protesting injustice, writing books — this pandemic has rocked me in a way that not even the death of my father, a crushing international move, and periods of intense financial stress ever did.
So when my beloved but surprisingly noisy/messy/hungry family invaded my quiet house as both school and work moved virtual, it shook me. My quiet work environment shattered — my thoughts as chaotic as the house, like the news, as the world. And through it, all were woven the pervading fear that the pandemic might take our loved ones, our jobs, our livelihoods, away from us.
We fared better than so many others. We’re healthy. We both kept our jobs. My mother and both my in-laws have now been vaccinated. Elderly family members have either avoided COVID-19 or survived it. And our teenagers, who struggled mightily with a hard first semester of e-learning, came through it without flunking out (though it was a near thing). Yet there I sat, in my yoga pants and slippers, feeling farther than I ever had from that sassy teenager who sang her heart out in a convertible nearly thirty years ago.
My first instinct was to retreat. To hibernate. To hide how I was feeling, especially since on the surface, we were getting by. But as a second pandemic — the mental health crisis that is hitting us almost as hard as the virus — emerged on the heels of the first one, I questioned that instinct. Because each time I reached out to a friend or colleague, each time I was real about the anxiety and depression I was feeling, I learned that they, too, were suffering.
What if I didn’t hide? What would happen if I talked about it? About finding a therapist, about being diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), about the way that ignoring anxiety, trying to hide it away, often leads to depression. About how the videos showing us how to wash our groceries to keep them from infecting us with COVID-19 left me curled in a fetal position on the couch as bags of food lay unopened on the porch like some nefarious and deadly threat.
I started small. I told my friends about my struggles. I told my mom. I talked with my kids, who were just as depressed as I was. I chimed in on a few discussions on social media. Is this what Natalie Cole meant by wild women showing what we’re going through? I think so. It didn’t feel wild at first, but like so many things, it started with this tiny ember. This tiny admission that I was not OK, but that I was getting there, that I would be.
By this past fall, I was ready to fan that ember of wildness a bit. I made a commitment in both my business and my personal life to live out loud. That led, as everything in my life does, to writing about my experiences. So I kicked off the new year with an article on The Writing Cooperative called Writing Myself Back Into the Light. In it, I admitted all the ugly things that I’d been holding inside — how writing can be so much like grieving, how it’s plagued with insecurities and professional jealousies, how easy it is to let that block you, how close I came to quitting.
I didn’t know how badly I needed to talk about this, to write about it until I took that first risk. Until I felt the first bit of wildness returning to my battered heart. How I needed to whisper wildness onto that buried ember, to rekindle it, to set it aglow. But as soon as I did, I knew that wildness was not something that only existed in past-tense for me. It’s still there, calling to me, waiting for the moment when it can burst once again into glorious flame.
Those three friends who drove around Monument Circle with me in 1992 live across the country from me now. And I don’t think any of us owns a convertible anymore. But, especially after a year of isolation, I needed that same kind of connection. The universe must have heard my unspoken need. Because it delivered up a beautiful sunny spring day and a break in my work schedule. I texted some friends and, amazingly, they were up for a Thursday adventure. We met up with our bikes and off we went. As we rode along the beautiful Sammamish River Trail, one of many in our gorgeous Pacific Northwest home, I felt the wildness I thought I’d lost surge within me.
The Wild Women of 2021 look a whole lot different than the ones I remember from 1992. But even though our conversations were about all those things I thought had tamped down my wildness — the pandemic, parenting teenagers, caring for aging parents — the echo of the past was there. The things both wild and mundane that we’d been through as we navigated our teenage years, our coming adulthood, our budding wildness. The games. The foibles. The triumphs and disasters of being young and newly free. They have taken a different shape, as my body has in the past twenty-five years. But the wildness, the laughter, the dreams are all still there — a state of mind rather than a phase or moment in time. And I reveled in the rediscovered wildness within me as I biked with these other wild women, smiles on our faces, sunshine at our backs, and songs in our hearts.
Julie Artz is an author, editor, and book coach living in Redmond, Washington with her husband, two strong-willed teenagers, and a couple of naughty furry familiars. Learn more at about her book coaching services at JulieArtz.com, subscribe to her #Create2021 newsletter, or follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
