The Writer’s Voice Twitter Pitch Slam is Tomorrow! Check out my competition:

It all starts tomorrow at noon, EST. If two agents request the same manuscript, it’s up to you, the writer, to decide which of us gets to read (full rules on Brenda Drake’s fabulous blog). Talk about cutthroat. And my competition is mighty indeed:

 

Vickie Motter
Code Name: Black Widow 

@Vickie_Motter

Literary Agent with Andrea Hurst Lit http://www.andreahurst.com. Agent slash book blogger. Compulsive reader of Adult ParaRom&UF and YA. Terrified of robots.

http://navigatingtheslushpile.blogspot.com/

Natalie M. Lakosil 

Code Name: The Oncoming Storm

 @Natalie_Lakosil

Literary Agent at the Bradford Literary Agency, making my way through adventures in agent land.

http://adventuresinagentland.blogspot.com/

Pam van Hylckama

Code Name: The Bullet Dodger

@BookaliciousPam

Associate Agent at Larsen-Pomada Literary. Queen of Slush, mother, dog owner, wife of a Dutchman.http://bookalicious.org · http://bookalicio.us 

Hannah Bowman

Code Name: Black Mamba

@hannahnpbowman

Literary agent at Liza Dawson Associates. Cornell alumna. Reader. Writer. Organist. http://hannahbowman.tumblr.com

Seriously folks, it’s an honor to participate in this great event with such rad agents. Let the pitching begin!

I Got the Strangest Spam Mail Today

HI

 

Plese read this is not spaM:Hey its Dee Dee. I have been traveling abroad with some friends and it looks like my passport, wallet, and dragons have been stolen. I need a $520, a ship, and my dragons to get back home. I know we don’t know eachother well but if you could please help me I promise I will pay you back and make you a High Lord of the Seven Kingdoms ASAP, as soon as I get back! So sorry I know this is so embarassign. Please sen dmoney quickly adn especially the dragons, because as I said someone has stolen my dragons. They are just gone. The cages are still there but the dargons aren’t in them. Also my passport and wallet.

 

Thnx so much Im so sorry and I really appreciate it

-Daenerys “Dee Dee” Targaryen

 

All my dragons got stolen. Please send dragons.

Armchair/Shotgun’s Live Radio Drama; 61 Local, MAY 19TH!

This Saturday, May 19th, in conjunction with Lit Crawl NYC,  Armchair/Shotgun (including yours truly), along with authors Dolan Morgan, Zachary White, and Alanna Bailey, will perform a radio drama… Live! On Stage! With Sound Effects and Everything! at 7PM sharp at 61 Local. (Or whenever you have acquired your beer…) And we’ve chosen the ever iconic… drum roll please…Flash Gordon! There will be EVIL scientists! And TERRIBLE monkey-men! And, of course, BEAUTIFUL maidens! (You’ll have to forgive the excessive use of exclamation points. But, we think you’ll agree, Flash Gordon deserves a lot of exclamation points.)

DETAILS:

61 Local
61 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
7PM for 45 minutes
Free!
Map

CAST AND CREW:

Zachary White‘s ‘The Story About My Coat’ appeared in Issue 2 of Armchair/Shotgun. He lives in Brooklyn.

Dolan Morgan‘s work appears in Armchair/Shotgun, Contrary, Field, The Believer, The Lifted Brow and others. In exchange for his book, Google Place Reviews, he throws people’s money away in the street.  For more information visit him at http://www.dolanmorgan.com.

Alanna Bailey is a Native Los Angelino transplanted in New York City where she is a Marketing Consultant by day, and a WordSmith by …well, most the rest of the time… She graduated from Eugene Lang in 2008 with a Bachelors in Cultural Studies & Media and Creative Writing. She firmly believes that every single person’s individual story is their strength; and is worth being told–and heard.

John M. Cusick is a co-founder and managing editor of Armchair/Shotgun. He is the author of Girl Parts (Candlewick Press, 2010), and the forthcoming Cherry Money Baby. He is also a literary agent with Scott Treimel NY. He is currently writing a musical about the MTA.

Vicki Lame is Armchair/Shotgun’s resident publicist. She is also an editor for St. Martin’s Press in New York’s historic Flatiron building and has previously been published on Thought Catalog. She lives in Brooklyn.

Laura McMillan is a managing editor of Armchair/Shotgun. Her most prominent stage role was as Hamlet in her high school’s production of Tom Stoppard’s ’15-Minute Hamlet’. The actual production lasted approximately 20 minutes due to excessive giggling and an extended swordfight. She resides in New Haven.

BONUS:

The after party will also take place at 61 Local.

What Did You Google Today? Part 2:

CHERRY MONEY BABY revision is due next week. Today I’m doing a final polish, checking a few facts. Here, by way of a teaser trailer for the novel, is What I Googled Today:

Is it Jennifer Wallace or Jennifer Walters?

One of my favorite scenes ever.

The Big Bang Burger Bar (because Milliways would be too obvious)

What’s the super poisonous one?

That would be a great name for a night club…

Everyone You Know is Getting Married (Lyrics)

Mornings are for writing novels, afternoons for work, and evenings are for writing musicals.

Lately I’ve been blowing off steam working on the 2012 New York Melodrama, which is kinda sorta about the MTA, except set in the old west.  Now that the song writing bit is winding down and the producing / casting / acting bit is winding up, my piano hours have been spent tinkering with a musical feature film. My concept is something like Reservoir Dogs, except a ten-year high school reunion… Anyway, the story is still coming together, and I’ve written two-and-a-half out of 12-or-so songs. It’s seriously undeveloped, but I wanted to share with y’all the first half of a song I’ve been tinkering with this week.

The Scene: Three female friends at their ten-year high school reunion find common ground in their frustrations over everyone they know getting married. They’re not jealous. Maybe two of them are already married. They’re just sick of other people’s weddings taking over their social lives (which, for those of you who are not yet twenty-seven, believe me, it feels that way sometimes). The girls exchange lines in the middle of the verse.

 

Everyone You Know is Getting Married: 

Everyone you know is getting married,

…In the summer!
…In the spring!
…In time for Christmas!

Save the date and be so kind to R.S.V.P.
Every weekend for the next five years will be,
Cordially appropriated in the name of matrimony

 

Everyone you know is getting married,

…In Orlando!
…On the Vineyard!
…At my mother’s…

Book your rooms and don’t forget to book them early.
Doesn’t matter if you can’t afford the flight,
We don’t mind if you’re confined to Greyhounds over night.

Everyone you know is getting married,
It’s a matrimonial blight!

 

Everyone you know is having babies,

…In the autumn!
…Oh you’re glowing!
…I’m enormous…

Ladies get together and we’ll plan a shower.
We’re so glad you’re passing on your DNA!
We’ll expect the labor pictures up on Facebook any day now.

Everyone you know is getting married,
And some with a bun on the way!

 

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

John Cleese

I’ll Be at the W.I.Y.R. June Conference and So Can You

Listen up home slices: Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers in Sandy, UT is holding its summer five-day conference, June 18-22, 2012. In addition to nine morning workshops, participants get the chance to have their work critiqued by some amazing author, illustrator, and industry pro faculty members, not to mention Yours Truly.

So obviously, already, this is an amazing opportunity.  What’s extra cool? This year the conference sponsors its first annual Writing Contest and Scholarship. Follow this link for a chance at a $1,000 award.

My fellow faculty include the brilliant Cynthia Leitich Smith (one of my favorite humans evor), Tim Wynn-Jones (who can bend spoons with his mind), Ruth Katcher (invented the internet), and Alexandra Penfold (rumor has it she ghost-wrote Infinite Jest but you didn’t hear it from me). It’s gonna be a blast. I highly recommend you go here and sign up now.

See you in Utah.

Whatever You’re Calling About, the Answer is Yes

There are only a few people to thank (/blame) for me become a writer. Same goes for me being a relatively happy guy. Only a handful occupy the center of that Venn diagram. And it’s not a round table, either. There are definitely two portly, stately gentlemen at either side of the long table. And one of them is Stephen Sondheim.

I stumbled into Sondheim obsession without knowing it when I was eight years old. My parents had recently re-finished the basement and I was romping around on the new carpet with a brand new Power Rangers toy (arguably the only corny television institution of its era that hasn’t gotten cooler with age). I was zooming around the basement, making laser and rocket sounds, when the television, which was tuned to PBS, began running the original cast production of Into the Woods,  a terribly funny and dark musical about nursery rhymes and fairy tales. These bleaker, funnier, more adult versions- which I was young enough to think of as kids territory, my territory absolutely blew my mind. By the time the opening number was over, the Power Ranger toys had been forgotten. I was hooked, and on far headier, more addictive stuff.

Jump ahead oh twenty years or so and I am entirely obsessed with (to list them in the chronological order I discovered them), Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, Assassins, and most recently, Company. I fell in love with the first two on this list having no idea their scores were composed by the same amazing person. Since then I’ve paced my exploration of his oeuvre because I want spend as much of my life discovering new Sondheim musicals as possible. Better critics than I have described the SHEER AMAZINGNESS of Sondheim’s music and lyrics, so I won’t try and tackle that task. Instead I’ll say that like all my favorite artists, Sondheim explores the very fine gray lines between the big blaring poles that rule most stories. He explores grays within grays, shades within shades, and seems to understand (and believe me, for my high school and even college years I really, especially, needed someone to understand this) the beauty and poignancy of loneliness, disappointment, and misunderstanding.

I was so fortunate to get to sit in the same room as this genius a few months back when he came and spoke in Princeton. He’s still so sharp, and so reasonable. Unlike what you’d expect from a Living Legend, Sondheim isn’t a blowhard. Like his art, he is subtle, asking questions rather than handing down answers, possessed of such startling human insight and empathy.

I could go on and on and on. I won’t. It’s the man’s birthday, and I love him. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Happy Birthday, sir. And whatever you’re thinking, the answer is yes.

But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Pictures From Last Night’s Armchair/Shotgun Panel at Greenlight

Last night I moderated this event at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn. I’ve always wanted to be a moderator!

Our fabulous panelists were Paul Morris, formerly of BOMB, now Director of Membership, Marketing, and Literary Awards at PEN American Center; The Atavist founding editor Evan Ratliff; fellow lit-agent Erin Harris of Irene Skolnick; Halimah Marcus, Managing Editor at Electric Literature; and Tess Knoebel, Founding Editor of Abe’s Penny.

Thanks to Armchair/Shotgun managing editor Laura MacMillan for snapping photos.

We packed the house!

I was terrified I'd drop my iPad. So I put rubber cement on my fingertips.

Evan Ratliff of The Atavist and lit agent Erin Harris.

 

For a play-by-play of the night’s festivities, check out this great coverage from Electric Literature.