Mary Brotherton

Welcome to the new marybrotherton.com website

In my world, weekends are for writing. I can engage one of my fictional characters for an all-nighter, knowing I will be able to sleep late the next morning, or as is the usual custom, I can edit bits of journalism and cut articles down to size for yet another publishing deadline.

Such is the case for my weekend at the end of June. Senior Life is being distributed and now, it’s up to me to polish everything for Viera Voice prior to having it laid out to print.

While what I do may be tedious, once I’m home with my music, it hardly feels like work. The beauty is – I get paid for doing it!

One of the most valuable tools for any writer is the love of reading. Whether you enjoy reading romance novels or classics from your childhood, reading is invaluable to a writer.

Reading the current hits helps you stay in tune with what is selling and what other readers find worthy of purchase.  You can see what editors and publishers value and you might find your brain suddenly exploding with new ideas for dialogue or characters and plot.

Even if you don’t think you have time to sit down to read, you may find an amazing resource in audio books at your local library – for free. Some audio books are still in tape cassette format, but increasingly publishers are releasing great books in CD and even MP3 format. If you like to walk, you can listen to books while you stroll, or even on your daily commute. I like to read while I’m doing mundane chores and get a thrill when I can read while writing!

Granted, I’m usually listening to books while writing emails or journaling and tend to listen to music while I’m working on something more serious like my novel or doing edits for the paper or one of my clients.

Music….ah, the balm for savage beasties. What writer doesn’t have a savage mongrel inside ripping at the edges of our creativity trying to destroy us with thoughts of what else we could or should be doing instead of writing? It doesn’t matter if you like to listen to Safri Duo or Joshua Bell, find the music that speaks to your heart and crank it up!

My sister said that to listen to Yanni made her think of the Angels and Mozart takes me to a place outside of my oughttas and gottas. My stepson remarked that I have an ecclectic musical collection and indeed I do.  My moods can take me, in any given day, from Heavy Metal to Indie. Within the same hour, I might change from Soul or R&B to Jazz or Scat. Each genre of music speaks to something different within me and releases a new muse.

If I’m not reading, writing, editing or listening to music I am proably sleeping.

Speaking of sleeping, don’t understimate the power of music or audio books in your sleep. Put your portable CD next to your bed and drift off to the newest best seller or chart topping hits. Personally, I prefer to find my dreams on the edge of Classical, Jazz or Ambient Techno – but that’s just me.

I was researching for a memoir I’m editing and found several useful links. I think the most useful might be from Anne Mini. Her blog Author! Author! is at www.annemini.com/ and she even has a very useful search link.

Just to give you a glimpse into some of the wonderful information on her site, I’ve copied excepts for you.

“A manuscript, dearly beloved, is NOT an exact replica of a published book. It differs in many small, important ways — and to editorial eyes, these difference are screaming fire sirens about the experience level of the author. A manuscript that apes the conventions of published books does not, contrary to popular belief, make the author look more professional, at least not to truly professional eyes. Instead, to an agent or editor, those very ostensibly expert touches brand a manuscript irrevocably as the work of an amateur.

Harsh? You bet, especially given that by definition, all first-time authors are amateurs. Yet in an environment where agents and editors receive 500 or more unsolicited submissions per week, being able to weed out the less experienced authors who do not adhere to standard format speeds up going through the mail considerably. Look on the bright side: if your manuscript is in standard format, it has already cleared the most pervasive hurdle on the way to publication.”

She continues: “Agents and editors may not have the power to chop off your head if you displease them, but they do have the authority to pronounce your manuscript dead on arrival. So the prudent course for those new to the publishing world is to learn its manners and traditions. Honoring these traditions may not guarantee your work a sympathetic reading – but on a bad day, when an agent is trying to plow through her seventieth submission in an hour, you bet your boots that deviations from standard format provide an easy excuse to toss that manuscript aside and move onto the next.”

Then she lists “the Rules” which I have helped myself to. Just don’t forget I found them at www.annemini.com.

All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced, with at least one-inch margins on all sides of the page. No exceptions.

• All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page. Yes, this is wasteful of paper. Deal with it.
• The text should be left justified ONLY. Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along the margins, and yes, your word processing program will replicate that. But don’t. The straight margin should be the left one.
• The typeface should be 12-point, preferably in Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. (If you write screenplays, you may only use Courier.)  There is a very good reason for utilizing a standardized font: in Times or Times New Roman, one double-spaced page is 250 words, rendering word count estimation easy.
• No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the entire manuscript in the same font and typeface. Even if the manuscript features an extensive correspondence in translated Elvish. If it’s in English, it should be in a standard typeface.
• Words in foreign languages should be italicized.
• Every page in the manuscript should be numbered.
• Each page contains a standard slug line in the header, listing AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/ABBREVIATED TITLE/PAGE #. Thus the third page of my memoir manuscript reads: MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/3.
• The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page. (That’s twelve lines, incidentally.)
• The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces. Yes, I know that published books often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that was the editor’s choice, not the author’s. Even if every chapter ever printed by your favorite author has used this device, you will not be in a position to explain that to an agent or editor until after he has already noted that your work is not professionally presented.
• All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.
• Dashes should be doubled — hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory. Yes, I know that your word processing program will automatically change a doubled dash to a single one. Change it back.
• Dashes should have spaces at each end — rather than—like this. Yes, yes, I know: books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy. But standard format is invariable upon this point.
• The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™.