What We Want, Writers....

Although STNY remains closed to unsolicited submissions, we do consider work by authors personally recommended by our writer pals and editors. The personally is important because it means we trust the source (whom we implore to aim high).

Big drag, we know, but thus tis.

We select manuscripts and authors for originality, excellence, and the strength to engage the present publishing establishment.

We want writers to appreciate today's book landscape against the busy media background. We want

• Quick pacing
• Vivid images
• Bold storytelling

As to content, here are random present interests

• Malice, whether in murder or menace, in realistic urban or rural settings
• Complex villains with credible psychologies
• Poverty represented as a matter-of-fact background character in a story not about poverty
• Unsentimental characters who are not self-pitying
• Realistic stories that go deep into a character's day-to-day life inside non-European countries
• Non-fiction that posits a worldwide story

Our advice: do not pull your punches, these are not subtle times.

Pacific Coast Children's Writers Workshop

We and the virtually perfect Melanie Donovan of Knopf  (virtually perfect only because otherwise it would sound weird) joined a group of writers a couple weeks back in a beach-y condo complex on  what was said to be the beach— personally, we could scarcely look out the window.

Under review were novels and partial novels with subjects like the Russian Revolution, gay dads, suicide, savant talent, summer romance, a Fae, crime, a mermaid, time travel— perhaps 60% contemporary realism and 40% fantasy constituted our own collection. (No devil worship or gang violence, surprisingly.)

From our point of view, the workshop was a success: we requested a goodly number of manuscripts we and Melanie worked on. The all-important, all-determining revisions are underway. We are eager (not anxious, as it is misused) to see what results. Keep your eyes glued here to follow the story.