The Dallas Cowboys

 As I write this, we're thick in the midst of the NFL playoffs. My Dallas Cowboys were humiliated last week by the upstart Green Bay Packers. It was one of the most humiliating defeats I've witnessed in over forty years of watching football. To call it an embarrassment is an understatement.

I became a Cowboy's fan in 1978 at the age of seven. This was the year the Dallas Cowboys played the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII.  I remember vividly how I became a fan. McDonald's used to run promotions every year for the Super Bowl. One day, about a week before the game, my Dad and I went to McDonalds and I saw banners for both teams. I didn't know, or care, much about football at that time, but my Dad asked me who was going to win. Being an animal lover, I was drawn to the horse on the Bronco's helmet so I declared that I would root for Denver. My Dad smirked at me and shook his head. I'll never forget him saying: "You never count out Roger Staubach and the Dallas Cowboys."

Anyone who knows football knows the legendary exploits of Roger Staubach. I didn't want to disappoint my Dad so I declared that I'd root for Dallas instead. The Cowboys went on to beat Denver for their second Super Bowl win of the 1970s. I still didn't follow them all that closely, but anytime a kid at school would ask me who my favorite football team was, I defaulted to the Cowboys, even though growing up in Sacramento, we were in Forty-Niner territory. 

As I got older I started watching football more and rooting for the Cowboys. Unfortunately, the 1980s were not a good decade for the Cowboys and many times I wished I'd have gone with the "home team" Forty-Niners as my team. They dominated the 80s as the team of the decade.

The Cowboy's fortunes changed in the 1990's when Jerry Jones bought the team and installed Jimmy Johnson as the coach. Although I became a fan in the 70s with Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Randy white, etc., I was in my twenties in the 90's and Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin and the rest of those teams truly became "my" Cowboys. The Cowboys won three Super Bowls in the 1990s and should have won more had Jerry Jones not fired Jimmy Johnson. We Cowboy fans were spoiled and only vaguely understood the ramifications of that firing. I knew the firing was all about ego and felt this was a bad sign going forward, but I never dreamed it would be twenty-eight years and counting without another Super Bowl victory!

As a fan, I have a love/hate relationship with Jerry Jones. I'll always be grateful for those three Super Bowl victories, but also resentful that he's so ego driven that he can't get out of his own way. It's well documented that Jerry Jones learned the NFL-ropes from Al Davis, notorious owner of the Oakland Raiders. In retrospect, their ownership tenures mirror each other. Both had early success, but then stubbornly refused to change their ways, and ultimately never won another Super Bowl. As frustrating as it is, I truly don't think Dallas will win again until Jerry Jones is gone.

Ego can be a good thing in some cases, but not in his. Jerry Jones needs to be the center of attention. He craves it! He can't handle sharing credit or the spotlight. He's one of the few owners in all sports that does more interviews then the head coaches. Speaking of head coaches, he refuses to hire strong-willed head coaches who will challenge him, and potentially pull the spotlight away from him. 

We're currently stuck with Mike McCarthy. By all accounts he's an average head coach, but has proven he can't get the Cowboys over the hump. This latest beat-down should have signaled the end of his tenure in Dallas, but Jerry is keeping him on. I don't hate McCarthy. He's a good head coach, but not great. My biggest issue is that this offseason there are two obvious coaching upgrades available in Bill Bill Belichick and Jim Harbough. When you have a chance to get a head coach of their calibur you've got to take a chance.

Dak Prescott is our quarterback, and like McCarthy, I don't think he's terrible, but he's not elite. He's a rank 8-15 level quarterback. If the rest of the team was loaded he could lead a team to a Super Bowl win, but he doesn't elevate the play of others. I fear Jerry is going to pay him elite-level quarterback pay which is going to hamstring our salary cap for years to come. 

The team is in that no-man's land area. They are good enough to produce winning records in the regular season, but not good enough to go deep in the playoffs. Having a good record means a poor draft choice, and then paying a mid-level quarterback elite-level money means the cycle of mediocrity the Cowboys have been in for 28 years continues. 

I will give Jerry Jones credit as an astute business man. He's built the Cowboys into the most valuable North American sports franchise despite no championships in almost 30 years. They are the most highly covered team in all sports. Their games consistently get top ratings. I'm sure he's raking in the money. However, this makes him complacent. He says he's all about winning, but what does winning a championship really accomplish for him? Nothing really. This is why I don't buy into his boasts about how desperatly he wants to win another Super Bowl.

I'll always be a Cowboy's fan, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't extremely frustrated. It's depressing realizing that the Cowboys won't win another Super Bowl until Jerry Jones passes away and a new owner takes over. Hopefully an owner who will hire a good general manager and a good coach and stay out of the way and let them do their jobs. Until then I'll try to comfort myself with good regular seasons and low expectations of winning a championship.  

Short Stories

 It's been awhile since I've made an update. I've been busy submitting Relentless Blades to various literary agents and some publishers, but unfortunately nothing new to report.

I've been plotting out the next installment in the series, but in addition to that, to keep my creative juices flowing, I wrote two short horror stories for submission to Heathen Press Heathen – Thrilling, terrifying horror. They currently have an open submission period for horror stories under 7,500 words. 

The first submission is called The Werewolf of Vincennes. Unsurprisingly, the story is about a werewolf terrorizing the small town of Vincennes, Indiana. It's not a straightforward werewolf tale. It's got a neat little twist that I'm proud of. 

I've loved werewolves since I was a kid and have always felt they don't get the monster respect they deserve. They're constantly overshadowed by the likes of vampires and zombies. I've never done a deep psychological analysis on myself, but I'm sure there is some reason I've always been drawn to characters that transform into other forms. In addition to loving werewolves, the Incredible Hulk is my favorite superhero and I'm a big fan of the Transformers, particularly the dinobot, Grimlock. 

The second story is titled Daddy's Home. It deals with the fascination I've always had about what, if anything, zombies think? Zombies have saturated television and the movies in the past couple decades, but the stories are almost always told from the human point of view. This of course makes sense but has always left me wondering if the zombies think anything. This theme has been touched on by George Romero, godfather of zombies, in movies like Day of the Dead and Land of the dead. Marvel Zombies also presents the superhero zombies thinking and talking. These were inspirations for this story.

The Heathen submission period ends on January 31, 2024. I have my fingers crossed they choose one of the stories for publication. 

On a completely unrelated note, the NFL playoffs are about to start. Go Cowboys!!!!

Finished...for now. Many thanks!

Well, after just over a year, I've completed the Relentless Blades...for now. I want to give special thanks to all those who were instrumental in supporting me along the way.

My beautiful wife, Stefanie

My sister, Julia

My beta readers: Randy Castro, Dave Dolliver, A.S. Hardin, and Addie Olds.

My editor, Robin Connelly

My proofreader, Dave Melbye

Darran Hight for his fantastic Vragoth artwork

It takes a village to raise a novel. It's been a long journey and took ten edits to get the story where I wanted it, but I'm happy with how it turned out. I can honestly say it's the best I can do and I consider it finished. I only leave it open to more edits should it get picked up by a traditional publisher and they have their editor take another crack at it. Should I not be successful in traditional publishing, I'll be content releasing it as-is.

I now begin submitting it to publishers and/or agents. Wish me luck! In the meantime, time for a little break to decompress, then it's on to planning the sequel.  

Zarune

 I now bring you a map of Zarune! Hope you find it interesting.

Map Making Fun!

 Greetings!  When creating new worlds for fantasy novels, it's a good idea to include a map to help orientate readers with where things are. When I began writing Relentless Blades, I created a map, but it was very crude. It got the job done, but it's not something I'd share with anyone. 

Now that I'm in a bit of a lull as beta readers are going through Version 8 of the manuscript, I have time to rectify the map situation. I've dabbled with several online mapmaking software over the past week and have settled on Inkarnate. There is a free version, but it's fairly limited, however the pricing is pretty inexpensive for the Pro version that gives you access to everything. It's only $5 a month or $25 for a year subscription. 

I purchased Pro and am now starting to create the map. It's not the same creativity as writing, but it is a creative outlet and I'm enjoying myself. I'll keep everyone updated as I go along.

Developmental Edits - Saved by the Quill

 Greetings. It's been some time since I've updated my blog and that's because I've been diligently working through rewrites and edits to my manuscript. At the end of March, I sent my work to Robin Connelly with Saved by the Quill to perform a developmental edit.

For those not familiar with this type of edit, she read the whole manuscript (106,000 words at the time) and provided detailed feedback and analysis of areas I could change and update to strengthen the story and the characters. Her analysis was fantastic, and her pricing was very reasonable. I can't recommend her highly enough. Here is her link if you need editing of all kinds: Saved By The Quill (wordpress.com)

She provided me with her feedback in May and I've just now finished making all the updates. She gave me a multitude of suggestions and I incorporated at least 80% of her feedback, so it was a lot of work.I took it in a two-step process. First, I did the rewrites based on her feedback and saved that as a new version. The edits ballooned the word count to almost 109,000. 

With the next (current version) 8, I edited the whole thing and got it down to 103,000 words. The story and characters are much stronger, and I feel good about the work. Looking for a couple Beta+ readers to look it over. I say Beta+ because having gone through such a great developmental edit, I'm not expecting readers to find much to critique about the story itself, although of course I could be mistaken.

At this stage the feedback I'm really looking for is whether or not they enjoyed the story. If they had a good time reading it, that's good enough for me. Of course, I also hope they can point out any inaccuracies.

I have a proofreader lined up for after I get feedback from the beta readers so things are moving right along.

Literary Agents

I just received a rejection letter from one of the literary agents I queried and decided to focus this post on the querying process. It's probably one of the most frustrating aspects of trying to get published. Obviously, there is the option to skip querying agents and just self-publish, but it's not my first choice. I'll dedicate a full blog to my thoughts on self-publishing versus traditional publishing, but for now I'll just say my first option is traditional publishing, which involves trying to land an agent.

It's not required to have an agent, and I have submitted Relentless Blades to several publishers who accept un-agented submissions but have yet to hear back. While it is possible to land a traditional publisher without an agent, it's much more difficult, hence I am trying to acquire an agent.

Before I get to the responses I've received, let me say the process of querying an agent is exhausting. First of all, you need to search for agents that accept submissions in the genre you're writing in, so for me that is fantasy. Next, you need to narrow down those agents you found to those that are currently open to accepting submissions. Finally, you need to read all the fine details of how each specific agent and agency accept their submissions, and from my experience, it's not at all standardized.

Some agents, although few from what I've experienced, still request physical copies of the query letter and sample. Those were not very common. Most either require an email query letter or the use of the Query Manager submission portal.

Those that require an email, usually require everything to be embedded within the email, including the query letter, synopsis, author biography and writing sample. Most do not want attachments of any kind. However, that is not hard and fast, as I did encounter a couple that did want the sample chapters to be attached as separate files. 

At least half the agents I've queried so far use Query Manager, so nothing is emailed. You follow the prompts and fill out all the information they require. Most are fairly standard to include a place for your name, title of the book, genre, word count and your email address. There is usually a section for the query letter, another section for the author biography, another for the synopsis and one for the writing sample.

Whether an agent accepts submissions through Query Manager or via email the requested writing sample various widely by agent. There were some that wanted the first chapter, some that wanted the first two chapters, some the first three, some only the first ten pages, one that wanted the first fifty pages and a couple that wanted no writing sample, only the query letter and synopsis.

The moral of the story is, if you're an up-and-coming author, be prepared to do your agent research and don't think one query letter or writing sample will fit all. You need to pay close attention to what each specific agent requests.

As I write this blog, I've sent twenty-one queries (21) and have received nine (9) rejections. I'm still new to this, but from what I understand, it's common to receive no responses, so having received an almost 50% response rate feels somewhat positive. Three of the nine responses, including the last one, have a positive tone. I've included them below but have removed the agent's name and agency.

Dear Russell,

Thank you for sending me the manuscript for RELENTLESS BLADES. Unfortunately, this one isn't as strong of a fit for me as I hoped in order to champion the piece. I'm sorry to have to share such disappointing news. The publishing industry is so subjective, so what may not be working for me could be just the thing another agent is looking for.

Remember, this pass is only a pass on this piece of work and not on you as an author. I would be delighted to be considered for future projects.

I'm rooting for you!

Dear Russell –

Many thanks for writing. You have an interesting story to tell and there's a lot to like about your approach. But in the end I'm afraid I didn't come away quite fully convinced this was something I think I'd be able to represent successfully. I'm sorry not to be more enthusiastic but thanks nonetheless for giving me a chance to review it and best of luck in finding it the right home. 

Dear Russell Carroll:
 
Thank you for your query on Relentless Blades which I regret we must pass on.
 
Due to the number of clients that we currently represent we have to be extremely selective on any new project.  Please keep in mind that your work made it to the second round of readers here at the Agency. Although we had to pass on it, given the amount of material we look at on a daily basis, the fact that yours was selected for a closer read speaks volumes.
 
Now, this is the point in the letter where I usually offer some advice.  But I have no advice since I don’t have any problems with your submission; it is well-written and well-presented.  It’s just not the book for me and every book deserves an agent who is 100% in love with it and  I am sad to have to say that I am not that person for Relentless Blades.  Other than that, I don’t have any advice other than if you aren’t already a member of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, I highly recommend them. They have a lot of resources for both the beginning and also the experienced writer:  www.sfwa.org . 
 
We wish you every continued success with your writing career and keep on writing!

All three have some positive things to say about my work, particularly the last one, which was actually the first received, but are also frustrating in the sense that they don't give me an idea of what I can do to edit the work to improve my chances of publication. 

I understand that agents are extremely busy and do not owe an author any explanation of why they are passing. However, each of these agents took the time to respond personally and offer some form of encouragement. It seems like minimal effort to write one or two more sentences (nothing detailed) giving me some idea of where I can focus my attention to improve my work. 

That’s my plea to any agent that might happen to read this, please give authors any tips you can as to why you’re not accepting the work. Any feedback is very helpful and appreciated.

I’m not giving up. I’m going to continue sending queries until I get the right agent who will be excited to represent my work.