Can you believe it's already July? 2010 is officially half over.

Since finishing the first draft of my Sekrit Love Story in May, I took June off to give myself a little bit of distance before I start revising. Mostly I spent last month reading books I've been dying to read for a while and watching soccer. I finally got to read Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. What an excellent YA. If you like gorgeous prose and an interesting twist on werewolves, you ought to try it.

Now that July 1st is here, a pristine print copy of Sekrit Love Story is ready for my highlighters and color pens. July and August will be all about revision.

How do you plan to spend your summer?

P.S. For those of you who missed the announcement, don't forget about my Kiss of the Rose contest!

I love drinking ginger tea regularly. It gives me a little perk-me-up, plus soothes my throat.

Ginger tea is super easy to make, though you need to do a little preparation first. Here's how I make mine.

What you need:

• fresh ginger roots
• honey and sugar (brown or white) mixture — I prefer a 1:1 ratio
• a glass jar big enough for the roots and honey and sugar mixture
• a mandolin slicer (or a knife)
• a mixing bowl

1. Wash the ginger roots and scrape off any dark spots and/or bruises, etc. You may peel the ginger if you want.
2. Slice the ginger very thinly. I use a mandolin slicer for this. (Collect the ginger juice during this process if you can, but don't worry about it too much.)
3. Dump the ginger slices into a mixing bowl.
4. Pour the honey and sugar mixture over the ginger. You should have enough to cover the ginger slices completely. Mix well. (FYI — Ginger to honey/sugar is about a 1:1 ratio, volume-wise.)
5. Put everything in the jar and store it in the fridge.

This mixture will last, like, forever so long as you keep it in fridge air-tight. The flavor's the best after about one week, but you can make tea with the mixture almost immediately if you don't want to wait that long.

To make the tea (a 1-person portion) —

In a pot, put enough water for one person and 1 tablespoonful of the ginger roots from the jar. You may add some of the sweet liquid from the jar into the pot if you want. This will make the tea sweeter. Bring the water to boil, then simmer for about 20 minutes. Toss the ginger roots away and serve immediately.

If you want your tea stronger, add more ginger roots next time.

Enjoy!

P.S. The honey / sugar / ginger slices mixture in the jar can be used to make a ginger glaze when you cook. :)

Per ESPN:

FIFA's steadfast refusal to contemplate using the mass of gadgetry available to broadcasters is, rightly, under more fire than ever before after the events of Sunday.

…

The justifications of the FIFA cabal for doing nothing are out of the stone ages — Sepp Blatter's ludicrous explanation that the public likes nothing more than to debate “incidents” confirming, were it needed, he is as far out of touch with the bulk of fans as it is possible to be.

What “debate” is Blatter talking about? There was nothing to debate. Everyone saw that England was robbed! (And Mexico too!)

FIFA claims the cost [of implementing instant replay and other technology] is prohibitive; the delays would be excessive; and it would undermine the authority of the referee and linesmen.

FIFA is expected to make something like $2 billion from this World Cup alone. There's no way it costs more than $2 billion to give referees and linesmen access to instant replay technology.

And what excessive delays? Instant replays are available … almost instantly! Like within seconds. I believe most soccer fans would rather wait a couple of seconds to ensure fair play.

Bad calls that go uncorrected undermine the authority of the referee and linesmen more than anything else, especially when everyone else in the world knows they screwed up. Furthermore, those bad calls cheapen the competition.

So FIFA, please join the twenty-first century!

Some of you are aware of the discussion Colleen Lindsay started about how agents get paid, and you know how I feel about raising agent commissions to 20%.

Wylie-Merrick agents seem to support reading fees. I think it's fair to charge low industry-standard reading fees. Let's say…about a buck or two per query / synopsis and the first five pages. I don't think writers should pay reading fees for requested partials or fulls, because agents have said they wanted to see them.

So here's why I think it's better to charge a very low reading fee for a query / synopsis and the first five pages than raising agent commissions from 15% to 20%.

These days, it's so easy to fire off an email. It's also very easy and cheap to mass-produce hard copies of a query letter. A lot of queries aren't very well-written. I'm not saying this to be a jerk, it's just a fact. I brutalized the query that helped me sign with my agent for months before I thought it was ready. I had the thing workshopped at various different venues, including Evil Editor and BookEnds LLC‘s Jessica Faust.

Evil Editor was truly evil. He mocked my title (in retrospect, it really sucked) and made fun of my pitch. But who cares? He gave me really good pointers: change the title and simplify the pitch!

Jessica Faust was the last one to critique it on her blog. I sent her a query letter containing a 158 word-long pitch. I thought it was ready for prime time but wanted to make sure. Jessica thought the pitch part was too long. Ouch. So I condensed it down to 57 words. (No, that's not a typo. I cut 101 words — practically two-thirds — out of the pitch I sent to Jessica to critique.)

I know a lot of writers who don't spend much time or effort on their query. Now, a few people are just naturally gifted and can write amazing pitches in one try. But for most people? Just not possible.

If people want to spend their money on sending out query letters that they spent an hour on, it's their prerogative. But it's a thankless job that agents must do, and the probability of them finding something worthy of a partial / full request is pretty slim. So why should agents' clients bear the cost of agents reading unsolicited mails (among other things) by paying higher commissions? It doesn't make any sense.

If reading fees are low (like a buck or so in my example), standard and industry-regulated, then there will be much less potential for abuse.

Now there's a possibility that some writers will fail to do their research and send hundreds of dollars to scammers. I sympathize, but at the same time I don't see how we must keep everything status quo just because some people don't want to do their homework. There are so many resources out there about the agent-hunting process that it's getting increasingly hard to justify why someone “didn't know any better”.

What do you think?

Usually I thank writers individually and privately. However, recently I've received some significant above-the-call-of-duty advice from a few people on a variety of important topics, so I want to thank them publicly.

So here are the awesome writers (in alphabetical order):

Joely Sue Burkhart
Crystal Jordan
Emily Mystery
Kate Pearce
Charlene Teglia

Thank you so much ladies!

Hypothetical Scenario:

Suzy just received an offer of publication. She wishes to be paid 10% royalties, but Publisher says it can only pay 8%. Publisher says it's only a 2% difference. So Suzy agrees to the offer.

Later, Suzy writes another book and receives an offer of publication from Publisher. She wants to get paid 8% royalties, but Publisher says it can only pay 6%. Publisher says the economy's really bad, and that it really can't pay 8%. It tells Suzy that the royalty difference is only 2% just like before, so why not play the ball?

Suzy, feeling like it's only 2% just like before, signs the contract.

How much total earning potential Suzy gave up in both contracts? (Please calculate in percentages!)

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.
.
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Ready?

Answer: It's not 2% for both cases. In the first case (10% to 8%), Suzy gave up 20% of her total earning potential. (If Suzy were to have earned $500 if she were getting 10%, then she would get $400 at 8%. The difference from $500 to $400 is $100, or 20%.) In the second case (8% to 6%), she gave up 25% of her total earning potential.

So Publisher's assertion that it's only 2% lower for both cases appears correct only if you're thinking about the total revenue that the book will make, which of course doesn't really matter to Suzy because she's never going to see that total amount of money. All she should be worrying about is her cut, and her cut is being cut by 20% (or 25%, depending on the scenario).

Why am I “lecturing” on math?

Recently I saw a discussion on Twitter about agent pay (#agentpay). Victoria Strauss, for whom I have great respect, said maybe the agent commission could be changed. You can read her entire post here.

The comments from some writers showed that some of them aren't thinking about the issue in the right way.

If agent's commission were to jump from 15% to 20%, it's not a 5% increase. It's actually a 33.3% increase. Look at Emily's math here.

This is probably the same reason why people think that giving up a few percentage points here and there in royalties affects them very little. But it's actually pretty significant.

So don't throw away your earnings, thinking it's only 1%. It's not! Do yourself a favor and punch in some numbers on your calculator before agreeing to anything.