Okay, I know that's a long title, but bear with me on this one. I've been on a binge of the Buckkeep Radio podcast for about a month and it's gotten me thinking about how readers interact with media, as well as the role of the author once their work is out in the world. …
Continue reading Death of the Author and Queer Interpretations of Realm of the Elderlings
When querying, the literary agent landscape can seem daunting. Worse, there have been a few prominent dust-ups in 2020 regarding agents' behavior that raise a really good question: How do I know if my agent is a good one? "Good" can mean a number of things in this question. Do their morals and values align …
(NaNoWriMo logo in header courtesy of National Novel Writing Month). NaNoWriMo approacheth, and if this is your first year tackling the challenge, it can seem pretty daunting. Fifty thousand words? In 30 days? But there are a few ways to make it easier on yourself and to improve your chances of success. There are a …
Every year, I make a selection of NaNoWriMo word count calendars to set as my desktop background, and thought I'd share them with you as well! More may be added to the Google Drive folder below as November draws near. View all on Google Drive All calendars include three numbers on each day: top number …
(Logo in header courtesy of National Novel Writing Month). So it's October, which means the writing community is in a pre-NaNoWriMo tizzy of planning, anticipation, and hype. If you're new to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), it's a month-long challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel over the 30 days of November. I've participated in NaNoWriMo …
In publishing, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of industry jargon and abbreviations. I've listed some of the most common ones here. Acquisitions: This is a phase in the manuscript purchasing process, when the acquiring editor pitches your book to others at their publishing house in order to convince them …
Continue reading Glossary of Publishing Terms and Abbreviations
In the buildup to Pitch Wars submissions, a lot of queries are flying around the writing world right now. And I'll admit, I'm a bit of a query junkie. I write them for works-in-progress as practice. I've read the entire QueryShark archive and listened to every Print Run query episode. I spent hours in the …
Welcome to a new blog post series on tidbits of grammar trivia and terminology. We'll cover some interesting things you may not have learned in school, or might have forgotten since then. Today, gerunds! So what's a gerund? It's a tricky little beastie, a word that's based on a verb and looks like a verb, …
First, a disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with the Character Trait Thesaurus books I'll be using in this article, and I haven't been compensated for endorsing them. I just really love using them as a resource. Character development. There are worksheets galore on the internet, varying from ones that ask about a character's favorite …
Continue reading Using Key Traits to Create Complex Characters
The short version: good, old-fashioned querying. The long version? Well, that's a little more detailed. First we have to go back a little. The book that my agent signed was the second I queried (though far from the second I completed). I'd previously queried another novel, though not very widely. When I queried my first …
