Where Normal Need Not Apply
If you’ve had email for a while, you’re familiar with email spam. Spammers often try to make their emails seem relevant, with fake warnings about our PayPal or eBay account, etc., but their messages have nothing to do with us (um, yeah, Viagra doesn’t apply to me). We’re just an email address to […]
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*Shh* Be very, very quiet. We’re hunting agents. (Sorry, with that picture, I couldn’t resist the Bugs Bunny reference. *smile*) Many—if not most—writers want to find an agent at some point in their writing career. Even in this age of self-publishing, writers still want agents to help them with foreign […]
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I love when I make my readers think. Even better is when they turn around and make me think even deeper about an issue. *smile* Yesterday, K.J. Pugh blogged about my last post (where I talked about cliffhangers and hooks) and brought up the issue of sequels I briefly mentioned. No, […]
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Pitches, queries, back cover copy, and full-length stories all have writing techniques in common. For one thing, they all need a strong opening. We talk about that being a “hook,” something that grabs the reader and pulls them forward to the next line, paragraph, and page. A similar approach works within […]
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I’m excited to share today’s guest post by author Roz Morris. After ghostwriting many bestselling books, Roz recently self-published My Memories of a Future Life, her first novel under her own name. Roz’s decision to self-publish came about partly because this novel doesn’t fit into normal genre boxes. However, even as […]
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Several people I know are going through revisions right now based on feedback they received from beta readers, agents, or editors. Every one of them is dealing with the “I suck” issue along with that. Yes, sometimes feedback can be a bit too mean or blunt, but that’s not the […]
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If you’ve sent out queries, you’ve probably received rejections. They usually say things along the line of: “This is just my opinion and others may feel differently.” “Just because I wasn’t drawn in doesn’t mean others won’t love it.” “Publishing is a subjective business and another agent would be better suited to your work.” […]
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In my last post, we talked about voice and how we tend to write the same types of characters, premises, and themes over and over. That’s not a bad thing. Those stories resonate with us as writers. Similarly, there are stories we would never write. Stories might be so against our internal grain […]
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I’ve been having a great conversation with Serena Yung in the comments of one of my posts about voice from a few weeks ago, so voice has been on my mind again this week. When I found a fantastic article by author Julie Leto about voice and how it relates to our writing, […]
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My post about combining comments from multiple beta readers in MS Word brought up a great question. How do we get beta readers? In the comments, Amanda Byrne asked, “[A]ny hints on how you can scare up more beta readers? … [O]nly one of them gets back to me in […]
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