Tag Archives: traditional publishing

Writing is Hard Part 7: Improving the Craft: A Self-Designed Curriculum

By Posted in Ramblings, Writing is Hard Tagged , , , , , 2 Comments

(Before I begin, this is my 200th blog post? Wow)

writingishardp7

Three novels in four years, and it’s time to step back and work on word craft. I’ve found that beating my fingers against a keyboard and my head against a wall has taught me several valuable lessons about story arcs, characters, and world-building, but the actual infrastructure on a sentence level, I feel that I have been struggle to grow in that particular garden. Here is what I’ll be covering today:

  1. What I’m doing during a month of a break from novel writing and full-time employment
  2. Explaining the specific books I’m reading

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Writing is Hard Part 6: The Waiting Room of Querying

By Posted in Ramblings, Writing is Hard Tagged , , , , , 1 Comment
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This gorgeous header was made by Rey Noble

Ah, querying. When you distill your tens of thousands (some people have written hundreds of thousands? wow!) of words of a novel into 250-300 words in the hopes that an agent will pick it up. But how long do people wait? How do you know if your query is working? Well, I wanted to share my experience and hopefully help ease people’s expectations around the querying journey by answering:

  1. Is my query working?
  2. How long have I been waiting on different responses?
  3. What were the outcomes?

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