Posts about writing

Feb262010

Use it or Lose it

So in my work, I have a really bad habit that was pointed out to me when I had Eastlight edited by Carol Gaskin: I like to toss every little idea that pops into my head right down onto the page. Most of these are good ideas, but they often change the direction of the story at a time when it doesn’t warrant changing. They insert a detail that catches the reader’s attention, but then I never bring it back or wrap it up and the reader is left wondering what happened to that magical amulet in chapter fifteen?

Use Its, as I’m calling them, are details I considered important enough to describe at the time, but never come back. They’re little floating threads that never get snipped out of the tapestry or woven back in. The fix is pretty simple of course: lose them. Unless the thread is going to come back (in this book or another in the series), cut them out. Loose ends frustrate readers. I know I’ve personally put down many a book and found myself trying to remember if things got dealt with. Avoid Use Its by marking them when you write them in either the novel (I use programming syntax /** since it’s easy to search on in Word) or keep them in a separate file. Just make sure that the threads get used later, get snipped out, or you don’t leave your comment markers.

Stephen King mentioned in On Writing that no character considers themselves secondary. In our minds, we’re the center of the universe. So it is with characters. “Use It or Lose It” also applies to characters. Too many people vying for the spotlight can slow the story or take your work off into a tangent. This is a major problem for me: I want to show you everyone in a city, a village, a world. But no character should be given the spotlight unless they’ve got a crucial role, and it’s cheating to try and shoehorn them in by upping their role in the plot.

Feb252010

The Need to Believe in Yourself: in Defense of the Writer’s Ego

I’ve encountered the arrogant writer a few times. A few times, it’s been me who was arrogant. Many of us can be obnoxious about our work and our belief in it, which often blinds us to its faults and gaps in quality. What’s going on with that?

Simply put, I think it’s the fact that making it as a writer is no easy feat, and it’s often a great defense mechanism from the rejection we feel. But like all defense mechanisms, it has to come down sometime, particularly when its usefulness has passed. We like to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths. In my case, a good one is that I really need to cut back on the world-building exposition. I find myself slipping into Professor Slayton mode, where I start lecturing the reader about a neat little bit of history or mythology I’ve worked into the world. I love this mode, because I love showing off and hearing the sound of my own voice (like many English majors), and I truly want to share my knowledge with the reader (like many History majors).

Keeping your ego at the fore of your work is problematic because it blinds you to feedback. When criticism comes, and criticism is a necessary part of the process, you need to be open to it. I often find the most scarring criticism is the kind that is spot on: someone points out something I already knew deep down, but did not want to accept. In this position you have two options. You can either choose to ignore the criticism and hold up your ego like a shield, demonstrating a variation on the “I’m an artist and you just don’t understand me” slash “I’m just too smart for you to understand my work” defense; or you can accept the uncomfortable truth that yes, maybe that character in chapter three is a little too Yoda-like to pass muster, doesn’t serve a point, and should probably go.

When we write we put forth our inner selves. We’re out to entertain sure, but we’re also trying to tell a story that means something to us. You have to believe in your work to finish a novel. You have to really believe in it when you query it to agents. But you can’t skip the middle part, which means getting feedback, getting it critiqued, and improving the quality of the work. Your ego is a valuable tool in this process. It’s a partner in getting you back to the keyboard every day; but don’t let it be bruised too easily by critique, and don’t let it blind you to things you don’t want to accept about your work. Your ego is a part of you, but keep it in its place.

Jan102010

David’s Review of Three Junes by Julia Glass

Three Junes is one of those books that should be a lot longer: three narratives, three points of views, with decades passing in the lives of the characters. Yet Glass takes the family saga and boils it down to three snapshots, three important periods, and uses the time constraint of three months to keep the book brief. It was recommended to me by my friend Jo Dunn for this reason: that I could see how Glass keeps things short while still juggling a lot of time and spatial difference. She employs a great economy of word: not drawing things out, but still managing to handle the same depth of larger family sagas such as House of Spirits or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Glass’s method for brevity is partly achieved in that the three sections are wholly distinct. Point of view doesn’t alternate between or within chapters so in each section, we get one strong voice.

These clear delineations do not affect its power. Three Junes keeps a resonance, with mysteries and bubbling secrets threading throughout. I feel like the book lost a lot of steam in the denouement, that the final section lacked the power of the first two, but that things still tied up neatly.

When I tried to describe the book to someone yesterday, I found myself unable to sum it up in a way that gave it justice. The book’s plot is so simple, that trying to describe it in those terms sells it short. Much like Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, that’s a sign to me that Glass has created something very internal and powerful. Thank you Jo for recommending it.

Sep242009

Back to Basics: The Zen Circle of Writing

One of the things I’ve picked up in Yoga is that even advanced practioners need to get back to the basics sometimes. As I work on my next project, while still querying on Eastlight, I’m looking at writing as a craft in a whole new light.

The new project (working title Ghost Town), is in the early stages and this gives me the chance to be better organized from the start. I’m back at the start of the development cycle, and I’m fortunate that I’m bringing more experience to my game.

What does that mean exactly? I’m breaking my work into tighter scenes. I’m rambling less when I write. I’m writing stronger sentences out the gate and hopefully with more clarity. I’ve also learned (and this is a big one for me) that not every idea which springs to mind needs to go into every chapter or book. Sometimes, my first idea for a scene isn’t the best, so I take the time to refocus setting before writing.

I’m at the start of the project, but I’m looking at my writing with a lot more confidence and a lot more skill than what I brought to Eastlight and Neophyte. I’m hoping the eventual payoff will be the need for less rewrite this time. I know rewrites are a natural part of the project lifecycle, but I’d like to shorten the number to get projects out to market faster.

Jul112009

The Delicate Art of the Serial II: The Dresden Files

The Modern Language Association (MLA) is the style manual I cut my college teeth on. It’s the preferred manual for English papers and so I first learned to underline book titles rather than italicize them. I’ll confess a dirty secret: I started italicizing a while back, unless I was writing a paper, since it just looks cleaner to me, and when dealing with electronic formats, avoids confusing the title with a URL. Here’s another one Daily Writing Tips reports that the MLA has finally caught up and decided that italics with titles are the way to go. This should give a few million English majors an easier time as well as help resolve conflict with the Chicago Manual of Style, which other majors such as my History degree, use. I highly recommend subscribing to Daily Writing Tips. They’re doing a lot of great work and keeping me up to date.

The second book series I’m examining is the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I’m going to start with two disclaimers: I completely missed the television series, so I won’t be discussing it to any degree. Second, I read the first book a while ago and the second more recently. I’m revisiting them for critique, but I’m already a fan and likely a bit biased towards them. I know there are several more, and I am behind, but they’re in the stack and I hope to get to them very soon.

In Butcher’s first book, Storm Front, he set up a stand alone adventure with a few threads he could build on for subsequent plots. This looks typical for the business (and is the model I’ve used for Eastlight). You don’t want to torture your readers with unresolved issues if you don’t get a longer publishing deal. Harry Dresden as a character is established and his basic traits are put up there for us to see: technology doesn’t work well around this urban wizard, and money is usually an issue for his business. Butcher will revisit these traits at the start of the next two books as an anchor for us to remember but also maintain conflict. The second book, Fool Moon, immediately reminds us of Dresden’s money problems while the third, Grave Peril, instantly brings up the technology problem in a life and death situation.

As characterization goes, Harry is fairly vague in the first book. We get to know him, but a lot of his history (and the potential conflicts it brings) are left out. As a good serial character, he shouldn’t grow or change too fast, and Butcher keeps to the core of who Harry is. He’s brash, has a strong streak of chivalry that is often a weakness, and his aforementioned liabilities surrounding money and technology are a concrete portion of his character. What does get expanded nicely are Harry’s contacts with the spirit world. As the series progresses, we see more of his allies and enemies past the mundane. We’re introduced to some of his old associations, and Harry’s world widens for us. Handling things this way, Butcher wisely doesn’t throw the whole world at us in the first few books: he lets it widen as he goes. By handling it this way, he avoids the typical fantasy trap of over-describing and laying out all the groundwork in advance of the story. Instead, he lets the world serve the story and grow organically. It also means that the reader doesn’t have to remember a million little details about how Harry’s world works. We can just get on with the story and let the world catch up.

Butcher gave the first two books a fairly strong self-contained nature. Characters from them return, but again, he doesn’t wallow in backstory, so the plot gets moving right away. The third book seems to lay the groundwork for a longer series, setting up some pretty important events (which I won’t spoil). The Dresden Files works effectively as a series for a number of reasons, but I think the strongest are that Butcher doesn’t bog us down with unnecessary detail. He repeats critical information but not too often, and he links the books together with details that while important, aren’t essential so you don’t feel as though you’re missing something if you read say, the second book before the first. One warning though: you may get a little hooked. I finished the third book and immediately cracked open the fourth. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Jul102009

The Delicate Art of the Serial I: Balancing Conflict and Resolution in a Series

Instead of a personal note on mood or what’s on my ipod, from now on I’ll be dropping a note on style or grammar into the blog. As my intended readers for this blog are largely fellow aspiring authors, I want to share my findings as I scour the Internet for tips:

Thanks to Daily Writing Tips, I know that the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) has finally dissolved my tradition of using two spaces after a period. It has been a factor in writing as we transition from print to electronic media. Since I was trained to type in the business manner, I’ve had a hard time letting go of that second space: but I learned in my History and CIS degrees to treat the CMS as definitive so one space it will be from now on.

I don’t think it will shock you much to learn that I was something of a nerd in high school. A bit anti-social, extremely awkward and shy, I spent a lot of time in the company of paperbacks, many of them in a connecting series. This was a great escape, running off into vast landscapes of books where characters grew in slow arcs, defeated foes who’d come back to haunt them, and eventually marry the man or woman they’d been fighting alongside for hundreds of pages. As I intend Eastlight to be a series, I want to spend some time analyzing successful series and what makes them tick. This will be the first of three blog posts looking at series as I read and analyze them.

In high school, I first read long serials, before moving on to comics. I wish somebody had explained that Dickens wrote in serials and should be read as such. We had to read vast chunks of Great Expectations all in one go, and I utterly hated it. I’ve since learned to appreciate Dickens by reading him the way his original readers did: bit by bit, week by week. In this manner I can sip at his prose, slowly taking it in, without feeling buried by his language. Instead of stressing to complete a big block of reading in time to write a terrible paper about it, I have time to enjoy Dickens and look forward to the next chapter.

Back in my awkward teen years, the series that kept my attention the most were Star Trek novels. They were a great way to spend infinite time with characters I loved. I went on to read a lot of comic books. One author who crosses between the two mediums with deft, prolific, effectiveness is Peter David. I think the man must sleep very little. His X-Factor comics have a consistent high quality in a bloated landscape, and his Star Trek: New Frontier books demonstrate a well plotted, character-focused serial.

I took about a twenty year break from Star Trek novels so I’m still surveying the landscape, but as far as I can tell, David was the first to try something of this type: he took a number of B characters in the Next Generation Universe, stirred up his own funky aliens, and dropped them into a ship in an uncharted region of space. Remember when I said he’s deft? David’s strength in writing characters he didn’t create is that he picks vaguely-defined figures and brings them to vivid life.

The short length of the books means I can breeze through one in an evening, though I quickly find that I need a few on hand as I’ll reach for the next as soon as I put one down. In this manner, he’s constructed his series to work just like episodes of a television show, and it works really well. Part of why the series succeeds is that threads aren’t left to dangle: he tracks unresolved elements over the course of many books and gets the conflict resolved. He’s shown a similar talent with X-Factor, where I’ve been happily surprised to see him pick up threads other writers dropped fifteen years ago and wrap them up. His way of writing comics, in self-contained chapters which culminate and collect well into larger books, serves him well in his novels. He likes to leave you with a cliffhanger or an ominous portent. Both serials benefit from a large cast, which aside from cannon fodder, also provides him with many smaller arcs to stretch the narrative over a larger canvas.

One weakness in the serial is that the suspense can be tiring if threads don’t get wrapped up. You want to see things resolved at some point. If an author stretches things out for too long you get anxious. There’s a delicate balance to this that many authors struggle with. In comics, where short attention span reigns, writers only have so long to wrap it up (or we get those annoying dropped threads when the writer changes guard). In the novel these open ended moments can bring you back for more, but only if the payoff is worth the wait. An easy out for a conflict that has stretched over three books leaves a bitter taste. David doesn’t suffer from this problem.

David’s second strength is that he doesn’t lose track of his characters. He keeps them in mind when he returns for the next episode. We get surprised by new facets of a personality, but he doesn’t radically alter a character’s nature. They grow, and our understanding of them grows too. Using this technique, he lets characters resolve their individual conflicts. In the New Frontier series, he seems to have started things with each individual coming on board with a different secret or desire. Each episode clears up one or two of these, so the reader is satisfied while they wait for some of the larger mysteries to simmer. I think David intimately knows his characters, and while they surprise us, I get the feeling he knows exactly what they’re hiding before he began writing the first episode. I’ve long been a fan, but I’m really beginning to admire Peter David’s craftsmanship as well.

Jun62009

Everything Old is New Again

The summer movie season came faster than I expected. It will be dating myself to say that when I was in high school, Terminator 2 was the big action flick. This summer feels like a nostalgia wave: Star Trek, Transformers, and a new Terminator are all hitting the screen.

I find it interesting that we cling to serials and timeless characters, though I’ll have to do a lot more in depth analysis to grasp what I think makes a character last like that. In fantasy, the trilogy seems to be the norm, but the series is another standard. I think some series go on a bit too long, sometimes when the author has simply run out of things for the characters to do. (I’m thinking here of R.A. Salvatore’s action-packed Drizzt series, which I loved for the first eight books or so). Or an author leaves too many threads dangling, and I finish the books feeling like some important plot points were left unresolved.

But we seem drawn to everlasting characters, ones we eventually call classic. I can easily tick off a list of attempts to bring older characters forward: the upcoming Sherlock Holmes film immediately springs to mind. Some of these characters are actually immortal, drawn back from death after their creators have tried to let them go time and time again.

So how do we get from blank stock character to one we want to spend a number of books with? It’s a question I’ll be putting a lot of thought into as I think about Eastlight’s future. I’d certainly like to see it go to series and last at least as long as a trilogy. I’ve started with the idea that characters need to evolve over time, but not too quickly, so they have somewhere to go. While my two main characters certainly grow in the course of the first novel, I’ve left them a lot of room to mature and sprawl out in time. Certainly a character should be unique, original enough the reader wants to spend many books with them, but not too unique. I think of the typical romantic heroine, who shouldn’t be so offbeat or alien that your reader cannot identify with her getting the hero. Genres such as fantasy and science fiction give us the chance to work with characters radically different in culture, history, and even biology. All of these things can help to give a character flavor and a distinct background, but even strongly defining traits shouldn’t override our ability to relate to a character.

May92009

Writes of Spring II: The Query Process

Mood: Still up, but trying to refocus now on my next project.
Music: Byzantine chants, perfect for writing fantasy on a Saturday morning.
Backpack: Just finished Fool Moon by Jim Butcher, turning back to some Rilke.

In my last post, I alluded to the idea that shopping for an agent is like dating. I’m not the first person to make this analogy, but I can take it a step farther: it’s a lot like Internet dating. You craft a query letter, you hope to intrigue a stranger, not look too desperate for representation, and most of all, create a life long relationship that will benefit you both. When I first crafted my query letter, it was pretty bare bones. As I visit more and more sites, I realize different agents want different levels of detail. So the letter has spawned many, many versions. Just like an online profile, I keep testing what to share, what to hold back, and where to hint that I might have a bit more up my sleeve than a cliché opening line.

Things have changed a lot since I shopped my last book. More agents are working through email. This is great for the cost savings, the faster turnaround time, and of course the paper we’re all saving. It also means I can craft a letter on the bus and then fire it off once I get to my day job. It also gives me the chance to reference materials on my web site without bogging down the query letter. Who wants to type a URL from a snail letter into a browser?

The query letter shifts a bit to reflect different agents’ needs. The bare bones is the same, but the more research I do into an agent’s client list, the more likely I am to see if I’m going to align with what they’re looking for. The key to improving the letter is the key to improving any writing: editing and time. The pitfalls are also the same: know how and when to let it go and stop fussing with it. I’ve dropped my kid off for his first day of school. Let’s see if I’ve given him the skills to survive rejection, grow through adversity, and the wits to avoid having his lunch money stolen by scammers. The query also means taking a bit more time for research: the agent has to represent young adult fantasy and hopefully have a track record with the genre. It’s an extra plus when I see they rep an author I love, but like dating, it can also make me more nervous about the introduction.

Then there are the criteria. Some agents go off the letter alone, no pages wanted. This means they’ve got to be intrigued by the blurb alone. Fair enough, think of them as browsers in a bookstore, looking at the back of books. If that’s enough to get them to read five pages, I’ve written the right blurb. Some agents linger a bit longer. They want the first few pages. Always the first few, so make them count. This is the second impression, the first actual date. Try not to blow it. Dress appropriately – is your copy error-proof? Write down the directions – did you include the right contact information, the right format, the right number of pages. Be a gentleman – Be careful to make sure you’ve got the agent’s name and other letter details right. So far, so good. You’ve made it through dinner.

This brings me to the delicate art of the synopsis. A little reading online tells me I’m not alone in finding synopsis writing a challenge. I think one reason is that it’s reversing everything we’ve learned about showing and telling. You have to tell in a synopsis. How else are you going to get the details of your story out in a few pages? That doesn’t mean it can be boring. Even the synopsis has to be punched up to intrigue. My first synopsis draft was too short. It made no sense because I was trying to get the entire story crammed into two pages. My second draft was five pages and way too long. The current, and hopefully final, form is three pages. With each draft I’ve gotten great input from my support network and the language has become more active. It’s not the whole story by any means. I had to leave out a lot of great secondary characters and interesting side-trips, but the meat of the conflict is there. This is the version of the story you’d tell your date over dinner. Don’t bore them with detail but don’t leave out anything critical that’s going to cause her to lose interest. Try to imagine at what point I’d lose my friend or she would start yawning. Really, this is the same process the book should have: at what point was someone able to put it down? When did they get bored? Those are the parts to edit or take out.

Like dating, querying agents means a lot of rejection and a lot of practice. Some people may get lucky and connect with the right agent on the first go, but I’m willing to bet that for most of is, it’s a longer process.

The last bit of leg I can get out of this analogy is that the rejection can get you down. You can feel down about your work and worn out from your efforts here. Taking a short break, working on your next project or even putting writing away for a few days altogether can recharge your batteries. The one piece of advice that won’t hold up is to stop looking. You have to query many, many agents in a wide pool. You have to put yourself out there and stay in the game. Hold me to that as the rejections come in.

Apr172009

Lessons Learned so Far

Status: Eastlight is complete! First query letters are off. The first rejection is in. Now we play the waiting game.

I was really flattered yesterday when someone asked me what he should do to start writing a book. I felt a bit like an imposter, as I haven’t published my novel, but I do think I have figured a few things out. Here are the things I am applying to my own work.

Write. This one is standard advice. You’ll read it anywhere. To write well, you need to write as often as you can. I’d take it a step farther and say that you need to write with a structured approach. Be free form to get it down, but try to keep it in my mind that the work has to make sense to other people. In fantasy we have a tendency to spin out worlds that to us are intricately detailed, with lots of juicy side-trips, but that same book needs to translate into something a reader can engage. My friend Alan says that I “have a hard time seeing the trees for the forest, and my forest is deep and lush.” He’s referring to my tendency to build an entire world, when the reader only needs the part they’re exploring. So I’ve been cutting a lot of these details out and saving them for later journeys.

Grammar. This is one I’ve seen pushed aside in a lot of the creative writing courses I’ve taken. The idea is that writing is intimidating, and grammar more so, therefore it’s important to just write and not worry about grammar, which is something you can bolt in later. I think of grammar and the language itself as the operating system. You might create an incredible video game, but if it won’t run on any computer’s operating system, then you’ve made something that will never sell. So again, write freely, but study grammar and language. Writing truly is a craft and becoming good at it means constant practice and applied study. If you’re writing fantasy, think of it as your own wizardly studies. Mastery takes expertise and training. The beauty of it is that you can always learn more, go farther, and reach a new level in the craft. The next level will always be there. Reach for it, and never stop growing in skill.

Read. Annie Dillard says that the payoff in writing is being a better reader. Actively read, not just in your genre, but in others. See what’s happening in Literary Fiction, Horror, Suspense, etc. Even Romance may have a few things to teach you. This is one piece of advice I see over and over, but the part that I don’t see as often is that you need to read actively. By this I mean that you need to analyze books as you read them. Think about point of view, exposition, plot elements, characterization. Try to grasp what’s working and not working in the books you read or even the movies you watch. I’ll warn you though, this might kind of ruin reading for you. I know I’ve learned to shut off my writer self when discussing a movie with friends. Dissecting a creature does after all kill it.

Share. I wrote my first book in a vacuum. I thought of it as a great opus, a piece of art, and didn’t get any input until it was finally finished. And then, it didn’t sell. The book was bloated, with too much description, too much exposition, not enough dialogue. The book came out just like it was being written: solitarily, with little review. When you’ve got a draft together, carefully select people you trust to share it with. They need to be readers or writers, but it’s hard to find just the right critique circle. I chose readers who have a lot of experience with books but not so much with writing. I felt the writers I worked with were too close to their work or ideas to objectively critique mine. Even then, my readers had very different tastes. I found their feedback to often be helpful not for fixing problems, but for telling me what wasn’t working. Regardless of the feedback, be gracious. Somebody took the time to read a less than perfect version of your book. I really could not have written this book without them.

Open-mindedness. Holding your work too close to you is a sure way to strangle it. Some of the best sentences I framed for Eastlight were the ones I had to cut. They were pretty, but they didn’t fit into the flow. I find that I suffer from too many ideas, too many random directions. I had to cut a lot of these side-trips and segues in order to make the book work as a whole tapestry. Be open to the feedback you receive, and be prepared to make changes. Define which items you’re not willing to budge on, but be sure they’re worth the fight. I may revise this lesson once Eastlight is published, as I suspect that publishers and agents will have some suggestions of their own. The important thing is that I am open to them. I’m not married to the work, and as long as the changes don’t compromise the heart of the story I wanted to tell, I am willing to make them. Get a thick skin. It’s a tough market, and thousands of books are written every year that will never be published.

Editing. You’ve got to be brutally objective when you edit. Stephen King suggests putting a manuscript away for six months before editing. I’m too impatient for that, but I do recommend getting some distance. In my case, I sent the book out for critique and got to work on my next project. I started writing something completely different, so that when Eastlight came back covered in blood red ink, I was ready to see it with fresh eyes. It really helped. I integrated the feedback that I felt enhanced the book, starting with the line by line typo corrections, then turned my attention to items of larger or vaguer note: “This character doesn’t have a big enough part;” “There are too many religious factions to keep track of,” etc. Some of this feedback was a matter of the reader’s taste. Some of them agreed on weak points, and after having taken six weeks off from it, so did I. I cut a lot of factions, speeding things up considerably, and making it easier for the reader to jump into the story. In some places I combined factions, removing partitions, and in one, I changed an important faction that showed up at the end to match one from the beginning, giving the story some nice parallelism. A friend asked why I worried so much about editing, that wouldn’t the agents or publishers take care of that, which brings us to my next lesson learned.

Professionalism. Be in it to win it. Be objective and on. Write the best book you can and try to avoid obsessing about publishing. When you’re ready, and the book is as good as you can make it, start studying the publishing and querying process. Do not just start sending your book out. Read up on agents, what they represent, what they’re looking for. Follow the instructions on their website or in Writer’s Market, or on Publisher’s Marketplace. Never assume you’re the exception to the rule. Be prepared to see your work objectively and take critique. Get real on the chances and on the process. Don’t assume the book you’ve labored on as an act of love is the next big seller. Be kind to the agents that request partials and gracious to those who don’t.

I’m sure as the process progresses that I’ll have a fresh list or a few refinements, but the list above is a good start.

Feb172009

Studying the Craft and Other Updates

I haven’t been much for the blogging lately, instead having thrown myself so deeply into editing with whatever free time I get; but Eastlight is out for a fresh pair of eyes, so it’s time to catch up a bit on the virtual side.

Unfortunately my reading has slowed a bit as well, but I’m happy to say that I’m taking the time to get a few books in on writing. I’ve returned to a habit of keeping one on me at all times. Ten minutes here, fifteen there, it adds up. And I’m grateful to have wonderful friends, who for Christmas stocked me up on great books from my Amazon wishlist. I’ll be reading through them and reviewing them here over the course of the year. I’ve already read two, so look for those soon.

I’m also getting close to graduating. My final quarter of courses in my “practical” CIS degree is about to end and from there I’ve only got the project. For that I’ll be giving my actual website a badly needed makeover and expansion, just in time to start the submission process for Eastlight. It’s nice to be able to tie things together.

Finally, I’ve discovered another great resource on writing better query letters. Query Shark has reinforced the great advice provided by Kristin Nelson, Miss Snark, Evil Editor, and well, just about everybody else.