Week in Short

It's Friday again, which it's time for a look at the last week. It's been a short, but great week. :) HBP finally came out and did not disappoint, I did a lot of writing, and a friend got an offer for representation! :D Congrats!

There are four Must Reads this week. Yes, there were so many great posts I couldn't decide on one. The first two are in the same boat: 17 reasons why agents reject manuscripts and Why agents turn down good books. Both are from blogs that I didn't follow before. No more or I won't have time to write... Blood Red Pencil has a must read post on adverbs. And finally, my friends over at OPWFT (Old People Writing for Teens, the blog created by YA writers that are just older than us twifties...) have a great interview with Jay Asher, author of Thirteen Reasons Why.

Rachelle Gardner has some great advice to write another book and an update on ICRS including a look at what publishers and editors are saying.

BookEnds blog has a great post on how passion isn't everything when it comes to an agent on the fence about a project. There was an interesting discussion going on in the comments too.

There's 6 tips for submitting to publishers at adventurous writer and I'm sure these tips can apply to agents as well.

Queryshark went on a critiquing spree this week, with five queries. This first one is a great example of what NOT to do in a query. This second one is a little short and written in first person with the character's voice. It also occurred to me that genre is not shown. A very long query for chick lit was third. The next query began with 'I hate Lost.' Now, I have never seen Lost and don't plan to, but what was this person thinking? I mean, what if they queried an agent that loved Lost? Okay, that one got revised. I saw the old version which you can read if you scroll down. A finally, a crime novel that's labeled as mainstream that I didn't really get, but the shark would've requested pages for.

Writer Unboxed has some great advice on trying to create fantasy languages, words, and names.

Elana at QT has a great post on letting queries and manuscripts cure. That's something I've always had a lot of trouble with...

Agent Kristin talks about what to do if you plan to meet an agent at a conference.

Blood Red Pencil has a great post on exclamation points this week. If you've ever emailed someone that seemed to feel the need to use an exclamation point at the end of every sentence, you'll know that it does get annoying.

And finally, Janet Reid has her own query tally for yesterday where she read 52 queries in an hour, requested two fulls, and wrote a quick note on why she rejected each query.

That's all for this week. Hope everyone has an awesome weekend!

Comments

Sarah said…
Fantastic post! I'll definitely take a looksie at all of those links!

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