Submissions & Queries

No matter what Jim Hanas says about writers being caught up in the lottery of “rejection porn,” I love reading about successful writers who made it after a gazillion rejections. I’m a sucker for lists that tells me how many times authors like J.K. Rowling, Louis L’Amour, Dan Brown, and C.S. Lewis were rejected. Why? Because knowing others found success after rejections is what kept me submitting my manuscript even though I gained a total of forty-seven forty-nine rejections. (Update: after I sold, I received 2 more rejections from retracted queries.) Fifteen of those were on full requests. And, to make things worse, …

The Golden Heart deadline is coming up and, as usual, I’m scrambling to write my synopsis. The good news is that I have polished manuscript to an extra gleaming sheen while I procrastinated the summary part. As you can tell, I’m not a fan of summarizing my masterpiece in 5 pages or less.  I’m getting better at it though. This is largely because of some awesome tools that generous writers share on their websites. In the spirit of prolonging the inevitable a bit longer, I decided to share the most useful ones I’ve found here, with you, as an early …

The last few weeks I’ve been obsessed about e-pub vs. print and self publish vs. traditional houses. Over at Bark I blogged about how I learned that the term “self-published” is too filled with negativity, so the hip new term is “indie author.” I also wrote about how a writer friend emailed me Jim C. Hall’s very funny cartoon to get me to shut up about the whole thing. Well, I’m happy to report that I’m not longer obsessing. The Rose City Spring Intensive has renewed my enthusiasm for writing, given me new hope about getting published, and shown me—yet …