Query letters and story synopses are part of most writing careers at some point, unless one starts off self-publishing and sticks to it relentlessly. For the rest of us, querying agents and editors is part of the business, and so is preparing various sorts of submission packages.
Read more →Writing conferences are something that I think deserve their own post. There are quite a lot of them, and they are sufficiently dissimilar that one really shouldn’t just pick one at random to attend. Like everything else, each type works well for some things (and writers) and
Read more →I was at a book signing recently and admitted to the person in line behind me that I was about a quarter of the way through writing my book. I should note here, she is also a writer. She immediately asked me what writing conferences I had
Read more →My tax guy said I should create a business identity that the money will go to (if I ever sell a book) rather than just my name. I don’t know whether that means I have to sign the agent contract with my “business” name or not. Generally
Read more →We now reach the third leg of the professional-writing stool: Business. At first glance, this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the writing part of writing-as-a-profession. Business is all about the profession part, right? And logically, that means that writers who don’t care about “having
Read more →The elbow is not completely healed, but it is much better. I’m still not allowed to lift anything heavier than a coffee cup, but typing isn’t about lifting, so that’s all right. However, I’m planning to ease back into things – I’m going to be posting once
Read more →Deadlines. Some writers love them, some hate them, and some don’t seem able to finish anything unless they have one. And how many times have you heard someone say (not necessarily about writing) “I do my best work when I have a deadline to meet”? Around a
Read more →I was flipping channels yesterday and came across somebody – I think she was a life coach – giving advice to a thirty-something guy who said his dream was to become a writer. He had apparently given up (at least temporarily) when he didn’t make it into
Read more →It’s been over a year since my last post on query letters, and frankly, after writing four different posts on the topic, I didn’t think I had anything else to say. After all, the basics of query letter writing don’t change much, mainly because its purpose hasn’t
Read more →A while back, I got a deceptively simple question with an apparently obvious answer, all of which turn out to be neither so simple nor so obvious as they at first seemed. The question was, in essence, “What parts of your writing career can you talk about
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