If you’re writing this week, it’s either because you’re on a tight deadline, you’re stranded on a solitary island in the South Pacific and it just happens to have wifi, or you finished all your shopping and meal prep …
Agents
Should Writers Query Literary Agents During the Holidays?
One of the questions I see most in online spaces among writers is some iteration of, “Is it worth my time to query literary agents during the holidays—are they even reading queries?” I can’t speak for all literary agents, but …
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4 Reasons Writers Need a Writing Community
When I was in college, my favorite class was Creative Writing 101. The professor was one of my favorites, and her bohemian, free-flowing style of both living and teaching permeated every encounter I had with her. One of the reasons …
Expectations vs. Reality
photo courtesy of Pixabay by permission
Do an aspiring author’s great expectations for a literary agent align with reality? Not always.
With a combined (estimated) 200,000 work hours devoted to serving the Christian publishing industry, we Books & Such Agents …
Five Questions I Ask After Reading a Query
Recently I held a “Pitch Me Day” on Threads, a day I created to give writers a chance to pitch their project in a low pressure way. If I “like” the pitch, they get to skip the query and send …
Five Practices for Becoming a Better Writer
Whether you’ve just started putting pen to paper or you’ve been writing for years, one truth remains constant: there’s always room to grow. Becoming a better writer isn’t about waiting for inspiration to strike—it’s about showing up consistently, pushing your …
Building a Writing Community
Writing can be lonely. You sit in front of your computer, day after day, typing away–agonizing over the words that will come together to form the story that you’ve dreamed up. It takes many solitary hours to craft and edit …
The Dreaded No
If an author were to compile a vocabulary list for writers in the making, or writers stuck in the middle, they might put the dreaded NO at the top of the list. To many, it feels as if they hear …
Make Non-Fiction Come Alive
Nonfiction comes in a variety of genres and can have tremendous impact on the reader. But within each, the importance of keeping the reader’s attention and giving them solid take-away is important. Your writing can come alive when you use …
Random Agent Thoughts
Yes, this is a blog post of random agent thoughts.
A few weeks after my father’s heart stopped beating for the last time, we discovered among his office files a three-ring binder labeled “497 Random Thoughts.” Over the course of …