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Posts Tagged ‘slush pile’

  1. Productive Stall

    July 2, 2012 by Kiersi

    Paper Towns (blue) book cover

    Work on the last stretch of The Aeronauts has stalled in the wake of bachelorette parties, book club (John Green’s Paper Towns), applying for a fellowship with Literary Arts, and chomping through Beth Revis’s debut YA sci-fi novel, Across the Universe. Maybe I’ll review it and its sequel, A Million Suns, when I’m finished with them. If time permits. Or if someone asks nicely.

    I’m also struggling to stay away from planning this “new adult” (“NA,” as it is affectionately called; the term means “16-18+” age range) novel about superheroes, and the middle grade novel that I–guilty swallow–might have started writing last weekend about chick viking dragon hunters.

    And oh, yeah, my hair is blue.

    Anyway, some presents for you: (more…)

    Category: in progress | Tags: , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

  2. Tips for Writing the Perfect Hook

    April 30, 2012 by Kiersi

    Tips for Hooking an Agent or PublisherWilliam Nolan, author of the award-winning dystopian novel Logan’s Run, described the process of editing for Gamma magazine as far back as the 1960s at the Write to Publish 2012 convention this weekend:

    Every Thursday I went into the office to go through the slush pile of manuscript submissions for the magazine. I reached the point where I’d open each box or envelope, slide out the first page, and just read the first couple of paragraphs. That was all the time an author got to impress me and convince me to keep reading.

    With the advent of email submissions, agents and publishers increasingly find their inboxes swamped by unsolicited manuscripts–leaving them even less time to wade through backstories and prologues to get to the action, the theme, the meat. This is true even for query letters. I’ll leave that topic for another day.

    Here are some suggestions I picked up at the Write to Publish conference to help you clean up your manuscript for submission. (more…)

    Category: How-to, Literary Agents, Publishing | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments