✨Annabel Monaghan on writing that evokes all the feels✨
Plus, a query resubmission (!) during 📕Books with Hooks🪝and The Query Lab continues
Happiest of Fridays to you, friends of The 💩!
How’s everyone’s writing going? We know it’s hard to resist the lure of the sun, so if you’re struggling to stay in your seat and hit your word count, might we suggest taking a walk with your headset on and dictating as you go? We swear it works. Something about moving and a change of scenery always seems to shake something loose and—bonus!—you’re waaaay less likely to get caught up in editing as you go! (Just be careful when passing strangers on the sidewalk if you happen to be writing a particularly stabby thriller and have just gotten to the good bits).
As you know, it’s our mission here at TSNOTYAW to impart as much wisdom and enthusiasm as we can to help you survive and thrive on your journey to publication, so one of our very favourite things is knowing that our listeners are able to take our ideas on board, put in the work, and elevate their query as a result. And that’s exactly what’s happened this week, as Bianca, Carly and CeCe discuss a resubmission in our Books with Hooks segment—we love to see it!
We’ve also got Bianca’s interview with Annabel Monaghan, where they chat about her latest novel, Summer Romance, and the unfortunately widely held belief that “if you're a smart person, you should be writing ‘smart’ things and they should be confusing and mysterious and everyone should have to work really hard to read them and they should be taught in schools.” (Pro tip: Think writing a successful romance is a breeze? Try doing it some time!) Plus, we share another successful query letter in this week’s The Query Lab.
Thanks for reading! ❤️
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
P.S. Still not sure about upgrading to paid? Check out our Tuesday Teaser below to see what you’re missing!
This Week’s Podcast✨🎙️✨
In this week’s 📕Books with Hooks🪝, Bianca, CeCe, and Carly are joined by guest literary agent, Mary C Moore. They critique a resubmission and a sci-fi query, during which they discuss:
The importance of making tropes as fresh and different as possible
How to ensure your pitch isn't too dense, especially in genres that involve world-building
Highlighting why you're the right person to tell the story you've written
Writing plot points that connect to your major dramatic question
The balancing act of trying to write a cross-over novel
Always being mindful of your writing at a line-level
The quality of prose that is required for literary fiction
The need to get inside a character's head to better understand them
Avoiding overwhelming the reader with terminology that is specific to the world you've built
Making your hook very clear; and
Expressing why your work is different from similar novels that have come before.
“You cannot build something beautiful when it comes to writing without the writing being there at the sentence level. I would rather as writers that you take two years off from writing a book, from a particular story, and really just practice on elevating at the sentence level … Just focus on those sentences and then you can come back and build a house rather than being like, ‘well I built this thing but there aren't any bricks but don't worry about that, I'll worry about the bricks later.’”
– Bianca
After which, Bianca interviews NYT bestselling author, Annabel Monaghan. They discuss
Annabel's latest, Summer Romance, and the unique inspiration behind it
Her work as a columnist and how it contributed to her skills as an author
Why she switched from YA to writing women's fiction and rom-coms
The art of writing in a way that gets into a reader's heart and not just their head
The story behind Annabel's opening line in her latest novel
The challenge of knowing where to start your novel
Writing about grief in a rom-com; and
Whether Annabel is a plotter or a pantser.
“I think life has probably always been hard, feels kind of hard right now in the world. I just don't think there's anything wrong with using your full mental capacity and all of your energy to create something that feels like a break for people, feels like a release, feels like just, you know, a moment of joy.”
— Annabel
More information about Annabel can be found on her website here. She's also on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Tuesday teaser 😉
We know from the number of Books with Hooks submissions we get for multi-POV manuscripts that a lot of you like to write this incredibly challenging structure as much as you like to read it. Done right, books that take this approach can be hugely compelling and commercially successful (Nine Perfect Strangers, anyone?), so we think you’ll enjoy next week’s newsletter exclusively for our paid members, which includes debut author Caitlin Weaver’s insights on the pitfalls of ensemble casts and the secrets to avoiding them, including seven questions every author needs to be able to answer about their characters.
We’ve also got our weekly Author Q&A, this time with screenwriter, novelist and director Sidney Karger whose recently released The Bump was called “Smart, deeply funny and heartwarming” by Anderson Cooper.
Not a paid member? Don’t miss out—upgrade today! Here’s what you get every week (plus we always have new ideas percolating!):
For just $8USD a month or $80USD a year:
an exclusive newsletter on Tuesdays featuring bonus author Q&As and other exclusive content from industry experts
weekly access to Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra’s written notes on queries from the podcast’s Books With Hooks feature
monthly bonus podcast episodes, AND
regular Ask Me Anythings / Q&As with Carly, CeCe, and Bianca Marais.
If that doesn’t kickstart your writing journey, we don’t know what will!
The query lab 📝🖊
Welcome to The Query Lab where each Friday for the next few months we’ll be
sharing a successful query letter that got an author their agent AND their book deal.
Today we’ve got a query from Angela Pisel, author of With Love From the Inside 😍:
Dear [REDACTED],
Grace Bradshaw knows the exact minute she will die. On death row for murdering her infant son, her last breath will be taken on February 15 at 12:01 a.m. Eleven years, five months, and twenty-seven days separate her from the last time she heard her precious daughter’s voice and the final moment she’d heard anyone call her mom. Out of appeals, she can focus on only one thing—reconnecting with her daughter and making sure she knows the truth.
Secrets lurk behind Sophie Logan’s big house and even bigger bank account. Every day when she kisses her husband goodbye, she worries her fabricated life is about to come crumbling down. No one knows the unforgivable things her mother did to tear her family apart—not her husband who is a prominent plastic surgeon, or her “synthetic” friends who live in her upscale neighborhood.
Grace’s looming execution date forces Sophie to revisit the traumatic events that haunted her childhood. When she returns to her hometown, she discovers new evidence about her baby brother William’s death seventeen years ago—proof that might set her mother free, but shatter her marriage forever.
Sophie must quickly decide if her mother is the baby-killing monster the prosecutor made her out to be or the loving mother she remembers—the one who painted her toenails glittery pink and plastered post-it notes with inspiring quotes (100% failure rate if you don’t try) all over Sophie’s bathroom mirror.
In my novel With Love From the Inside, a mother’s quest to reconcile collides with a daughter’s decision to never look back. Similar in theme to Amanda Eyre Ward’s Sleep Toward Heaven or Elizabeth L. Silver’s The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, this modern day 88,000-word women’s fiction explores the complex relationship between a mother and daughter and their quest to discover the truth—all before their time runs out.
As a therapist and life coach, I have had the opportunity to mentor women through various transitions in their lives. I volunteer for an organization that seeks to reestablish healthy relationships between children and their parents who have been incarcerated. I also correspond with several women who are on death row.
I genuinely thank you for your time and consideration.
Most Sincerely,
Angela Pisel
You can purchase With Love On the Inside on our Bookshop.org affiliate page here 🥰
Click below for the downloadable version of Angela’s successful query!
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That’s all for this week’s news! If you enjoyed it, why not share the love? 🥰
Tune in again next week for more invaluable wisdom from our wonderful hosts! Until then, happy writing! 😍
❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
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Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra are literary agents at P.S. Literary Agency, but their work in this newsletter is not affiliated with the agency, and the views expressed by Carly and CeCe in this newsletter are solely that of themselves and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of P.S. Literary Agency.
This Books with Hooks was hands-down the best one for me personally as I have two completed manuscripts (two of a three-part series) of a space opera/romance/book club crossover that I need help classifying (as you see). Also always looking for good comps. It’s a sparse space out there (pun intended).
I believe there is a female sci-Fi audience out there that is being criminally underserved as evidenced by the literally hundreds of thousands of sci-Fi fanfiction stories on the web. These are stories of emotion and conscience, social justice and family, action and aliens. They rewrite genres and shape subcultures. And most of them are written by and read by women. Where are the commercial publications that give these audiences what they desire? All too often, I read the first chapter of what Mary referred to as classic sci-Fi, and I’m bored already. But so-called ‘women’s fiction’ (ick) holds very little appeal for me either. I want strong women, tackling big world issues, experiencing extraordinary adventures, and helping us see ourselves through the lens of fiction. It’s the next romantasy trend without elves or ‘might makes right.’
Whoa! This is the longest query I ever saw. I'da gone with just the last two paragraphs. But hey, it worked for her!