Happy Tuesday, writing friends!
Last week was 📕Books with Hooks 🪝week on the podcast, so you can find Carly and CeCe’s written query critiques below! And yesterday was our Shooting the Shit segment - make sure you don’t miss out on CeCe and Carly spilling all the publishing tea.
Del Sandeen, author of These Walls Remember pens an excellent essay titled Knowing Your Genre: From Reading the Classics to Writing for Today’s Audience:
“Does your prose have to meander down a lane like Virginia Woolf’s did, taking its leisurely time to reach its destination while simultaneously providing a dizzying array of detail? Or do you have to name every character, even the most minor ones, à la Stephen King?
Of course not. After all, your style is yours alone.
But it’s worth pulling back from the past—this includes the most famous classics as well as lesser-known works—to help shape your work today. You might even take an old story with problematic elements and invert it. As an example, H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook” was turned on its xenophobic head in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, a novella with a Black man as protagonist.”
This essay has so many great nuggets of wisdom, you might need to print it out and highlight sections!
Max Doty, author of The House That Eats the Dead, discusses iteration over success in today’s author video. Curious to know what birdhouses have to do with writing and creativity? 🤔 Give it a watch!
In today’s Meet Your Dream Agent profile, we chat with Carleen Geisler from Britt Siess Creative Management:
“What are the most common mistakes authors make in their query letters?
Vagueness! I often see queries that tell me what their book will make me (supposedly) feel, or how they want readers to react to their book. That information is not helpful when I am evaluating a query. In addition (and along the same track), authors will sometimes write a query that tries too much to “stand out” from a typical query structure. Unfortunately, that just makes evaluating it more difficult on my end. I’m sorry to say that the standard structure is that way for a reason!”
Keep reading to see if you and Carleen would make a good match!
Then, Lynne Constantine, co-author of Promise Me Never, tackles our author Q&A. We love what she has to say about giving up:
“When I was first sending out queries years ago, I received rejection after rejection and my mantra was: Not if, but when. I was determined that I would never get up. I believe you should never give up on your dream. That said, I did other work for years while I was trying to get published but I never gave up on my goal of being a full-time writer.”
Finally, don’t forget about CeCe’s exciting upcoming Writing Tension course with a whole new acquisitions pipeline feature you’ll want to be a part of!
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! ❤️
❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
This Week on ‘Shooting the Shit’
Carly and CeCe are back for another Shooting the Shit, digging into the latest publishing news—from what’s changing with local author events, to encouraging new sales numbers across the industry. They also spotlight editor Whitney Frick and unpack what makes a memoir truly resonate, why fact-checking ultimately falls on the author, and the difference between simply recounting what happened and finding the emotional truth behind an experience.
Listen to it here or watch it on YouTube!
