✨The Berry Pickers Author Amanda Peters on Problem-Solving Your Way Through a Story✨
Plus, Mason Coile (a.k.a. Andrew Pyper) answers our questions, Carly's back with a Query Lab wrap-up, Kitty Johnson reveals her latest cover just for you, AND exciting new course offerings!
Happy Friday, writing friends!
Welcome to week two of our new podcast schedule! In case you missed it, as of last week, the show will be alternating between author interviews one week, and query critiques the next. This week is author interview week and it’s a good one: Bianca is joined by the award-winning and critically acclaimed Amanda Peters, whose little book The Berry Pickers you might just happen to have heard of. 😉 We don’t get a lot of opportunities to feature short fiction on the show (and it’s such an instructive form), so we’re excited to hear Amanda’s insights as she talks to Bianca about her latest release, the short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon.
Canadian author Andrew Pyper (whose most recent novel, the psychological horror meets cyber noir William, is out now under the pen name Mason Coile) answers our Author Q&A this week, and the insights he shares around the temptation to chase trends rather than follow one’s own “strongest inclinations” are absolute gold.
The Query Lab may have come to an end, but we’re sure some of you are still thinking about it. Specifically, you’re asking yourselves about some of the queries we looked at and wondering: “How did they manage to break so many of the rules Carly and CeCe have been drilling into us all this time and still land an agent?!?” Well, we’ve got the answer for you in another great essay from Carly this week. 🤓
We’re also excited to bring you another exclusive cover reveal in this issue, this time for Closest Kept, the upcoming novel from Kitty Johnson (author of the bestselling Five Winters). 📕 😍
There are so many skills a writer needs to master—like plot, character development, scene structure—and so few people who start out equally skilled at them all. And line-level writing seems to be one of the hardest to develop. If this is an area you want to improve in, be sure to check out Hacking Writing on a Line Level, the latest course offering from CeCe—details below! 💻✍🏼
And there’s still time to register for All About Fantasy with Bianca, but hurry—September 28th will be here before you know it and you don’t want to miss this amazing day of learning, or the chance to win an amazing prize pack from The Story Engine!🧌🐦🔥👽
That’s all for now. 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 today’s author interview (listen here!), Bianca interviews Amanda Peters, author of Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which is a collection of short stories.
Amanda reads the first short story in the collection, and the two discuss:
Framing and POV and Amanda's deliberate choices regarding POV in her stories;
Tension that comes from the reader knowing something the characters don't;
Writing quiet stories that are emotionally weighted;
Finding your way into a beginning and the evolution of Amanda's second story in the collection;
Problem solving as an integral part of being a writer; and
Amanda's experience oscillating between writing short stories and novels.
“You can be working on something for so long and you know it's almost there, but you just can't get it right. And then there's that “aha!” moment when everything just comes together. And it is problem solving. It is trying to figure out does this make sense in this context? How are other people going to interpret this? How are they going to read it? Am I pleased with it? So it is a lot of problem solving and putting things together.”
— Amanda Peters
You can find out more information about Amanda on her website here.
Author Q&A with Mason Coile (a.k.a. Andrew Pyper)
Andrew Pyper was born in Stratford, Ontario, in 1968. He received a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from McGill University, as well as a law degree from the University of Toronto. Although called to the bar in 1996, he has never practiced.
His most recent novels include The Homecoming (2019), The Only Child (2017), and The Damned (2015). His 2013 novel, The Demonologist, won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Novel, and was a #1 bestseller in Canada and Brazil.
A number of Pyper’s works have been acquired for TV or feature film. The Homecoming is being developed by eOne with Andrew acting as Co-Creator and Executive Producer. Other active projects have not yet been announced.
Among the earlier novels, The Guardians was published in Canada (Doubleday Canada) in January 2011, the U.K. (Orion) in February 2011, and following this internationally in various territories. It was selected a Globe and Mail 100 Best Books of the Year.
TSNOTYAW: How do you ensure you have enough time to write amidst so many obligations competing for your time?
Andrew Pyper: Back when my first novel came out twenty-five years ago, it was successful enough for me to approach the writing that came after as "a living." Just thinking that, or declaring that, means nothing, of course. But I took the opportunity and worked hard to not go back to a normal working life, whatever that would've looked like for me at the time. I was the boss, yes, but it had to be treated like a job. I think this approach holds up well whether you're making a go of writing professionally full-time or just trying to carve out an hour here or there to finish a project.
What is the most challenging part of being a successful author? And how do you mitigate its effects?
Staying the course. There were a few times in my career when it looked like the well had dried up (not my creative well, but the opportunities to find room in the marketplace). The temptation to chase some trend, or pump out something too fast, or simply give up can become strong. In my experience, though, if the ship is going to right itself it's going to be because you continued to follow your strongest inclinations, and even more importantly, you continued to produce good work. Even books that editors pass on can be helpful over the long run if they're well-crafted — readers remember that, because so much of what comes in to them isn't. Hold steady! The answer is always in the work!
Writer’s block: myth or unfortunate reality? If you experience it, how do you overcome it?
I know it feels real to many, so I won't speak definitively about whether writer's block exists or not (I lean more on the "myth" side, for the record). Either way, I find a cure for being stuck in getting outside. Bring a notebook or turn on the dictaphone function on your phone. Describe a tree. The odd gait to someone's walk. What the smell of freshly mown grass reminds you of. What starts off as just a phrase or sentence inevitably builds into something more...and before you know it, you're back, baby!
How important do you think it is for writers to be on social media?
I know that some writers (more often non-fiction authors) have built careers off of impressive social media platforms. However, speaking as a novelist, I honestly believe that there are far more writers out there who are spending way too much time nursing their social media than not spending enough. I have colleagues who have built wonderful, creative, involving social media campaigns for their books, or who supply a steady torrent of "content" that has enlarged their follower numbers into the five or even six figures — and it hasn't made much difference to the book's fate. This probably puts me in the minority, but I think a writer's attention is better paid to the quality of the work itself — its concept, its execution, its timeliness, its standing out from other stories in its sub-genre — than boosting the book through social media. Read your work aloud. Hire an editor if you can. Take their notes! I can't tell you exactly what secret sauce makes a book a bestseller (not that I'm keeping it from you, but because I don't know) but I can tell you that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, fiddling around on Instagram or TikTok makes no difference.
What is something you’ve learned about yourself later in your writing career that would have surprised your younger self?
Literary fame — whatever sputtering flame that might denote — is of almost no interest to me anymore, and hasn't been for years. Yes, I want to be published by good houses, I want an audience, I want readers to enjoy what I've made. But fame? I tasted that for the first few years and, while sweet at the time, I have no thirst for it now.
If you could travel back in time and meet your past self in the year after the publication of your debut, what words of encouragement and/or warning would you give yourself?
Don't write a second novel quite so different from your very successful first novel. Sure, be fresh, be unpredictable, but maybe find some commonality between Book One and Book Two so you don't leave people scratching their heads.
You can purchase William on our Bookshop.org affiliate page here. Buying books through this link supports a local indie bookstore, as well as The Shit No One Tells You About Writing 📚❤️
The Query Lab Wrap-Up 📝🖊
By Carly Watters
Rolling out The Query Lab has been a goal of mine for awhile and everything from sourcing the query lab pitches for you to watching you read them and react to them—and support the authors who wrote them—has been exactly what I’d hoped: another resource to show you that yes, real writers do it and yes, real writers get published! It’s not some mythical event that happens. Getting an agent and getting a book deal happens to real writers. Imagine that. It’s possible.
What did we learn from the Query Lab?
Not every writer follows the “rules” and that’s OK. (The rules are just guidelines, anyway!) Lots of writers put their word count and comps at the bottom in these samples. Did they get the job done? Yes. Is it the way CeCe and I suggest on the show? No. Is that OK? …YES! Repeat after me: the goal of a query letter is to get an agent to request pages. That’s the whole goal.
So why do we tell you to do it a certain way, and why do we call it a rule? Simple: It's the same reason you start out circling an empty parking lot and not the Indy 500 track when you're learning to drive—you need a firm grasp of the basics before you start getting fancy. Writers whose queries break the rules tend to be those who have incredibly strong hooks, who’ve researched and have a real understanding of the agent they’re querying, and who’ve already had plenty of practiced with rule-following approaches (in other words, those who’ve driven around the parking lot enough times to know what they’re doing and be ready for more).
There are books that maybe you don’t feel passionately about that still get book deals. (We keep those thoughts to ourselves! There is a big market out there for all kinds of books!) Agents see this all the time: we pass on something, and it gets picked up by someone else who is passionate and that’s fantastic.
Agents fall in love with books for all different reasons. I haven’t asked each of the agents that signed these authors what they fell for, but as a professional myself I can tell you it’s always going to be: the hook was compelling, there was something in that story, setting, or stakes that wanted to make us read more, and when we read the pages we loved them and wanted to help the book make its way into the world. That’s the formula.
Sometimes all it takes is a hook or one really good line for an agent to request more and get on board with the pitch. Look at this one from OLIVIA STRAUSS IS RUNNING OUT OF TIME: “...a visit to the Nettle Center — a trendy, New Age wellness clinic, whose founder claims to have created a genetic test that can predict the exact date of one’s death. Both women assume the test is bogus and that the experience will serve purely as a quirky, “we’re only here for the story” sort of outing. However, when Olivia’s results come back unfavorable, she must consider a question she has avoided for far too long: what is she actually doing with her life?” To me, that’s the part that would make me stand up and say, “oh yes, this is doing something unique.”
Stakes and setting are VERY important. Let’s remember Aime Card’s pitch: “THE TIGERBELLES is the story of how eight women from Tennessee State University, an HBCU in Nashville, made it to the Olympics, and how four of them came home with gold medals.” BOOM! The year is 1960, HIDDEN FIGURE is a comp, and the Olympics are always a fascinating topic—this is a great concept for a book. Let’s root for the underdogs in a sports book! Classic hook we all love.
Comps matter! These Query Lab pitches nailed their comps. Here are a few examples: Jane Goodall meets Carrie Bradshaw (Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating Apps by Treena Orchard). Succession meets The Farewell (Dava Shastri's Last Day by Kirthana Ramisetti). There are a ton of great comps in all these Query Lab queries.
Author bios can tell us SO much about someone in a short paragraph. We love reading how Hailey Alcarez chooses to tell us about herself: “As a Mexican-American woman, an English teacher for mostly Hispanic students in South Phoenix, and a lover of powerful female protagonists, I am uniquely qualified to tell this story of a mixed race young woman blazing her own trail.”
What did you learn from the Query Lab? Let us know below in the comments!
Book Cover Reveal 🥁🥳
When you and your best friend hook up with two guys on a night out, how do you know you’ve chosen the right one?
That’s quite the question Kitty Johnson (author of the bestselling Five Winters) poses in her upcoming novel Closest Kept, and we’re excited to be able to exclusively reveal the cover (if not the answer) to you today! Read the description below then check out that cover and …😍
Close knit friends Lily and Alex and Inga and Matt spend all their time together, laughing, talking and sharing dreams. Lily never had a best friend until she met Inga at college; perhaps that’s why she lets Inga pair up with Matt when the four of them first meet, even though she’s drawn to him herself. Or maybe it’s because of the secret past she’s never shared with anyone, not even Inga — a past that makes her feel unloved and unlovable if she dwells on it, which she tries never to do. The daughter of an alcoholic mother, Lily practically brought up her feisty younger sister Violet until she was taken into care. Besides, Alex is lovely too, and she’s happy. At least, she is until Inga decides to conceal something awful from Matt, forcing Lily to keep it a secret too.
Unhappy about being forced to lie when Inga starts deceiving Matt, Lily finds herself at odds with both her friends and her lover. Especially when Alex decides he wants to change the rules of their relationship at the exact same time her sister Violet storms back into her life.
Bestselling author of Five Winters, Kitty Johnson lives in Norwich, Norfolk in the UK, with her partner and teenage son. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and teaches creative writing part-time.
Closest Kept releases on May 6, 2025 and you can pre-order it on our Bookshop.org affiliate page here!
Tuesday Teaser 😉
In next week’s newsletter exclusively for our paid members, we’ve got an Author Q&A with Ann Rose, author and literary agent who has some serious wisdom to dispense, including an answer to the question we’re sure you’re all asking yourselves: Is it easier to get an agent when you are one? To learn the answer, you’ll just have to subscribe.
We’ve also got yet another fantastic essay from our very own Carly Watters, this time on the importance of making the right first impression in the publishing world, and the mistakes you should avoid.
For all you witch-y fiction writers and fans, Sarah Henning, author of nine YA and middle grade books, often involving witches, shares a video on creating a believable magical system.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, we’ve also got an essay from debut novelist Becca Grischow who takes a look at the downsides of the following that old writing advice chestnut “Write What You Know” and offers advice on how to avoid getting yourself into trouble when doing it.
Not yet a member? For just $8USD a month or $80USD a year you get:
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!
Hacking Writing on a Line Level📝
No matter what genre you write in, knowing how to elevate your writing on a line level is an essential skill. But what does strong writing on a line level look like exactly? Are there rules and/or techniques that can help storytellers elevate their writing? And how can writers know if they’re improving this element of the craft? Join CeCe not just to unpack strong writing on a line level, but to learn how to *hack* it! This class will be jam packed with real-world examples of writing on a line level that work—and that don’t. All examples, all the time. For the first time ever, we're meeting for 3 days! November 7th at 8pm ET: First Craft Session November 11th at 8pm ET: Second Craft Session November 26th at 8pm ET: Live, cozy Q&A session (attendees will have the option of turning on their cameras and interacting with CeCe)
Come prepared to take lots of notes!
If you’ve taken this class before, then the First Craft Session on November 7th will feel familiar to you, but the Second Craft Session will include new techniques and workshops! Don’t worry if you have to leave early or if you can’t attend one (or more) sessions live: all sessions will be recorded, and each recording will be emailed to everyone who is registered 24h later. Recordings will be available to the viewer for a limited time.
Learn All About Fantasy with Bianca and Friends!🧙🏼🪄🧙🏼♂️
Join Bianca Marais on the 28th of September from 9am-5pm ET as she hosts a one-day virtual retreat specifically aimed at fantasy authors!
Whether you write YA Fantasy, Romantasy, Adult Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Dystopian Fantasy, or any other variation of the genre, you won’t want to miss out on this amazing day of learning dedicated especially to you and those writing in your genre.
The retreat will be taped, and the recording and materials will be sent out to all registered delegates the next day. Each session that includes a Q and A will allow you to ask the speakers all your burning questions.
A closed Facebook group will be created so that delegates can interact with one another before and after the retreat as a way of building and maintaining community.
The registration fee is US $ 149.00.
For more information, and to book your spot, click below:
Be Part of Carly’s Masterclass 😍📝
Carly’s class includes 10+ hours of writing and publishing video lessons you have lifetime access to, monthly Q&A sessions, and fresh content every quarter.
Did we mention there’s an app, too? You can keep learning on the go. Don’t miss a minute of Carly’s top career advice for aspiring, emerging and published writers. Get the writing career you’ve always dreamed of.
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
Our work takes place on land now known as Toronto and Ottawa and we acknowledge that these are the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat Peoples as well as the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Toronto is covered under Treaty 13 and the Williams Treaties. We respect and affirm the inherent and Treaty Rights of all Indigenous Peoples across this land and acknowledge the historical oppression of lands, cultures, languages, and the original Peoples in what we now know as Canada. We invite you to learn more about the land you inhabit, the history of that land, and how to actively be part of a better future going forward together at Native Land or Whose Land.
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.
Very good as always