It's Tuesday again, so here we are. I'm going to be writing a query letter this weekend. If you don't know how, plenty of websites, articles, and podcasts will explain it. Somehow it still feels impossible. I have to summarize my novel's plot and make it sound irresistible. I've read that if you can write …
Okay, maybe in that picture I'm just typing an email. It's hard to say for sure. But my husband took that picture around the time I started my novel--in the year 2000 or 2001. And that's the laptop I started writing it on (RIP first laptop) and the desk I was sitting at. I certainly …
In high school I spent one year on the yearbook staff. I started the class really excited, and I ended the class hoping never to speak of it again. When my mother saw the section I'd worked on--the advertising section, which I hated but did work hard on--she said, "That doesn't look very good. That's …
In case you have somehow escaped me telling you, I have found a publisher. This press is small and new and in the UK. Since it was a UK literary journal that published my first short story and the BBC is my favorite channel, a British publisher makes sense really. Don't you think? The name …
So, an agent has asked for a synopsis that reads like a book jacket. I'm not to give too much away, but to sell the story. I feel the same way about a synopsis as I did about an outline in school. But anyway. Here is my dumb idea of the day. Let me rephrase …
The agent wasn't taken with the pages I sent from my manuscript The Labyrinth House. I rewrote them, but they still work for her. The agent was willing to read a few pages of The Blue Jar, and she liked those pages enough to ask for more. I've sent more, and I'm now waiting. I …
How often do you look back on a past moment in your life and wonder if you missed what really happened? I am very good at this. The other day I was reading about some hubbub going on over a storyline on a television series. I don't watch the series but the issue of writer …
I got through high school and college without a boyfriend. I had a few dates, but no one you could call a boyfriend. (By boyfriend I mean someone who would actually refer to me as his girlfriend.) So after dating (and I use the term loosely) guys who seemed incapable of anything resembling a actual …
Sometimes I may begrudge every other published writer everything. You know, in moments of personality collapse. Meaning, those moments when I'm not the great and fantabulist soul I want to be. (Yes. Fantabulist.) Those moments when I'm resistant, cranky, jealous, and generally not nice. (All you saints out there can begin throwing stones at any …
The ink is my pen is frozen and so are the keys on my keyboard. Really! It's true! Okay. Really, nothing is wrong with the ink or the keyboard. The problem is in my head. One or two of you may know that a while ago an agent asked to see some pages of my …
Marta Pelrine-Bacon 