Head on over to Wicked Jungle to read my guest post, Anatomy of an Idea, where I discuss why “where did you get the idea for your book?” isn’t such a simple question, with examples of the many bits and pieces that came together to form the idea for GIVE UP THE GHOST.
You can also win signed copy of GHOST by commenting and tweeting!
How much information about the plot of your book would you recommend revealing in a query letter? Up to the climax? How the story concludes?
I think the best advice I’ve heard on query letters is to make your book description sound like the sort of blurb you’d read on the back of a published book. Before you get started, read the blurbs for some of your favorite books, and see how they do it. Give a little set-up, introduce the main character and his/her main conflict, what’s at stake, maybe a complication or two, and that’s it. You definitely want to hold off on telling the ending–you want the agent or editor to be eager to read the story and find out what that ending is!
For the query for GIVE UP THE GHOST, which you can check out here, with my agent’s comments, I covered (in a very general way) the events of about 2/3 of the book. But you can see I didn’t give away how Cass resolved her problems. And you can definitely cover less, as long as what you do tell is gripping and shows how your story is unique.
For example queries that work and don’t work, and thoughts on why they do or don’t, I highly recommend checking out Query Shark and Evil Editor, as well as Miss Snark’s Crapometer archives (start at the link and work backwards). And read those book blurbs!
If you were to live in any book universe, which ‘verse & character would you choose and why?
I found this tricky, because while I have many books I adore, most of them would be rather stressful/unpleasant to live in. 🙂 That’s what makes them so entertaining, of course!
I think if I had to choose one, I’d probably go with Sophie from HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE. Because there’s a lot of fun as well as conflict in her life, and who wouldn’t want to hang out with the Wizard Howl in a castle that can take you into different worlds? I could even stop by Earth now and then if I wanted!
Your turn, readers: what book would you choose to live in?
Do you believe in ghosts and have you ever seen or felt the presence of a ghost? If yes, please tell! And if no, would you like to?
When it comes to most things paranormal, I consider myself an open-minded skeptic. I don’t believe ghosts definitely exist, because I’ve never had an experience or come across evidence that convinced me of it. But I don’t believe they definitely don’t exist, either, because I have heard many stories from many other people that are very convincing, even if not quite enough to decide me.
I’ve never seen a ghost myself, that I know of. One time, when I was a teenager living at my parents house, one of our cats started acting very strangely, reacting as if there was something very scary under my bed. He sprang across the room, flailed and scratched me when I tried to pick him up, and then ran out and sat at the top of the stairs staring at the bed through my open door for quite a while. He’d formerly loved to hide under it and for months afterward completely avoided it. I wondered if there was some sort of presence there that he sensed but I didn’t.
Would I like to? You know, if ghosts do exist, I think I’d want to see one simply so that I would know for sure. I’m always the sort of person who’d rather know what’s going on than not.
What about you? Have you ever seen a ghost, or evidence one was around?
I hope to see lots of Toronto area folks this weekend at Ad Astra. It’s running April 9th to 11th at the Toronto Don Valley Hotel & Suites, 1250 Eglinton Ave East. I’ll be around and about, but you will definitely be able to find me at these times:
Panel on Critique Groups with Matt Moore, David Nickle, Suzanne Church, and Lorne Kates
Friday, April 9th, 8:00-9:00pm
Ballr. East
Autograph Session (a few copies of GHOST will be available from Bakka-Phoenix in the Dealer’s room, or you can bring a copy you picked up previously)
Saturday, April 10th, 4:00-5:30pm
Ballr. East
Reading with Kelley Armstrong and Rob St. Martin
Saturday, April 10th, 7:00-8:00pm
Salon 443
Panel on How to Get an Agent with Adrienne Kress, Ian Keeling, and Gregory A. Wilson
Sunday, April 11th, 10:00-11:00am
Ballr. East
Hope to see you there!
Yesterday was a busy day, because after work, I went to pick up the newest addition to our family:
Please welcome Molly!
She’s an Egyptian Mau, currently about 13 weeks old, very purry and very playful, as you can see here:
Fiver and Hazel aren’t yet sure what to think, but I’m sure they will all get on fine. 🙂
Happy Easter!
What do you do when you get a serious case of writer’s block? What do you do to get through it?
To be honest, I don’t get anything I would call writer’s block. I do have a number of points in the writing process where I may find it difficult/impossible to write, that someone else might use that label for, though. But to me “writer’s block” has the connotations of something unnatural, that we’d want to do away with completely, and all those points for me are a normal part of the process.
Sometimes I can’t write because I don’t have any projects on the go, and none of the ideas I’ve been playing with feel quite ready yet. This can be very frustrating, but I’ve learned from experience that if I try to make an idea work when it’s only half-baked, the end result is half-baked, too. When this happens, I try to give myself lots of opportunity to take in inspiring material–books, music, movies, art–until I find the missing pieces for one of those ideas and it’s ready to be written. I also look through my notes on other ideas and random snippets that seemed interesting in case I’ve forgotten something or might see two elements that would work together in a way that hadn’t occurred to me before.
Sometimes I have an idea I think is ready to be written, and I start outlining it, and partway through I get stuck. Most of the time this means that the idea wasn’t really ready after all, and I need to do some more brainstorming and inspiration-seeking to fill in the gaps. Occasionally, like with my current WIP, I start writing based on the beginning of my outline, and spending time with the characters and situation helps me figure out what needs to happen later on.
And sometimes I get stuck in the middle of writing a draft. This happens most often during the first draft, but sometimes later on, too, and it means one of two things.
It can mean that I’ve messed something up–I didn’t really understand my main character’s motivations, and I just realized they don’t make sense for what needs to happen in the story now. I totally forgot to consider how a subplot is going to affect the main plot, and everything has to change. That sort of thing. In those cases, I either re-outline the rest of the story to get things on the right course and continue on pretending that I was going the right way all along (with the intention of going back and fixing the earlier stuff in the next draft), or I start over from the beginning immediately. That depends on how big a change it is (the bigger the change, the harder to course-correct without fixing what’s before) and how far I’m already into the story (the further I’m in, the less I want to start all over again).
It can also mean I’m just having a lot of self-doubt. I’m not really stuck, I’m just afraid that what I’m writing is bad, and that if I sit down and write more, it’ll be even worse. I get this during every first draft, because it’s a lot scarier to write when the story isn’t all on the page yet, and I’m not totally sure I will get to The End. The way I deal with that is, I write those first drafts as fast as I can, to get as much down as I can before the doubts start creeping in, and to get to that magical The End place as quickly as possible after they do. I have a schedule when I’m working on a draft where I write every day after breakfast, before I’m allowed to go online, and so even if I procrastinate for a little while before I get myself into the writing chair, I get there. I remind myself that I always feel that way with a first draft, and all I have to do is get through it, and I’ll feel better. And usually once I get past the first few painful sentences, it starts flowing, and it all gets easier. At least until I have to sit down the next day. 🙂
(Self-doubt is my least favorite of the above, but you know what, I wouldn’t do away with it completely, either. Doubt is what keeps us trying to write the best stories we can, pushing ourselves to do better.)
Writer friends–do you get what you’d consider writer’s block? How do you deal when you’re having trouble getting the words down?
What did you do when you found out Give Up the Ghost was going to be published?
Something I suspect most non-authors don’t realize is that the “finding out your book will be published” part of the process is more complicated than it sounds. In my case it took place over the course of six weeks! Consisting of (through a combination of e-mail and phone calls with my agent):
-Hearing that an editor planned to offer but wasn’t officially going to until after the Christmas holidays.
-Hearing that the editor had officially offered.
-Hearing that another editor had offered.
-Waiting while my agent negotiated.
-Deciding with my agent which house we would go with.
-Waiting while my agent continued to negotiate with the chosen house on the deal terms.
-Finally hearing everything was settled, and being able to announce the good news!
When the first offer came in, I celebrated by babbling about it to my husband and on the phone to my parents and ordering in Thai. But nothing feels totally certain until you get the go-ahead from your agent to announce the deal publicly. And it took another six months before I saw and signed the contract itself! After that, I celebrated by getting myself a shiny new computer (an iMac to replace my old eMac that was still running fine but getting a little slow). 🙂
Other authors want to share their “when I found out I’d be published” stories?
