Query Letter Hell

- by ria, on Thursday, 10th February 2011, 5:05pm

As you may have guessed, I’m writing my query for book 1 at the moment. Why am I not working on book 2, you ask? Way back when book 2 was nothing but an overblown 4-page story(overblown by about 80 pages) I had extreme trouble with one scene. I couldn’t figure out how to get one character from one place to another. My answer was highly convenient, but I left it in because I couldn’t think of anything else. Now, I’m at that bit again, with the same problem, but this time I refuse to sully the story’s integrity by using convenience. Hence, I moved on to my query for book one while the scene simmers in my mind.

I’ve been trying to write a good query letter for about six months now. Every attempt was boring, or stagnant, or lacking emotion. Writing a query is hard. Trying to sum up what motivates your character, the conflict, the stakes, while using good wording and a unique voice (and get across some emotion) is not something that happens overnight.

Anyway, I am very happy to say, that after 5,000 words of attempting (a query is 250 words at most), I finally have a good hook:
Almost half a millennium of magically enhanced life has given Zachery an acute fear of death, and he is dying.
So that’s half the battle, right?

I feel like I’m cheating using it, because Zachery’s fear of death doesn’t really come into play until pretty late in the book. What I worry about is that an agent will read the query, love the hook, but not see it reflected in the start of the book. Ah well. I’m going to stick with it for now.

Aside: I’m changing to a post when I feel like it schedule. I’ll still try to update weekly, but those updates will be more spontaneous.

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Change is Good

- by ria, on Wednesday, 5th May 2010, 1:01pm

“Change is good, but it’s not easy.”

The site’s been converted to wordpress. Not a simple task by any means. But I managed to port the design and css over with minimal hassle. As I write this, there are still a load of little things to be done, but the main layout is working and that’s what matters most.

EDIT: the main layout is still suffering growing pains. Bear with me if there are weird borders and divs are all over the place.

This site was always more of an art site, with less of a focus on writing. That is about to change. As my life goals and career path move closer to writing, I find that I have very little time for drawing any more. The gallery will still exist (as the art page), but it probably won’t be updated that often. No, the space to keep an eye on is the writing page. Expect short stories hopefully every few months. And here, on the main “loop” (as the wordpress people call it), there will be updates on my writing techniques, useful tips, and my learning progress. I’m not a seasoned writer by any means – I’m working on my first novel at the moment, with the aim of getting published sometime in the next 2 / 3 years.

So, this will mainly be a blog of my voyage into the world of publishing. And hopefully people will find me, and my posts will be helpful to them, and we all take the journey together.

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category: site, writing

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