First, the announcements: The Dark Lord’s Daughter has an official release date of September 5! I got my ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) last week, and it looks very nice. The cover looks like this: This phase of the publication process was particularly mysterious to me the first
Read more →So the interior pages for The Dark Lord’s Daughter arrived last week, and they’re due on Thursday, which means I don’t have enough brain right now to talk about anything else. First a little explanation: The interior pages are what they used to call “galleys” or “page
Read more →As for requests: Elevator pitches, are there different varieties? (Because I’ve heard them described as both one-sentence set-up only, and as three-sentence complete but extremely abridged plot summaries.) –Deep Lurker My first reaction is that you’re over-thinking this. An elevator pitch doesn’t have rules or even a
Read more →One of the things I keep coming back to is the fact that writing, especially writing for a living, is a business. It doesn’t have to be—for instance, people who write fanfiction for free don’t have to worry about that part. But anyone who gets paid for
Read more →Happy New Year! Traditionally, no matter how or when it is marked, a new year means a fresh start: cleaning out the old, revving up the new, and getting the stuff that’s stalled a kick in the pants. Depending on where one is in life, this can
Read more →Let’s talk about query letters for a minute. Specifically, let’s talk about the plot summary portion of a query letter. (Note: This post is going to have a bunch of spoilers for Mairelon the Magician, which I’m using as an example.) Query letters are conventionally limited to
Read more →I have a world I’ve fallen in love with but I’m afraid of putting out a story in my favorite world too early and having it not sell well because I haven’t gained some critical mass of skills or fans. I haven’t talked much about the business
Read more →Most people I know think of career paths as a series of jobs that ideally involve increasing levels of skills, responsibilities, pay, and status – something that’s applicable chiefly in terms of climbing the corporate ladder. But entrepreneurs and freelancers have career paths, too; they’re just a
Read more →Over the past few months I’ve had a number of writing questions that superficially are all very different, but that, if you back off a bit and look at them, boil down to “Ms. Wrede, why do people keep telling me that I can’t/shouldn’t use XYZ non-standard
Read more →First things first: I think we may have the comments problem fixed, though I may have to reapprove people the first time. I’ll try to keep an eye on it, but anyone who doesn’t see their remark after a day or so, please email me. A writing
Read more →
