Here to write

In the process of writing my novel The Nazis Tried to Kill Us. I also like discussing TV and books.  

[cykelops]

I love all books but sometimes you read a book and you’re like so were all 21 thousand of you blindfolded and at gun point when you rated it 5 stars

[eknippp]

Some of our favorite quotes from Artemis ii so far:

"Copy. Moon joy."

"I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working."

"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."

“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”

"To all of you down there on Earth... we love you, from the moon."

"We just went sci fi."

"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."

"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."

“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”

"Amaze amaze amaze."

"I said that we do not leave Earth, but we choose it. And that is true."

"Christina has been sleeping head down in the middle of the vehicle, kind of like a bat"

"It's really fun to be floatin' around, it just makes me feel like a little kid."

"Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful."

"'Homo Sapiens' is all of us, no matter where you're from or what you look like. We're all one people."

"I'm proud to call myself the Space Plumber."

"We were all eagerly awaiting the chorus."

"Copy heart. Copy bracelet."

“Welcome back. We are still here. They are in space.”

"Copy. Bubble wrap nominal."

"We have rediscovered the chocolate snacks."

[what-eats-owls]

Hello! I read your last post about traditional publishing, and was wondering if you’d be able to speak more on revising your queries? I’ve been querying various manuscripts since 2016 and never once have I gotten any personal feedback- about the query or the manuscript. When the only responses are form responses (which I do understand- agents are overwhelmed with queries) how do you then go about revising a query letter you’ve already done your best with? Any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks for helping out us hopefuls.

Great news! I'm procrastinating!

So, listen. I love queries. It took me a long time to love the art of writing one but now I'm so extremely up my own ass about it I'm a human Möbius strip.

First and foremost, gonna drop the link to Query Shark again. Janet Reid was a pretty legendary agent, and on this blog, she specifically calls out what works and what doesn't and WHY. To your purpose: some of the entries are on queries that have been critiqued, revised, and resubmitted.

Second: Query letters and jacket copy (the summary on the dustcover or back cover) have largely the same anatomy, in genre fiction. Outside of genre fiction, they let you get away with shit like "five friends reunite on the Alaskan coast after ten years and relive their journeys through heartbreak, addiction, illness, grief, and one of them sets fires."

The bones of a genre fiction query, on the other hand, are:

Introduce protagonist and their status quo

Explain the problem they will face in the book, and the consequences of failure to overcome it (aka conflict and stakes)

IDEALLY: incorporate a hook.

You can usually structure this as "Meet [Protagonist.] Protagonist must [do objective], or [consequences of failure] happens. HOWEVER. [Optional hook - we'll get into this below.]"

However, this is deceptively simple, so let's go through each point.

PROTAGONIST INTRODUCTION

Let's just get this out of the way. If you have multiple protags/POVs you're going to have to pick one to take the lead. Look at how dual-POV romance books structure their copy—it's usually something like "POV 1 is a fabulously wealthy scoundrel who has a problem for the first time in their life. [Abridged summary of problem.] POV 2 is a straight-laced, emotionally repressed bookworm who would never be caught dead with POV 1... if not for [problem that perfectly compliments POV 1's problem.]" The first introduction contextualizes the second.

Moving on! The point of the introduction isn't just to tell us who your protag is, it's to tell us why they are the conduit for this story. The real trick is doing this in a way that also communicates something about the setting and their status quo.

I'm going to use examples from my books to illustrate this. First, with The Merciful Crow:

As a chief-in-training of the Crow caste, sixteen-year-old Fie abides by one rule: look after your own. Her caste of undertakers and mercy-killers takes more abuse than coin from the gentry, but when her family is called to collect royal dead, she’s hoping they’ll find the payout of a lifetime.

We get Fie's ethos. Then the next sentence establishes why that matters while also positioning her place in the larger world, and ends with what she's seeking: money to protect her family.

By contrast, Vanja's introduction for Little Thieves is significantly longer:

Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love―and she’s on the hook for one hell of a debt. Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele's dutiful servant up until a year ago. That was when Vanja’s otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back… by stealing Gisele’s life for herself. The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape. 

We get Vanja's ethos, but also an immediate open-ended mystery: what is this debt? The next sentence hints at the answer while illustrating the fantastical nature of the world and Vanja's place in it. The third sentence pushes us to sympathize with Vanja... but then presents a highly questionable act as her solution. Then the next paragraph lays out the consequences: Things are going (mostly) great for Vanja, but she's very alone.

Normally I'd cut this down and let you get this backstory in the book, but the key is, the penny drops (wink wink for anyone who's read LT) in the next sentence:

Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed.

Which brings us to bullet point 2:

CONFLICT AND STAKES

So now we know what the book is really about: Vanja's misdeeds have led her into a poetic curse that she has to break (conflict) or lose her life (stakes.) Everything that came before gives those weight. We have the surface level explanation of why she's been stealing instead of just cavorting around as a princess, why she has to solve this alone, why the god would choose turning to jewels as a punishment. We care about her losing her life because it sounds like she made a bad choice to get out of a bad situation!

By contrast, this section in The Merciful Crow's original query is much longer:

Instead, they find a still-living crown prince, his too-cunning bodyguard, and a common foe. To seize the throne, the murderous new queen has allied herself with the same violent faction that has terrorized the Crows for generations. The prince has never lifted a finger to stop them; the guard has never drawn a blade to protect a Crow – and now they expect the Crows’ help. They don’t expect Fie to name a price: she will smuggle the prince across the nation to his own allies before the queen hunts him down. She won’t even smother him in his sleep for ignoring her caste’s persecution. And in return, he will guarantee the Crows’ safety once he wears the crown.

This lays out bigger world-level conflict and stakes as opposed to LT's more personal stakes; it also provides a preview of the prickly character dynamics to come. Which is important when we get to....

THE HOOK

The hook is the special sauce. It's the oomph. It's the sentence you read in the summary and decide that book is going home with you. It's not necessarily a twist, but it's something that scratches your brain and makes you want to dive in.

In the TMC query, it's the last paragraph:

If Fie can keep the deal, she’ll bring an end to her people’s hardship. But with the queen’s brutal hunters on their trail, every step puts her family in greater danger, forcing Fie into the bloody truth of what it means to be a chief – and the sacrifices it takes to truly look after her own.

This takes the big world stakes and makes them personal and immediate. It's not "will she honor her creed of looking after her own" but rather "what does that look like when the promise of massive societal change comes at the expense of your immediate family."

In LT, the stakes are already very personal, so the hook is already in elements like her being the daughter of Death and Fortune, the hint of her 'stealing her life back' but winding up lonely, stuff that suggests inner conflicts. The last paragraph instead gives a hook-y deadline, and an addition of factors that will further complicate Vanja's efforts to save herself:

Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele’s sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja’s tail, she’ll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life.

Things like Gisele's sinister fiancé and the overeager junior detective are further communicating a sense of pursuit and danger, ramping up the stakes and the hint of shenanigans needed to evade them.

Here's some examples of hooks you could throw on fairytales, as an illustration:

Little Red Riding hood, but Little Red opens the door to her grandma's house for the wolf

Sleeping Beauty, but the briars are actively spreading every year Aurora is asleep—but when she's awoken early, the thorns grow faster

Snow White eats the poison apple on purpose, and the prince has to figure out why before he can break through the glass coffin—if he even should.

This is all quite long, but here's some bits of advice to wrap it up:

Truly read through the Query Shark archives

Look at if your query has the basic elements of "Introduce protagonist, say what they want to do, say what's in their way, say what happens if they fail, ideally throw in flavor about the price of success."

Read the jacket copy for your favorite books, and/or books that are similar to yours. (If you think no book is similar to yours, read more widely, haha, because also: comp titles! Oh god I need to talk about comp titles.)

COMP TITLES

I was about to wrap this up but this needs to be a separate point. Comp titles are the part in your query where you say "my manuscript is [title] meets [title.]" Three big suggestions here:

One of those titles needs to be something published in your desired genre and age category within the last three years. You need to show you are actively reading in this genre.

Avoid major properties. Game of Thrones? Nope. Star Wars? Forget it. Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight, Divergent, Throne of Glass, Six of Crows, Squid Games, everyone is using those comps and it becomes meaningless. Also used to be common wisdom to stick strictly to books, BUT...

The best thing you can do, and the exception to no. 2 in its entirety, is calling out a specific trait/element your manuscript has in common with a comp title. So let's say I'm writing a humorous adult fantasy about uhhhhh a young stern political activist lobbying for a new categorization of magic to be recognized by Magic Parliament. I'd comp it as "A prickly-but-principled heroine like Emily Wilde navigating the very human politics of a fantastical West Wing." Or hell, let's take two of our big name properties: "Game of Thrones meets Twilight" tells us nothing. "Twilight's all-consuming romance meets the deadly, high-stakes political machinations of Game of Thrones" is cooking with gas.

I think that's mostly everything. It's almost midnight. If anyone else asks me publishing questions I will probably procrastinate more tomorrow, in which case, you're going to have to tell my agent why this book is late!

[what-eats-owls]

Upon revisiting this at a decent hour, I gave a lot of advice here, but I'm not sure I actually answered the question, which was: how to revise a query when you're not getting personalized feedback. Thankfully, a lot of what I wrote up last night is still pretty relevant, the trick is in applying it.

First, let's go through my methodology for figuring out where your submission materials need work.

Is the agent a) open to queries and b) seeking work in your genre/age category? Most agents will say 90% of their auto-rejections are someone querying them with, say, an adult self-help book, when they represent exclusively YA and MG fiction. It really isn't negotiable, even if your manuscript's amazing.

Is the work genre-aware, if not genre-savvy? AKA are you familiar with the conventions of your genre, such as standard word count range, structural expectations, etc.? If you are querying a 25,000-word epic fantasy you will be in trouble. If you are querying a romance novel that ends with the main couple getting hit with a truck, you will be in trouble. Because genre provides a set of expectations for the reader, it is an area where you have to know the rules to break the rules.

Are you getting any requests for further materials? While the rejections may be form rejections, partial/full manuscript requests indicate that your query letter and sample chapters are working as they should. If so, the issue lies in the full manuscript. If not, the issue lies in the query/sample chapters.

The following advice is for someone who's determined they need to revise their query/sample chapters.

You have very limited real estate in a query. Try to make the most of it. "15-year-old Prince Snobathan is lazy and rude, despite being the heir to a kingdom in distress." Meh. "15-year-old Prince Snobathan has never worked a day in his life, unlike his beleaguered, starving subjects." Better. "Prince Snobathan has never broken a sweat in his fifteen years of life, while his subjects break their backs toiling for survival." Much better. The age tag gets converted into useful context, there's a nice echo with broken a sweat/break their backs, and we get all the info of that first sentence. This is also referred to as punching up text, and there's a lot of advice out there for just that.

Write you elevator pitch. This is the "Protagonist must do X, or Y happens" 1-2 sentence summary. "When Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her sister's place in the Hunger Games, she must use her skill and wits to survive the deadly competition." "When a maid-turned-jewel thief robs the wrong family, she's cursed to turn into jewels herself unless she makes up for what she's stolen by the next full moon." This is the foundation of your query letter, and everything else should either give it depth or juicy context. (It also gets used in book deal announcements and marketing copy, so a good elevator pitch is worth the effort.)

Assess your hook. I know I harp on hook, but it really is what changes the game. A reader has hundreds of books to look at, an agent has hundreds of queries to read, so what makes yours pop? Let's look at those elevator pitches again. "When Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her sister's place in the Hunger Games, she must use her skill and wits to survive the deadly competition... while becoming a reluctant symbol of resistance against the gamemakers." That's the hook. "When a maid-turned-jewel thief robs the wrong family, she's cursed to turn into jewels herself unless she makes up for what she's stolen...including the identity of the princess she used to serve." That's a hook. And the tough news is: if you can't find one for your story, that's a manuscript-level revision to make.

Connect with other querying writers in your genre/age category to give each other feedback. Honestly? I figure out a lot of stuff to fix in my own work when I'm analyzing and critiquing someone else's. It's much harder to see your own writing's problems until you see that problem in a different context and go oh, yeah, no wonder this wasn't working.

Choose your cutoff points wisely. Most agents want the first chapter, first three chapters, or first ~fifty pages (or they used to.) Do all of those points end with a cliffhanger? Or at least with some good tension, something that makes the reader want to turn the page? It feels a bit cheap, but at the same time, it's a good way to be sure you're maintaining narrative propulsion early on, when readers aren't the most invested.

If all else fails... work on the next manuscript. I know that feels trite, and the valid concern is, if you're not getting feedback, how do you know you won't make the same mistakes? But you have to trust that you are growing as a writer; artists will tell you even their shittiest doodles still contribute to their progress. Sometimes, like in the point above, it takes distance and new context to understand why something isn't working.

That is my advice for revising your query! Good luck!

[incognitopolls]

Growing up, how many bathrooms did your home have?

1 bathroom for 2–3 people

1 bathroom for 4–5 people

1 bathroom for 6 or more people

2 bathrooms for 2–3 people

2 bathrooms for 4–5 people

2 bathrooms for 6 or more people

3+ bathrooms for 2–3 people

3+ bathrooms for 4–5 people

3+ bathrooms for 6 or more people

It varied too much to say (frequent moves, people coming and going, etc)

Other/not applicable (elaborate?)

Voting ended onJul 15, 2025

Count half baths (rooms with only a toilet and a sink).

–

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[thetursithan]

Ah these children who always create problems for poor mothers....

[purlturtle]

Let's hold up traffic with mama!

[whatcha-thinkin]

Dragon riders - humans trained to fly dragons into combat - are common in fantasy literature. In your opinion, what is the best story justification?

combat with human armies

combat with hordes of human-scale monsters

combat with other dragon riders

combat with rocs / other giant bird riders

combat with griffins / other fantasy creature riders

combat with kaiju

high-speed elite transport / bodyguards

natural disaster emergency response

no function, just to show off the rider's badassery

look if the dragon tells you to get on its back, you get the fuck on

Voting ended onMay 11, 2025

[misstrips]

Considering Anne McCaffery popularized it with her Dragonrider series, the OG reason is disaster response/planetary defenses.

[mikkeneko]

#if we aren’t having a symbiotic telepathic partnership with dragons who can fly and breathe flame but don’t do math#in order to protect the planet from destructive alien spores that eat all organic life on contact#why exactly are we dragon-riding#man I love Pern. idk if the biosphere of it all holds up#but by god she built a truly compelling social order based around a threat and its response#also 99.999999999% of those books are just culture/technology shock anyway#hi here’s my society built around a terrible ongoing threat crisis. this is what it looks like 400 years after the crisis ended#this is what it looks like one year after the crisis came back oops#don’t worry the people in charge of crisis response are ALSO annoyed and so actively seeking permanent solutions to the crisis#that everyone else is going wait hold on#is that legal#CAN we actually stop the man-eating spores from falling from the sky and killing and and destroying our agriculture#because the living in terror part is a cherished part of our way of life#and then they unexpectedly all meet Deep Thought#well anyway that’s the plot of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series - via @cerusee

[writer-sedai]

Do you think that in the series Rand's third wife could be Egwene instead of Min?

Short answer: No, the versions of themselves Rand and Egwene must become are fundamentally incompatible. The only future in which their relationship survives is one where they both stay in the Two Rivers, Egwene doesn't become Wisdom, they both eventually learn to channel without guidance, Rand goes insane and Egwene possibly burns herself out.

The tragedy is that they both know a romantic relationship is impossible but the feelings of who they both used to be (who they both COULD have been) lingers. Because it's something familiar in a world of increasing uncertainty, they keep returning to each other and pretending that it could be something real.

For that reason, they both struggle to reconcile who they were with who they've become.

For Egwene, it's: Has Rand gone mad? How else could he love a Forsaken? Is he addicted to the Power? Why else won't he let it go? Is he addicted to power? How else can he ask an entire people to follow him? How can he be okay with knowing he must destroy them? What happened to the gentle sheep herder boy I knew?

For Rand, it's: If Egwene would rather be a Wisdom — an Aes Sedai — a Wise One than be with me, then did she ever really want to be with me or was I only ever a convenient choice? Can I trust her? Will she be loyal to me or to the institution she chooses? What happened to the village girl who loved me?

And for both of them, it's: What if the person I thought I knew never really existed?

They both need to let go of the person they thought the other was and accept them as who they are now. It began happening at the end of S3 and I expect will continue happening in S4 (especially as Egwene moves towards her next big Plot Advancement) and it will keep happening over and over again because their shared history is still there, their love is still there, and it's not just something that can be abandoned or forgotten.

But nor can who they are now be forgotten, and that's the only scenario in which a romantic relationship between them might work out.

(As an aside, I'm not convinced Min herself will be part of the polycule. I'd have to go back to her exact wording in 1x08, but I think it was left intentionally vague so that they have the option to say

a) she was being flippant to avoid saying what she actually saw

b) her own vision was misinterpreted (as we've seen twice now) or

c) she's destined to fall in love with Rand in a later season.

Given the S2 rewrites that had to happen due to Barney Harris leaving, maybe a) and b) are more likely now.)

[technoturian]

Honestly the more this show goes on the more I kind of love the whole idea/subversion of Rand and Egwene.

Yes, the two of you are among the most powerful beings in this world. Yes you were both chosen by fate. Yes your destinies are entwined. Yes you are each other's first love, first everything. No, you are not soulmates. No, you are not meant to be and you will not live happily ever after. Yes, you do love each other. No, it will not change anything.

[faircastle]

He Who Comes With the Dawn (S03E08) THE WHEEL OF TIME (2021—)

[writer-sedai]

Been spinning the Rand/Egwene scene in 3x06 around in my head for days

She loves him but he'll never be enough for her because she wants greatness for herself, earned by herself

He loves her but he can't trust her to love the monstrous parts of himself (only another monster can do that)

They both take comfort in each other because it's something familiar when everything is changing

The fact that they can no longer take comfort in each other just proves how much they've changed

Even if nothing had changed, they were destined for different things (he just wanted a family, she wanted to carve her own path)

Now he's destined to go mad and maybe he's destined to kill her, or she's destined to still him, or chain him

Their paths are now set to run parallel instead of crossing and the roles they've been thrust into are so much bigger than the tiny village they come from

(but they both still love each other)

[writer-sedai]

Sometimes writing is so easy that I feel like a fraud, but most of the time it's so hard that I also feel like a fraud

[winonaparadise]

I got art block what should I do

[dduane]

Take a day off and see if you feel like making art the next day. Or the day after that.

Still nothing? Then sit down and make a piece of crap art.

I mean, CRAP. Make it as bad as you possibly can. Screw everything up! Don't just break the rules: jump on them from a height and mock every one as you come down and stomp them into mush. Challenge yourself to be the worst you can possibly be.

...No, not like that! Worse!!

WORSE THAN THAT!

Good!... There you go.

...And at the end of it, guess what? You'll still have made art.

It may indeed be terrible art, of no damn use to any other being on the planet. But you will nonetheless have asserted your claim to the right to create art, even when the creative process isn't working particularly well.

And just keep on doing this until the juices start flowing properly again. Because, pretty much inevitably, they will.

Disclaimer: do I use this approach? Oh God, yes! You should see my bad pages. (Or on second thought, no you shouldn't. I like the Hague a lot, but not that part of it.)

But sometimes the road to making good art (waving at @neil-gaiman) runs through the territory inhabited by making bad art... and sometimes willingly, shamelessly, hilariously bad art. The very act can be surprisingly cleansing.

Fear nothing. Make crap art, and let it set the stage for the good stuff. Then laugh at it, and keep on going.

Hope this helps!

[lt-sarai]

But what do you do with the crap art once it's made?? Is it ok to throw it away if I don't want or like it?? I put effort and materials into making it, I feel bad if I just. Toss it. Like, I know the point of making it was to practice, but if I'm making a physical item and it's bad and I nor no one else wants it.....is it ok to just toss it out?

[dduane]

I'd say you should dispose of it in whatever way suits you.

Assuming that I've been working in a physical format, I usually burn mine. (It's useful having a wood-burning stove in the living room, where my office is. Makes it easy to get rid of the corpus delicti.)

Otherwise I delete the files, and imagine I hear the electrons that wrote them into memory screaming as their associated protons and neutrons annihilate them. What happens to the leftover quarks, I consider to be somebody else's problem.) :)

[atimeofbeing]

How many stand-alone works do you own written by a single author?

take "stand-alone work" to mean books not related as a series, the series can count as one work (ie me owning all of NK Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy and The City We Became would count as two stand-alone works, even though it's 4 books). Owning multiple copies also only counts as 1 stand-alone work, sorry edition-hoarders

tell me the author name in the tags!

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10+

im jared 19 and never learned to read (i don't own books/see results)

Voting ended onFeb 14, 2024

[ao3cassandraic]

Eeeeeeesh, I don't know how to answer this because I'm not sure whether LeGuin's various books set in various corners of the Ekumen count as a "series." I personally don't think so, but I may be weird.

I, uh, have pretty much all of them, though, even the less-than-amazing early ones. Plus Lavinia and all of Earthsea and the Powers series and a few more.

[peniscursed]

hyper specific poll be upon ye

i live under 10 minutes (walking distance) from a lake

i got my drivers license at 19

both my maternal and fraternal grandmothers died of lung cancer

i have lego mini figures of walt and jesse from breaking bad

ive been to new york city only once and got the stomach flu while i was there

i share a birthday with hayley kiyoko

i went to an art museum with a tumblr mutual

i have seen an underground lake

three famous hockey players grew up in my hometown

my house has a 1:1 ratio of pets to people

multiple of these

none of these

Voting ended onFeb 13, 2024

[sexygaywizard]

Pretending this is the America Ferrera monologue about womanhood that got her nominated for an oscar

[toastandjamie]

The fact that Rand as our protagonist gets a heroes journey to the letter until we get to the last step and RJ pops in to be like “actually, no. After all the trauma and change you’ve undergone you’re so irrevocably different that you Can’t ever return home. There’s no home to return to, because while you have changed your home has changed too, and it’s so different you wouldn’t even recognize it. You. Can’t. Go. Home.”

Who hurt him?

Oh right the war.

[andwhatexcellentboiledpotatoes]

One of those ‘pick two pills’ things but it’s things I actually want