sending stuff off

Oh my god, how I hate writing query letters, hooks and synopses. If it weren’t for the phenomenon of Miss Snark, I’d probably give up. For years I’ve been chasing the holy grail of what a decent query letter looks like, or what a decent synopsis looks like; and hook, what the hell is a hook? Sell it don’t tell it? Jeeze, pass the smelly cheese.In all the past advice I’ve read in writers’ magazines about how to approach an agent, there has always been the stipulation that you must say why the agent is right for you, and say what qualifies you to have written this book, etc. Miss Snark advises against this sort of thing. Perhaps it is all subjective. Perhaps some agents like being arse licked but I suspect that getting over the gist of your novel before the agent tosses the paper in the reject pile is a bit more important. So whilst I’m bashing my head metaphorically over my new lap top and belly aching over adjectives for my polished and completed novel, I am already thinking about what the query letter for my most recent nano novel will look like when I get round to it. I WISH I had had this information (filched from Miss Snark’s blog)  when I first began querying: A hook requires more than “what this book is about”. There needs to be an enticement to read it. What’s the central decision that [he/she] has to make? What are the stakes? You can’t just describe [him/her] like a dossier either. [He/She] needs to have substance so we’ll want to read on …

tools and all that caper

With nanowrimo over it’s hard to keep away from the forums and get on with making mince pies and christmas presents, but one thing caught my eye this evening and that was the stupendous range of writing software out there that people have been using to write their nano novels with. I hopped over to Scrievener to have a decko at what all the fuss was about and sure enough, it look impressive and ooh ahh, I could use that, but really, if your writing sucks, no amount of gizmo technology is going to help. I think I will stick to text edit on my mac and the good old pencil/pen and notebook, real folder and real paper index cards. Besides which I am jittery about downloading stuff in case it messes with my machine in some unforseen way.