I missed March, April, and most of May on the blog. I bet you can all guess why. Wow. What a heck of a year so far. Global pandemic, hundreds of thousands dead, and so many people refusing to do something as simple as wear a face mask to protect themselves and others. It's mind-boggling. [...]
Tag: manuscript
2019 Wrap Up
Welcome to December! I should be working on my WIP right now instead of tallying up numbers from this year, but what is a writer if not a procrastinator, right? So I bring you my 2019 writing stats. People often ask me how long it takes to get a book written and what a writer [...]
The Spirit of the Season
Happy Holidays, friends and family! This is the official 2017 Storms Christmas letter! (Look - I even went red and green! Festive!) Before you start in on me about how lame I am for sending you to my blog for warm wishes of holiday cheer, remember it’s been a fairly tough year. Go easy on [...]
Misery Loves Company
So I haven’t had much of a chance to write lately between our crazy number of hospital visits in the past two weeks. Complications from husband’s original surgery have led to not much free time. Plus, there’s that pesky PitchWars thing I’ve been tweeting about. In preparation for PitchWars, I have slaughtered my pages over [...]
Querying (Part III)
By now you've probably got a pretty good idea where I'm going with my queries. (Progressively better with each version, but still not quite "there.") This particular version netted me requests (both partial and full) from several agents. It's better, but it's still lacking. Dear (Agent), Though your website lists that you are currently [...]
Querying (Part II)
After a year and a half of constant rejection, I finally revised my first query into something a little more focused. It’s not quite as rambling as my first and it seems like maybe I knew a little bit more about what was going with my own book on at this point. Dear (Agent), I viewed [...]
Querying (Part I)
Any writer can google how to query, so contrary to the title of this post, I won't be teaching you how to query. There's tons of information out there regarding how to query a literary agent — what to say, what not to say, how to say it, and how to say it well. No lie. Querying is hard. In a [...]
Slimming Down
Revision can be painful. Digging into the words you put so much effort into writing, not to mention deciding which of them need to go, can overwhelm a writer with fear. Which words do I cut? Filter words? Entire paragraphs? Scenes, even? What if cutting this particular scene is wrong? What if it changes the [...]
All In.
Before kids, my husband and I each had a full range of hobbies to fill our time. (Amazing how those hobbies dwindle when parenting takes precedence!) Back in 2005, my husband went deep into the world of online Texas Hold’em and enjoyed throwing live poker parties (with real cards, real chips, and real stakes) at our [...]
L. Ryan Storms 