Day five in my reports from the Austin SCBWI conference, and there’s still more to come after this one! Also, although I’m giving lots of great information from these speakers in these posts, I’m only giving a condensed version of their presentations. Reading about conferences is great, but going to them, even single-day conferences like…
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Day four in my reports from the Austin SCBWI conference, and today I’m featuring Curtis Brown literary agent Nathan Bransford. But first a recap of days one through three in case you missed them: agent Mark McVeigh on publishing, agent Andrea Cascardi on getting and working with an agent, editor Cheryl Klein on writing a…
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Day three of my reports from the Austin SCBWI conference, and today I’m featuring the advice of Arthur A. Levine Books senior editor Cheryl Klein. Earlier this week, we had two agents who were former editors: Mark McVeigh on the publishing industry and Andrea Cascardi on getting and working with an agent. Cheryl focused her…
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Day two of my reports from the Austin SCBWI conference, and here’s what literary agent Andrea Cascardi from the Transatlantic Literary Agency had to say about getting and working with an agent. Like fellow speaker Mark McVeigh, Andrea was an editor before she became an agent. She worked in editorial at Houghton Mifflin, Scholastic, Crown/Random…
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I spent my Saturday at the fabulous Austin SCBWI conference, which offered a great lineup of speakers. Over the next week, or as long as it takes to cover them all, I’ll post what I heard. First up is literary agent Mark McVeigh, who has his own agency, The McVeigh Agency. Mark knows something about…
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Manuscript update: I’m going to reward myself with this treat when I get the perfect query letter and synopsis written. Writing a novel isn’t easy, and we writers should reward ourselves when we reach a goal, no matter how small. Here’s one suggestion, Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies: Chocolate chip cookies from scratch have been…
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Sad news today that J.D. Salinger has died. His work lives on, however. Here’s a great Time article about Salinger, including the magazine’s 1951 review of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. At the end of the review, Time says: For U.S. readers, the prize catch in The Catcher in the Rye may well be…
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Manuscript update: Buried in query letter and synopsis writing hell. Yesterday, I promised more on synopsis writing today, so here goes. I went through this already with my first novel, but when I sat down to write the synopsis for my second, I felt like a toddler on uneasy legs. So, I did my favorite…
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Manuscript update: Still perfecting my query letter and synopsis. I’m attending the Austin SCBWI conference on Saturday — so excited — and hope to have a fantastic, shiny, brilliant query letter and synopsis ready to start sending out to the conference speakers soon after. Yesterday, I wrote about why it’s important to write the perfect…
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Manuscript update: I miss it! I miss working on my story. But I got another book idea yesterday, so that’s exciting. I’m trying to refrain from running off into another book just yet, though, as I’ve still got the query letter and synopsis for my current book to perfect. Please note in the sentence above…
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