Posted by Christine on Apr 1, 2010 in General, Randomness |
It’s Spring, my second favorite season. I like Fall best, but Spring takes a close second, especially here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m not sure why Spring has never managed to inch out Fall, I mean in the Spring you have the explosion of life and color. Flowers and trees are coming alive and everything seems bright and cheerful. Yeah, it rains…but this is the Pacific Northwest – it ALWAYS rains – and the sun breaks through the clouds in the most amazing ways in the Spring and makes the new leaves look so vividly, amazingly, green, like someone painted them there. I even love the rain. After all that’s what gives us all the amazing green everywhere. Plus I just like it, maybe that’s why I like the Fall, because I enjoy the rain so much. I like feeling snug and warm inside while it is wet and drizzly outside. It makes my house seem cozy all the time. We also get some of the most amazing rainbows in West Seattle that I have ever seen in my life, especially in the spring. Not that I don’t like Summer and Winter – they have their charms and I would never want to live somewhere that was relegated to only one season all year. I think that there is something very soothing in the cycle of the seasons, at least for me. But the truth is I love the Fall and the Spring the best....
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Posted by Christine on Mar 30, 2010 in General, Publishing, Randomness |
Update in the race for the status of Rejection Queen: No new rejection to report – my number is still at 1. I currently have two outstanding queries. One I’ll admit I don’t think I’m going to hear back from. The other I’m right within the window of reply. So I should hear in the next week or two. This weekend I worked on my query letter. This, of course, is the key to winning the Rejection Queen Crown. You see in order to accumulate rejections one must first send out queries. Without the query there can be no rejection. But, lets be positive here, without the query there can be no acceptance either. 🙂 I spent several hours perusing the web this weekend just reading queries. Yes I’ve done this before but I was looking for something different this time. Something elusive and almost intangible. Hook. I need a hook. That one sentence that makes the agent need to read my book. I knew it wasn’t something I was going to find in someone else’s query but I was hoping that by studying others I could maybe learn what an agent was looking for in the hook. What did I learn? No two query letters look alike. I read the ones agents accepted and posted to their blogs or web sites. Every single one was a bit different. They ranged in tone, style and depth. So, while there are some hard and fast rules (like address the agent by the right name, stick to one page, identify your genre, stick to one page, hook the agent, stick to one page…), I’m thinking that there is a little more flexibility than I want to give myself. The combination for a successful query might be more a cooking recipe, a pinch of this and a dash of that, than a scientific formula, one gram hook, three grams description, two grams personal background. This is one area where I could really use a hard and fast formula that is guaranteed to...
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Posted by Christine on Mar 27, 2010 in General, Kudos, Randomness |
I wanted to offer my congratulations to my friend Elissa Vann Struth. She is a fellow SiWC attendee and Storyteller award winner. Elissa’s short story ‘Down to the Roots’ won second prize in the Short Story (English) category of the CBC Literary Awards. You can read about it here. WAY TO GO ELISSA!!!! I am so excited for...
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Posted by Christine on Mar 26, 2010 in General, Publishing, Randomness |
It’s official ladies and gentleman, this is my web site. This is my blog. Here is it, my public launch. Look around, explore, read some, leave a comment to let me know you were here. But, I decided that to really make my public launch spectacular I needed to share some big news. Something exciting. A piece of news with the word “Queen†in it. “Queen, you say?†Yes, as in Agent Rejection Queen. Say what? She wants to be crowned what? Huh… Allow me to explain. One of the most influential writers in my life thus far is an amazing woman named kc dyer. She is a YA novelist and I had the privilege of meeting her for the first time at SiWC in 2007. Since then I have gotten to know her in person and over the internet. Her guidance, suggestions and friendship have been invaluable in helping me stay motivated, focused and improving my writing to the point where it is ready to be published. Plus she’s just a really cool person to hang out with and lots of fun to be around. It’s also from her that I first heard about the status of Rejection Queen. So what exactly is this, well I think that Deb explains it best in her blog post “Dusting off the Crownâ€. I would add that I think it is an amazing way to help each other stay motivated and positive through the agent hunting process. I was excited to be accepted as a competitor in this especially since I have the honor of competing against kc’s original contender. Here is her post “En Garde!†announcing the official start of the contest. We were also joined by Donna so there are three of us contending for the Rejection Queen Crown. I wish both my other contenders luck. Meaning – I wish them few rejections – so I guess I hope they loose 😉 Really I hope we all find the best possible agent for our work and that this contest makes things a little more fun and a little less stressful along the way. Look for my Rejection Queen Updates on at least a weekly basis here on my blog. In the mean time – ENJOY THE NEW...
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Posted by Christine on Mar 25, 2010 in General, Randomness |
Tomorrow. Friday. March 26th 2010. I will be officially publically re-launching my web site with and Blog. Yes – it’s still missing some graphics but my web guy and I are working on those. In the mean time my content is up and I am ready to share the site with the world.
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Posted by Christine on Mar 24, 2010 in General, Randomness |
We’re close… so close. Construction is coming to an end. Public launch will be this Friday with exciting news. Stay tuned.
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