The I Miss You Blogfest...and More!

Welcome to the I Miss You Blogfest,

hosted by

Alex J. Cavanaugh, Matthew MacNish, and Andrew Leon

Here’s the rundown:

The bloggers we really miss…
and the ones we would really miss!

Do you have a couple blogger buddies who aren’t posting as often? Those who’ve pulled back and seem absent from the blogging world? Do you have blogger buddies you are grateful they are still around and would miss if they vanished? Now is your chance to show your appreciation and spotlight them!

On November 16, list one to three bloggers you really miss and one to three bloggers you would miss if they stopped blogging. Then go leave a comment on those blogs.

Our blogger friends are special – time to let them know! 

I only blog on Mondays, my day to post and make the rounds, but there are a couple of blogs I visit every day or every day I know there’ll be a new post.  And while I follow and love so many blogs, and most of them are active, there are a couple of bloggers who don’t post as much as I would like.

First, two I miss because they don’t post as often as they used to:

Jennifer Hillier at The Serial Killer Files – Jenny’s a big time author now with two incredibly popular books, her 2011 debut, Creep, and this year’s follow-up, Freak, plus she’s working on a new novel, so it’s no wonder she doesn’t post as often.  But I really, really miss her, especially since she moved away from Seattle almost a year ago.  Lucky for me, we chat via text, email, Facebook, and phone calls so I never truly lose touch.

Janet Reid’s Query Shark – Yes, I know, Ms. Reid has her own regular blog here, but I really love Query Shark.  I’ve learned so much from that blog.  But she hasn’t posted since September 30^th, and for months before that, her posts were sporadic, at best.  I miss waking up on Sunday mornings and tuning in to read how The Shark has ripped to shreds yet another query written and submitted by someone who’s failed to read all the other queries, as directed.  Better still, I miss those few queries that hit it spot on the very first time, even when they break all the rules—like the query for Josin Mcquein’s Premeditated.  I realize I’m past this query stage, but I still learn a lot from reading them. 

Which brings me to a blog I would miss if it were to ever disappear:  In fact, when this blogger took a short break earlier this year, I found out just how much I did miss it.  And him.  And that blogger is…

Matthew MacNish at The QQQE or The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment – Much like Janet Reid, Matt has serious skills when it comes to dissecting and analyzing queries and determining what works and what doesn’t then suggesting ways in which to fix it.  So if you have a query you are thinking of submitting to agents, send it to Matt first.  The man knows what he’s talking about.  And his commenters help a lot, too.

And finally, the one blog I never, and I mean NEVER, EVER miss, is your friend and mine…

Alex J. Cavanaugh - There are very few bloggers out there who are as consistently and truly inspiring, relentlessly selfless, and remarkably entertaining as Alex.  He is the highlight of my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.  In fact, I typically read his posts before I even get out of bed in the morning.  So if Alex’s blog were to ever cease to exist, I would be crushed.  He is a lesson to us all on how to be humble and pay it forward.  And what's more, I've met most of my Blogger friends through Alex, so he's kind of a matchmaker of sorts.  Many thanks and cheers to you, Alex!

With less than 3 weeks until the December 6^th launch of Lisa Regan’s debut novel, I’d like to share with you her book trailer for Finding Claire Fletcher.  So without further ado…

    

IWSG: Jealousy Among Writers

I’m posting a day early for Alex J. Cavanaugh’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group held on the first Wednesday of every month.  I don’t personally have anything to complain about, but I have noticed something in the blogosphere lately and I was wondering what you all thought about it.

Last week, agent Rachelle Gardner wrote a post called Watch Out for the Green Eyed Monster where she discusses jealousy among writers.  She even expressed how she was envious when an agent friend of hers recently completed a great deal.  She was happy for her, of course, but she was also the tiniest bit jealous. 

I’ve met a great many writers here on Blogger, Wordpress, and other sources.  Most of them are like me.  They’ve written or are writing a novel and all that that encompasses, and they’re hoping and dreaming and even struggling to find and land that perfect agent, someone who believes in their writing, their project, and their beloved characters.  But there are quite a few who have recently bagged that elusive agent.  Even some who have secured a publishing contract or might be on their second or third book. 

Often, these writers make their incredible announcements via their blogs or Twitter, sharing their excitement at achieving their dream.  Most of their followers comment, expressing their joy and pride.  But as time wears on, some writers notice a lag in their comments.  Some writers have blogged about how they receive nasty emails from people, often other writers who are consumed with envy. 

NatalieWhipple at Between Fact and Fiction has struggled for many, many years, writing something like 9 or 10 novels.  A few years ago, Natalie managed to snag former agent-superstar Nathan Bransford only to lose him when he retired from agenting and the publishing business.  She landed on her feet though and acquired another agent.  After enduring something like 15 months on submission, Natalie and her agent finally gave up that particular book, but Natalie had another which was eventually scooped up by a publisher, and she was even given an option for a second book.  She is currently awaiting publication sometime in 2013.  Oh happy day, right?  Yeah, not so much.

Natalie has posted several times about how people were not always so happy for her success.  Apparently, there were quite a few who sent vicious emails, something I cannot understand myself because Natalie is just about the sweetest, kindest, most generous blogger out there, and she has shared every up and down along the way, of which there have been many.  I read a comment once that said writers who reach their dream no longer post about their struggles and therefore all the tension is removed from their blog.  I guess I can see his point, but this is not the case with Natalie.  She still posts about her struggles.  So what’s with all the jealousy?

It’s not like the other writers are taking a spot that we could have had for ourselves.  Each of our novels are so different, so unique.  I understand it’s hard not to want what they have, to achieve the same dream, but to be angry or jealous?  That I don’t get.  When I read about another writer landing an agent, sure, I say, “Boy, I wish that could be me,” but I also say, “See, there is hope.”  Because that is exactly what it gives me:  hope, that I might achieve the same thing someday. 

Of course, it all does depend on the attitude of the writer.  There is one particular writer whom many of us know.  We’ve seen her query up on QueryShark, her first page up on Suzie Townsend’s  First Page Shooter.  She had several offers and had her pick of agents, even got a book deal a few weeks later.  That’s every writer’s dream.  But this gal also has an abundance of self-worth, perhaps caused by all the attention.  But she hasn’t missed the opportunity to belittle other writers and their work on a certain popular blog, offering her opinion at their expense.  She still blogs from time to time, but she gets almost no comments any more.  She’s lost her following just when she needs it most.  I guess I can understand that a little, but still, writing is a relatively small community, and we are all greatly connected, so tearing someone down because of their success is like burning a bridge directly into the community in which you dream to be a part of.

So what do you think?  Is it difficult to see your friends and colleagues reach milestones before you do?  Or do you think of it as proof that all the hard work is worth it, that you can get there, too?  Does it give you hope or dash your dreams?                   

The Déjà Vu Blogfest

Today, I am participating in DL Hammon’s Déjà Vu Blogfest cohosted by Creepy Query Girl’s, Katie Mills, The World is my Oyster’s, Lydia Kang, and Nicole Ducleroir of One Significant Moment at aTime.  This blogfest gives participants the chance to resubmit their best posts for the benefit of all those who might have missed it the first time around.  I look forward to reading as many of the participants’entries as physically possible, and maybe make a few new friends in the process. 

The posts I’m most proud of are those I wrote on craft:  One on setting and another tension.  But the one I’ve chosen to enter for this bloghop has received the most hits and continues to do so every week.  I first posted this on July 13, 2011, and while my perspective has changed slightly, I still believe in the message.

Stories Don’t Happen in a Vacuum

I knew I would have to come up with something to post about today, but when I woke up, I still hadn’t thought of anything new, that is until I read today’s post at BookEnds Lit Agency.  Today is Workshop Wednesday at BookEnds, the day agent Jessica Faust posts one of the queries she’s received for critiquing, kind of like Janet Reid does at Query Shark.

I love query critiques.  I think it is the single most effective way to know what does and doesn’t work in a query.  Now, I don’t always agree with Ms. Faust’s opinion.  Case in point, a few weeks ago, she critiqued this query and loved it.  I thought the query was vague, at best, and had many of the qualities that agents advise writers not to include.  But she loved the “southern rhythm” of the voice.  Yeah, I didn’t get that at all, and I lived in the south for awhile, but whatever, just like books, it’s subjective and if she liked it then kudos to the author.  Well done!

But this week’s critique struck a nerve with me because Ms. Faust alluded to something I hear over and over again when agents are critiquing queries.  After reading the first two paragraphs of the query, she more or less said, this is all backstory; the real story starts here.  In other words, cut all this crap out and get to the meat of the story.  While I agree the query needs a lot of work, I find issue with the fact that the agent automatically thinks the first two-thirds of the query, and therefore the book, is all backstory.

In my opinion, this is the story, at least part of it.  It is how the author wrote it to give it structure and body, a reference point from which to contrast the conflict.  It bothers me that the agent thinks that everything that came before what she considers the core of the story is somehow irrelevant or that the story goes off track.  Yes, the author should have written the query differently to show the progression of the story and the importance of that progression. 

She implied subtly that the story might be about something else, or perhaps that was just the agent inferring that idea.  But even still, that doesn’t mean all those points the writer thought important enough to include in her query are not crucial to the story.  Some of the commenters, in fact, seemed very interested in the writer’s story, calling out the fact that those first two paragraphs were simply acts one and two.

My point is that agents toss aside stories based on assumptions that the reader doesn’t want to know all that happened before, that they simply want to get to the meat of the story.  Well, okay, I don’t need to know everything that happened to the nineteen-year-old protagonist during her first seventeen or eighteen years unless it’s relevant to the story, but from age nineteen on, all the things that happen to her forge her into the woman she becomes and adds dimension to her reasoning, to how she handles the conflict.  Stories don’t happen in a vacuum.  We need to care about the protagonist and her journey and we do this through knowing and understanding their history. 

I often wonder why everyone is always in such a hurry to get to the end.  It’s all about instant gratification so we can move on to the next thing.  Why not savor the time spent with a story and let yourself get immersed in the simmering heat of the layers as they buildup?  I’m not saying that everything the query writer put in her query is essential.  Personally, it comes off more like historical romance, not historical fiction, and so definitely not my thing, but I get that those details are important to understanding why there even is a conflict. 

Could you imagine if Winston Groom had to query Forrest Gump in today’s market?  Some agents would likely say to cut all that backstory about Forrest as a small child or in high school, but it is those details in the early chapters that show how Forrest changes later in life, how he manages to deal with all the drama that’s thrown his way.  How can we know if we weren’t privy to the backstory?

All this relates to me personally because last week I rewrote my query, for what must be the fifteenth time, based on advice from Stephanie DeVita in her post last week titled Slow Summer, where she says, “In most of the queries that I read, the writer isn’t giving me the most thrilling aspect of their book, the crucial element that should make me desperate to ask for more pages. In other cases, it’s unclear if that pivotal element is even there.” 

So I cut all the “backstory” out of my query and just alluded to it, then got right into the major point of the conflict.  But now I worry that any agent who requests pages will think the first third of my novel is all backstory when, in fact, it is the story, or part of it anyway.  Since the story is all about a man who changes, who becomes a different man due to some pretty terrible things that happen to him, that first third of the book is the setup.  It determines what he was like at first and how those events twisted him into a different man, made him act a certain way and do that one awful thing that drives the story.  The rest of the book is how he deals with the repercussions of those decisions.  Why would any reader care about how he changed and what he did if they didn’t know his “backstory?”

And by the way, I hate that word, backstory.  It makes it feel like all those early words are somehow illegitimate, a bastard to be cast aside.  Yes, it matters how that information is presented, that we feel it is part of the actual story and not simply dumped there in a lazy attempt to give context, but I like to think of it as the ice cream in my sundae.  It’s all those yummy bits on top that make it special, but you can’t just eat the yummy bits.  You have to savor it properly with the ice cream set below.  Otherwise, it’s not a sundae.

_______

As an aside to this original post, I’d like to say that backstory in a query, while important, should only amount to a few words in a single line, and only if the content is of the utmost importance to the heart of the story. 

Stories Don't Happen in a Vacuum

            I knew I would have to come up with something to post about today, but when I woke up, I still hadn’t thought of anything new, that is until I read today’s post at BookEnds Lit Agency.  Today is Workshop Wednesday at BookEnds, the day agent Jessica Faust posts one of the queries she’s received for critiquing, kind of like Janet Reid does at Query Shark.

I love query critiques.  I think it is the single most effective way to know what does and doesn’t work in a query.  Now, I don’t always agree with Ms. Faust’s opinion.  Case in point, a few weeks ago, she critiqued this query and loved it.  I thought the query was vague, at best, and had many of the qualities that agents advise writers not to include.  But she loved the “southern rhythm” of the voice.  Yeah, I didn’t get that at all and I lived in the south for awhile, but whatever, just like books, it’s subjective and if she liked it then kudos to the author.  Well done!

But this week’s critique struck a nerve with me because Ms. Faust alluded to something I hear over and over again when agents are critiquing queries.  After reading the first two paragraphs of the query, she more or less said, this is all backstory; the real story starts here.  In other words, cut all this crap out and get to the meat of the story.  While I agree the query needs a lot of work, I find issue with the fact that the agent automatically thinks the first two-thirds of the query, and therefore the book, is all backstory. 

In my opinion, this is the story, at least part of it.  It is how the author wrote it to give it structure and body, a reference point from which to contrast the conflict.  It bothers me that the agent thinks that everything that came before what she considers the core of the story is somehow irrelevant or that the story goes off track.  Yes, the author should have written the query differently to show the progression of the story and the importance of that progression. 

She implied subtly that the story might be about something else, or perhaps that was just the agent inferring that idea, but even still, that doesn’t mean all those points the writer thought important enough to include in her query are not crucial to the story.  Some of the commenters, in fact, seemed very interested in the writer’s story, calling out the fact that those first two paragraphs were simply acts one and two.

My point is that agents toss aside stories based on assumptions that the reader doesn’t want to know all that happened before, that they simply want to get to the meat of the story.  Well, okay, I don’t need to know everything that happened to the nineteen-year-old MC during her first seventeen or eighteen years unless it’s relevant to the story, but from age nineteen on, all the things that happen to her forge her into the woman she becomes and adds dimension to her reasoning, to how she handles the conflict.  Stories don’t happen in a vacuum.  We need to care about the protagonist and their journey and we do this through knowing and understanding their history. 

I often wonder why everyone is always in such a hurry to get to the end.  It’s all about instant gratification so we can move on to the next thing.  Why not savor the time spent with a story and let yourself get immersed in the simmering heat of the layers as they buildup?  I’m not saying that everything that the query writer put in her query is essential.  Personally, it comes off more like historical romance, not historical fiction, and so definitely not my thing, but I get that those details are important to understanding why there even is a conflict. 

Could you imagine if Winston Groom had to query Forrest Gump in today’s market?  Some agents would likely say to cut all that backstory about Forrest as a small child or in high school, but it is those details in the early chapters that show how Forrest changes later in life, how he manages to deal with all the drama that’s thrown his way.  How can we know if we weren’t privy to the backstory?

All this relates to me personally because last week I rewrote my query, for what must be the fifteenth time, based on advice from Stephanie DeVita in her post last week titled Slow Summer, where she says, “In most of the queries that I read, the writer isn’t giving me the most thrilling aspect of their book, the crucial element that should make me desperate to ask for more pages. In other cases, it’s unclear if that pivotal element is even there.” 

So I cut all the “backstory” out of my query and just alluded to it in the second line, then got right into the major point of the conflict.  But now I worry that any agent who requests pages will think the first third of my novel is all backstory when, in fact, it is the story, or part of it anyway.  Since the story is all about a man who changes, who becomes a different man due to some pretty terrible things that happen to him, that first third of the book is the setup.  It determines what he was like at first and how those events twisted him into a different man, made him act a certain way and do that one awful thing that drives the story.  The rest of the book is how he deals with the repercussions of those decisions.  Why would any reader care about how he changed and what he did if they didn’t know his “backstory?”

And by the way, I hate that word, backstory.  It makes it feel like all those early words are somehow illegitimate, a bastard to be cast aside.  Yes, it matters how that information is presented, that we feel it is part of the actual story and not simply dumped there in a lazy attempt to give context, but I like to think of it as the ice cream in my sundae.  It’s all those yummy bits on top that make it special, but you can’t just eat the yummy bits.  You have to savor it properly with the ice cream set below.  Otherwise, it’s not a sundae.         

Why I Blog: Following My Journey

           Last week, I wrote a post on blogs I love to read.  This week, I want to touch on why I blog myself.  To be honest, I never really had much interest in reading blogs or writing one either.  When I finished writing the first draft of my novel, The Mistaken, last summer, I started researching how to get published.  I found websites and blogs that shared all kinds of interesting information on writing, finding an agent and getting published.  The best blogs were those maintained by literary agents like Nathan Bransford and Query Shark’s Janet Reid, and writers like Anne Mini and Natalie Whipple.  Many of them mentioned how important it was to have an Internet presence such as a blog where agents or editors could check you out.  I thought, what the hell.  I can do that.  But I really didn’t know what in the world I should talk about.  And who would ever want to hear what I had to say anyway?    

I began checking out other writer blogs, people like me who were considered aspiring writers, yet unpublished.  (By the way, I hate that term “aspiring writer.”  I don’t aspire to write.  I do write.  I aspire to be published.  Big difference in my mind.)  A lot of them seemed to be simply daily journals, log accounts of their days, their lives, their families.  And while they might have been well written, they didn’t really interest me much.  I didn’t care about their “chipmunks,” their “rugrats” or “ninjas” or whatever they referred to as their children.  I wanted to read about their writing experience, their journey to become published authors. 

So I thought, that’s what I will focus on, detailing my trials and tribulations, my joys and heartaches, my quest to become a published writer.  And since it has been a rather emotional journey thus far, I found it easy to dig within myself and write about things that have affected me along the way.  It’s been a surreal experience, so I blogged about how I first got started on this wonderful trip and why I decided to take it in the first place, what I have discovered about myself along the way and who has influenced me.  I discovered my book’s theme, how music influenced my writing and having faith in the process.  Months later, when I was finally done with the revisions, I blogged about querying for an agent (a work in progress) and how much I missed living inside my story every day.  I even, ashamedly, blogged about my jealousy at the ease of which some celebrities find success in publishing.  (Sorry about that one!) 

I don’t know who reads my blog or if they are interested in those things, but I found when I read about similar accounts by other writers, I was buoyed by their tenacity, their unfailing faith that they would make it even though it is a painfully long and disheartening process.  Sometimes, though, just reading about how difficult it is for them makes me believe it will never happen for me, getting published, I mean.  But I won’t give up.  A part of that “not giving up” is continuing to blog every week or so.  Sometimes I just don’t know what to write.  I do keep a log on my phone when a blog idea pops into my.  I will roll the idea over in my mind, especially at night, even when I’m sleeping.  That’s a habit with me, dreaming about I should write about, be it my book, my revisions or my blog. 

A few of the writer blogs I read have a great many followers, folks who have signed up to follow their progress, read their writing and ramblings.  I think it’s cool that Natalie Whipple has 1300 followers even though she is not yet published.  1300—wow!  And Adam Heine’s Author’s Echo blog has about 150 followers.  (He’s amazing, by the way.  Very knowledgeable.)  Now, they have been blogging for five and four years respectively while I have only been doing so since last October—five months to date.  I do have four followers though, four generous people who I don’t know and, for whatever reason, have chosen to follow me—a nobody, a complete unknown.  And I am most grateful for those folks.  (I thank you from the bottom of my heart, really.)   

I don’t know how to cultivate more followers.  I am more or less a complete technical idiot and don’t know how to make my blog appear like I want it to.  I don’t know what gadgets are or how to insert photos and manipulate them.  I just picked a basic (and free since I’m a poor, struggling “aspiring” writer) template and added a bit of content—posts and pages.  I joined Networked Blogs through Facebook upon the advice of one of my followers, Laina Turner.  That has brought me quite a bit of traffic.  At least I think so, since I am a complete unknown.  And hey, I even got my first comment from someone I don’t know personally (no offense to my wonderful friend, Lisa Regan, who sometimes offers me encouraging feedback.)  That was exciting for me.  Silly, I know.  But hey, I am a complete unknown, a nobody.  I love getting comments no matter who they are from. 

I’ll keep working on this blogging thing, especially since I am now querying for a literary agent.  When I send out batches of queries—I’ve sent out about 28 so far—I tend to get a bit more traffic.  I think, wow, someone with power and influence might have just read words that I wrote!  And then I kind of panic and think, wow, someone with power and influence might have just read words that I wrote!  Oh no!  What was I thinking?

           This whole writing kick is such an unknown monster to me.  I am enjoying though.  I’m not technically proficient at it, my education was focused on architecture and design, not creative writing, but hey, I like to think of it as being intuitive for me, like playing the piano.  I’ve never taken a lesson, nor can I read music (at least not easily or well), but I can play some rather difficult pieces by Chopin, Mozart and Beethoven.  I have an ear.  I can pick a song out on the keyboard just by listening to it and sounding it out.  Hopefully, I will find an agent who feels the same way about my writing.  In the mean time, I will keep blogging and hoping that others will like what I have to say or at least get something from it.  And maybe a few more will follow me along the way.  It would be nice to have a few more companions because I think my journey will be a long one and I could really use the company! 

Blogs I Love to Read

            It has become a habit for me when I wakeup each morning to grab my iPhone off my nightstand and, before I even get out of bed, peruse my favorite blogs.  I read mostly writer, literary agent and publishing blogs.   I have my favorite blogs bookmarked to my homepage so all I have to do is click and read. 

I always start off with my favorite, Lisa L. Regan.  She doesn’t usually post more than once a week, but I check anyway, no matter the day, to see if she has written anything. Lisa is a writer, like me, and has written two books.  One of them, Finding Claire Fletcher, is now out on submission to various publishing houses and waiting to be picked up.  It is a fantastic read.  I met Lisa through former lit agent, Nathan Bransford’s blog forum.  She answered a post I made requesting a critique partner and we became fast friends.  In fact, she is one of my closest friends ever.  She has taught me a lot about writing, editing, critiquing and querying, as well as what it means to be a genuine friend.  She is the shoulder I always cry on when the process of writing and querying becomes too much or when I get bad news.  She is also the one I turn to when I have good news or just don’t know what to do next.  She blogs about all things writing, querying for an agent, good books to read, as well as her personal history.  I have come a long way because of her and cherish every word she writes.  We consider each other writing soul mates.  Check her out if you have the chance.

            The second blog I check out is Bookends, a literary agency blog.  I find Jessica Faust shares a lot of good information about querying for an agent and writing in general, as well as the life of a literary agent, all of which I find helpful and very interesting.  And her posts are generally very brief and to the point.  She has a long list of topics on her blog that any writer would find both helpful and fascinating.  And she's a no-nonsense kind of gal.  I really like that in an agent.

            After that, I tune into NatalieWhipple’s blog, Between Fact and Fiction.  She is another writer.  She writes Young Adult fiction, mostly fantasy or paranormal stuff, which is not really up my alley, but she is very personable and witty and she often writes about the trials and tribulations of writing, landing and losing an agent, being out on submission and rejection.  All the things I am most interested at this time.  Her insight is valuable and I take strength in her tenacity and fortitude.  And now she is aspiring to create a place where we writers can meet and hook up with critique partners who work in our specific genre.  I wish she had done that back in October.  Oh well, my loss.

            Next comes Dystel & Goderich’s blog.  They are a literary agency and usually have multiple daily posts about agenting and querying for an agent, as well as all things related to the publishing business.  It’s nice to have so many different perspectives to read among. 

            Others I read from time to time are The Rejectionist, who just left her position as an agent assistant to pursue her writing career.  She is hilarious and gives a lot of insight into the whole querying process.  I’m sad that I did not start following her earlier.  I also love Kristin Nelson’s  PubRants.  She is also a lit agent and she rants about all things associated with the publishing industry.  I really like her even though she rejected my query.  Her agency doesn’t really rep my kind of book, but I thought I’d give her a shot any way. 

A few others are Jennifer Hubbard (very sweet), Betsy Lerner (very tough), Adam Heine (very funny) and most especially Nathan Bransford whose blog taught me so much before I knew of anyone else or had any clue as to what I was doing.  He is the god of all agent bloggers though he quit agenting and now works for CNET.  He is very popular with 5000 followers.  (I have 4, all of whom I am eternally grateful for.)  And on weekends, I always go to literary agent Janet Reid’s Query Shark where aspiring writers send in their queries in progress for public humiliation and evaluation.  Too funny and actually very helpful.  By example, she tells you exactly what you should not do when querying for an agent.  Last weekend, she wrote an example of a perfect query, using the Bible as her work.  Both hilarious and insightful.    

            Last, but certainly not least, I read and follow Anne Mini’s Author! Author! blog.  She’s like Nathan Bransford on steroids.  A lot of steroids!  I only wish I had discovered her first.  She is a writer who grew up in the Bay Area, like me, and now lives in Seattle, also like me.   Her memoir, A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick, won the 2004 Zola Award, the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association’s highest honor for a nonfiction book. She has also won numerous writing fellowships.  Anne, also an editor, has been blogging since 2005 and has covered and recovered every topic you could ever think of regarding writing, editing, publishing, querying and agenting, as well as a myriad of other related topics.  Her blog archives are so extensive and thorough, she could publish it into a virtual encyclopedia on all things writing.  I’ve been trolling through her posts for months and I’ve barely scratched the surface on all the things she knows.  And what I love best about her is that whenever I post a comment, she always writes back.  ALWAYS!  I absolutely LOVE her!  Her posts do tend to be rather long, but I find I get sucked in every time because she is so thorough and knows exactly what my questions will be.  I can tell she’s been there and done that.  Every aspiring writer should definitely check her out.

            I do have others I read occasionally and I am always looking for other blogs related to writing, agenting and publishing.  Let me know if you have one I should follow.