ooooooooook iâm going vegan. actually, i already went vegan as of yesterday (so obviously not too long ago). i donât think iâve ever been as unhealthy as am i now. thatâs one reason why, but the real reason is the health benefits. i have an autoimmune disorder and since i was diagnosed something like 5+ years ago, iâve been told giving up dairy would significantly reduce my inflammation but i am lazy and always said âoh i could never give up cheese, never everâ but now iâm nearly 30 and sick of being in nearly constant pain.
so i decided to finally listen and give up dairy.
i have been a vegetarian off and on since i was 13 and decided to go back on at the same time. i also watched the documentary What The Health and recently read the book How Not To Die which both make me feel like vegan is a good way to go for health reasons. plus there was this interesting article in npr that shows the correlation between bad diets and brain function.
disclaimer: What the Health clearly has the agenda of wanting to make you go vegan and some of the science has been called into question, but even so I do strongly believe diet and reduction of symptoms to certain diseases believe and it is impossible to argue with the fact that a vegan diet is best for the planet.
anywaaaay iâm writing this post to hold myself accountable. iâm going vegan for at least two to three weeks. iâm not committing to a lifetime right now (i think itâll be easier for me to get through the first two to three weeks if i tell myself this). if it DOES reduce my symptoms and makes me feel healthier and better, then iâll make it a lifestyle choice. until then, weâll see.
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I had to post 5 times a week. If I didnât, I failed my followers. I had to reply to all comments in a timely manner. If I didnât, I failed my followers. I had to write good enough poems or prose to posts, even if I wasnât feeling inspired, because of that 5 times a week posting needs. But I never felt like I was great at it. I started my account (@tornepages) as an outlet from my prose writing. But the more time passed, the more pressure I felt until it was too much and I had to step back.
Iâve been mostly inactive this year. I always take a break from Instagram at the end of the year, around the holidays, because I visit family and just need a social media break. But instead of coming back in 2019 to be active, I felt like I was forcing myself. I wasnât enjoying it. So I finally took a hiatus in March to re-evaluate.
I had a chapter book series come out this year (Isle of Misfits, under the pen name Jamie Mae) and Iâm another book (a queer YA) and I work in publishing during the day, too. I think itâs too hard for me to find a release in writing when Iâm getting paid to do it.
So Iâve decided to change direction with my Instagram account. Simultaneously my most viral posts have been my art, and my most unliked posts have been my art. I donât think Iâll ever be a paid artist than same way Iâm a paid writer, but I get enjoyment out of it so Iâm going to focus my account on it full-time.
Iâm excited about this new direction--to make my account primarily an art one. I think Iâll post when I can, but wonât commit to doing it regularly on Monday/Wednesday/Friday/etc. Iâll interact more with followers and other instragrammers and feel more connected with the content Iâm publishing.
There are a lot of fabulous poets on Instagram. I love the community dearly. I think itâs the most open and welcoming writing community on social media. Iâll still be following my favorites but donât think Iâll be posting poems unless I feel particularly inspired.
I donât think I have a particular art style, either. Itâs something Iâve been doing off and on since I was a little kid, but never developed a style. A signature. I look forward to evolving and finding what that is.
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Third person POV has more than one way to write itâitâs not like first person POV. With first person POV, itâs easy. Youâre in your MCâs head and only your MCâs head.
With third person POV, there is close and omniscient. Â
Third Person POV: Close v. Omniscient
Omniscient
First comes the false assumption that writing in third person POV means you can head jump from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. This isnât true at all. If you are head jumping constantly within a scene, then you are writing in third person omniscient POV. This is something that is old-school, and youâll see it in some classics such as The Omen.
With omniscient, you are writing from a narratorâs POV, a narrator that knows everything that will happen and everything that is happening in everyoneâs head (hence the term omniscient). The voice is usually lacking, and stiff. As much as I personally love The Omen it is voiceless, the plot and concept of the novel is what carries itâand thatâs true for many books that are written in omniscient.
Third Person close POV
In todayâs marketplace, third person close POV is highly preferred. There is a reason that first person POV is really prominent in most marketplaces. Readers love to be that close to the characters. They love being able to know one character that intimately. Third person close POV is similar to first person POV in the sense that you are only in one head. You only know as much as that one character knows, and you cannot jump into the head of any other character in that scene.
In the next scene, you can change characters. But not within a scene. This is what separates it from first person POV (along with, of course, the use of the he/she/hers/his pronouns instead of I/me/my).
Third person close POV is better for many reasons:
Itâs easier to find a voice. You are writing from the POV of a character, and each character should speak differently and think differently. Which helps to bring more color and vividness to the writing.
Readersâas well as agents and editorsâprefer it. It gives the reader the same sort of intimacy as first person POV does. You are allowed to know characters deeper.
Omniscient is MOSTLY dead. Sorry, but itâs just the truth. Very few authors can pull off omniscient, and very few readers/editors/agents are interested in it. Itâs old-school, and itâs being left in the dust. (There are a few exceptions, but those exceptions are only allowed when an author has an amazing command of their own voice. When their voice is so unique that you can pick up a random, scattered sheet of paper, read a few paragraphs, and think yes, this is Laini Taylor thatâs when someone can write in omniscient. If you donât have a strong voice, omniscient will only weaken it further.)
When you are writing in third person POV, make sure to realize what you are using. Donât just default to omniscient because you think thatâs how third person POV should be written.
This post, just to clarify, is for breaking into publishing as a career, not a writer. There's a lot of hard truths about breaking into publishing as a writer too, but there's a lot of posts out there about it. Beware writers this, beware writers thatâbut what if you want to work as an editor, agent, marketer, or anything else in the publishing industry?
Hard Truth #1: You can't be in it for the money
You are not going to make bank at any job in the industry until you have paid a lot of dues. You may end up making good money as a literary agent, but only after two or three years of building a solid client list and connections in the industry. You may end up making good money as a marketing director or editor in chief at an imprint, but only after years of working your way up the ladder.
Hard Truth #2: It's a small industry and hard to break into
This is a small industry. It's also really interconnected. People jump from imprint to imprint, agency to agency, and a lot of time it's interns or assistance that end up with the entry-level openings. Being small, it's hard to break into without any connections. And there's a lot of people who want in.
Hard Truth #3: It requires a lot of (usually unpaid) internships
As I mentioned above, internships are the best way to get an entry-level job. There are very few internships that are paid. Most are unpaid, and can be long hours of doing them. I've personally had three internships. They were all instrumental in getting me my current, full-time paid position.
Hard Truth #4: The entry-level salaries are not awesome
$30,000 - $35,000 is the standard entry-level salary (yes, even in New York City). For a literary agent, a majority of those positions are purely commission based, meaning you only make 15% off of any deal you make (advance and then royalties, but it usually takes 2 years for a book to come out so there's no immediate royalties).
Hard Truth #5: Work/life balance isn't great
This really depends on your position. As an editorial assistant or assistant literary agent, you will be reading a lot of slush piles on your evenings and weekends. Your days will be mostly administrative work. You don't often get to read the submissions during work hours (which will be a majority of what your job details entail).
Marketing, publicity, and the like tend to be a different story. There's usually a good amount of work/life balanceâyou work at the office, and then you don't once you leave (unless you are going on a book tour as a publicity person). But most people trying to get into publishing tend to want those editorial and literary agency jobs.
I don't mean to depress anyone, but it's important to know the realities of an industry before you start job hunting. That way when it takes 6 months to a year, you know it's not just you. It's everyone.
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As a writer myself, I only ever replied to partial manuscript or full manuscript request rejections. If an agent took the time to read some of my manuscript, I always thanked them for it, usually something like this:
Dear [AGENT],
Thank you for taking the time to read my manuscript, TITLE. I appreciate your feedback [if they gave any] and will keep it in mind while I write my next manuscript.
All the best,
[name]
Short, simple and to the point.
This always went well for me. Sometimes an agent would reply and weâd talk a bit moreâalmost always ending up in âplease query me with you next manuscriptâ request (if I hadn't already gotten one)âand sometimes agents didnât reply. But either way, I felt good about thanking them.
I almost never replied to query rejections. Agents send out a lot of query rejections, and if every writer replied that would be a lot more emails to deal with. If the agent gave me personal feedback, meaning they clearly took the time to write it, then I would thank them. But most of the time youâll get form rejections or no response at all.
As a literary agent intern, Iâve seen a lot of weird replies to rejections. Iâve interned for three different literary agencies, and the strange things some writers do still amazes me. At the partial/full manuscript level, the responses were always nice, friendly, and thankful. But at the query level, it got weird more often that it was pleasant.
QUERY REJECTIONÂ
What Not To Do:
DO NOT ask them to reconsider. They didnât reject your novel for no reason. They had a reason for it. Often when someone asks agents to reconsider it comes off condescendingly. Like you made a big mistake, Iâm the next big thing. Donât miss out on this hot stuff. No one wants to work with someone like that.
DO NOT tell them they are dumb/idiots/stupid for rejecting them. I mean, come on, this is an obvious one. Do I need to say why this is a bad idea? (The answer is apparently so.) Maybe the agent isnât right for this manuscript, but maybe they will be for your next one. Donât go burning bridges.
DO NOT ask them for a recommendation to another agent. Itâs not their job to research agents and tell you who to query. Itâs yours. Figure it out.
DO NOT ask them for advice. Again, itâs not their job. Itâs your job to figure it out. They give advice to their clients. And agents are really busy, they canât give advice to every query-er. (They may freely give advice though, in which case be grateful and say thank you.)
DO NOT insult their assistant/intern. For every agent Iâve interned for that Iâve sent out rejections, the agent has looked over every query and pages. I am not the decision maker, I help and give my opinion on pages and queries, but it wasn't always my decision to make. Itâs the agents. But, sometimes, Iâm the one that sends out the rejection because the agent is too busy to send out personalized rejections. It drives me a little crazy when people reply to the rejections saying Are you sure THE AGENT read this? âCause this is exactly what they are looking for.
Why shouldnât you do this? Itâs super condescending to me as the intern, or to the assistant. We work with the agent on a daily basis. We know their tastes. Thatâs our job. You donât know really what they are looking for, and maybe your book falls under the category of what their interest is, but you have a concept they already represent (happens sometimes when you reference old interviews or #MSWL tweets), or your writing isnât where it needs to be (often this is the case).
Also, the intern/assistant probably is going to move up in the publishing world. Itâs small like that. Todayâs interns/assistants are tomorrowâs agents.
Overall though, sometimes you'd be surprised what can happen when you reply politely to a rejection. I have a friend who did that, and it turned a flat-out rejection of her full manuscript into a revise and resubmit (since the agent liked the concept, and liked the writer, and decided to give her another go). This turned into an offer of representation, and now her book is hitting the shelves this year.
Iâve seen a lot of query letters. Between my internship experience at multiple agencies and through my editorial services. But sometimes it does baffle me the mistakes I see in the query slush piles.
If you are reading this article right now, you are probably not one of the offenders to make this mistake. Probably, but not certainly. Trust me when I say if you make one of these mistakes, itâs good enough for a busy agent to move on to the next query. If youâre lucky and you get an intern or an assistant, they might give you an extra shotâthe query slush pile and requested material tends to be their main feature. But, not always. Sometimes those interns and assistants are tired or overworked or working more than one job. And agents? They work 40+ hours a week, and query slush pile is kind of a side job for them on top of their client work.
Donât make these mistakes. Give yourself the best shot.
ATTACHING QUERY LETTERS TO EMAIL
What the what? Yeah, a weird amount of people will attach a query letter to the email either as a PDF file or a Word file instead of pasting it into the body of the email. Some agencies request this, but not many. Most agencies want you to paste the query into the body of the email.
Some agents, plenty, donât want to risk a computer virus to view your query letter. Make this mistake and get an auto-reject.
QUERYING MORE THAN ONE PROJECT AT ONCE
Uh, no. You donât do this. You perfect one project and query it by itself. Pairing it up with other projectsâlike the other two books in the trilogyâjust means you donât know how to query properly. If you havenât done your research to prove that this is not what you do then you probably arenât ready for an agent.
IâM THE NEXT JK ROWLING
Nope, you arenât. Sorry, but I donât believe theyâll ever be another JK Rowling. There will never be another Stephen King. There just wonât. You arenât going to be them. Or Dan Brown. You can be you, and you might be awesome, but nothing proves that youâll be a top seller like them yet.
Bragging it up about how awesome you are is stupid. No one wants to work with someone arrogant. Confidence is good, but too much of it sets of red flags about your ability to work with other people.
SUPER LONG QUERY LETTER
Queries should be between 250 â 300 words. Not a ton more than that. If you canât figure out how to write a query letter, you havenât researched the industry well enough to understand why query letters are important.
ALL ABOUT YOU, NOT ABOUT YOUR BOOK
Queries that are paragraphs and paragraphs about you, about what you read, about what you do, and three or four sentences about your book is not doing yourself any favors. If you are writing about fiction, you want to talk about your book. You could be awesome, but it doesnât matter. Itâs all about the book.
NO QUERY LETTER
Sometimes people say they donât want to âbullshitâ the agent with a query letter. They want to get straight to the point, so here is the first five pages of the book.
No.
Thatâs not how it works, people. The query letter exists for a reason, and if you havenât researched the industry enough to know why that exists, then ⊠well, you probably arenât ready.
NO PAGES
If the submission guidelines call for pages, you want to include those pages. Why? Because a busy agent might be on the fences. They might not want to take the time to write you an email, you who ignored their simple submission guidelines, and ask for pages. If they are new, then maybe yes. If they arenât new, if they are well established with a lot of great clients, they probably wonât. Read the submission guidelines, if you expect an agent to take the time to read your query, take the time to read up about them.
WRONG PAGES
You donât submit an âexcerptâ â you submit the first five or ten pages. Not some random set of pages from chapter ten.
WRONG GENRE
Crazy how reading up about an agent can save you the easiest, quickest rejectionâthe agent doesnât represent your genre. You can usually figure that out by looking at the agencyâs âabout usâ page. Querying an agent that specifically says, for example, I do not represent paranormal means that they do not represent paranormal, so querying them with a paranormal novel? Not a good idea.
TOO HUMBLE
âI doubt youâd be interested in this, but I thought Iâd show you my novel anyway.â Or something like this, itâs a bad idea. Donât be too humble. You have an awesome book, donât assumeâif they represent your genreâthat they donât want to see it.
WEIRD SUBJECT LINES
QUERY: TITLE YA/MG/ADULT
Most agencies ask for that sort of format. For example, if you wrote a book called ALL HERE NOW and itâs a Middle Grade novel, then your subject line should be: QUERY: ALL HERE NOW MG. Donât write weird stuff in the subject line. A lot of agencies have filters, so writing something long like âthriller novel about space aliens invading that find love in all the wrong placesâ isnât going to really help.
NO, MG/YA IS NOT A GENRE
So, no, MG and YA arenât a genre. Also, a book cannot be both MG and YA. It is either one or the other. A genre is sci-fi, fantasy, horror, contemporary. A marketplace is Middle Grade (MG) or Young Adult (YA).
EVERYONE WILL LOVE THIS!
Everyone will love your bookâfrom teenagers to grandmothers!
Nope. Sorry, they wonât. You have a marketplace. Accept it. Know it. You might have crossover appeal, but you have one set marketplace, and itâs definitely not teenagers to grandmothers.
CRAZY MESH UP
âItâs J.K. Rowling magic meets Stephanie Perkins romance with a dash of Courtney Summers writing and Nova Ren Suma magical realism with the atmosphere of Ransom Riggs.â
Does that make your head kinda hurt trying to figure out? Yeah. It makes my head hurt too. Pick one or two authors to compare your work toâif you want toâbut more than that itâs insane.
IN CONCLUSIONâŠ
Like I said, if you are reading this, you are probably not one of the offenders above. Usually, they donât do their research. But you do. So youâre really top of the class. Your slush pile awesomeness. You just need to have the right query letter, and give it to the right agent and the right time.
Depending on the literary agent, they can get anywhere between 50 to 100+ queries per week. With that many queries, on top of their current clientsâ work to read and contracts to negotiate, can you imagine how much time they have for each query letter? Maybe thirty seconds, a minute at most.
So how do you stand out in the query slush pile? One of the best ways: personalize your query letter. Show the agent you did your research and you are querying them for a specific reason.
How do you personalize a query letter?
STEP ONE: RESEARCH THE AGENT
Publishers Marketplace, Literary Rambles, Writerâs Digest, Twitter, Google, all these are great resources to research literary agents. Find interviews and make sure they represent your genre (youâd be shocked how often people query agents that do not represent their genre, guess what that gets you? An automatic rejection).
In most interviews, agents talk about what they want to see in their slush pile.
See if they represent any of your favorite authors or popular authors in the marketplace and genre you are writing.
Make sure they like personalized query letters. This is rare, but sometimes youâll find interviews where agents say they would rather just get to the query letter than have personalization. But trust meâmost agents like to see personalization. It shows youâve done your research.
A lot of queriers donât do their research. By proving you have, youâre already a step ahead of your competition.
STEP TWO: IDENTIFY WHAT MAKES THEM THE RIGHT AGENT FOR YOU
By now youâve read a few interviews, checked out their clients, and probably can figure out at least one reason why you are querying themâeven if they donât have interviews out there, you have to know why youâre querying them, right?
It could be something as easy as their âabout usâ page on says they are interested in fantasy YA, and you wrote a fantasy YA novel.
STEP THREE: WRITE THE PERSONALIZATION
Put the personalization on the top of the query, since the agent is going to be glancing over the queryâyou want them to see it right away. Proof that youâve done your research. A connection that shows them yes, this will be a good query for me to actually pay attention to and read through.
I know that sounds cruel, but the truth of the matter is that agents are extremely busy and well trained. They can usually do a quick 10-30 second glance over a query letter to know if itâs something they are interested or not.
INTERVIEW PERSONALIZATION TEMPLATE:
âI read in your XXX interview that you are interested in dark, gritty contemporary YA. As such, I thought you might be interested in my 75,000 word YA novel, TITLE.â
(XXX of course should be replaced with wherever you read the interview. For example, âin your Writerâs Digest interviewâ.)
CLIENT PERSONALIZATION TEMPLATE:
âI am querying you because I greatly admire your client XXX. Since he/she writes dark, gritty contemporary YA, I thought you might be interested in my 75,000 word YA novel, TITLE.â
PROFILE PERSONALIZATION TEMPLATE:
âI read on your blog/profile/agency website that you are interested in fantasy YA. As such, I thought you might be interested in my 80,000 word YA novel, TITLE.â
There are, of course, other ways to personalize a query, but these are the most common. Personalization will help you set yourself apart from your competition.
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She reminded me of the sea; the way she came dancing towards you, wild and beautiful, and just when she was almost close enough to touch sheâd rush away again.
Querying can be scary. You have to compress your 80,000-word novel into 250 words. After that, you are going to send that query letter to an agent that gets probably between 50-100 queries a week (some get even more than that). As someone who has interned at three agencies, Iâve been shocked by what Iâve seen in the slush pile. Most rejections happen for a few simple reasonsâand as long as you avoid these mistakes, youâll be way ahead of your competition.
TOP 5 QUERYING MISTAKES
MISTAKE 1: WRONG GENRE, WRONG AGENT
This is the most common, and the one that just makes no sense to me! Seriouslyâwhy? Why would you shoot off a query to an agent without even looking at their agency profile? If the writer took five seconds to do that, they would realize: Hey, this agent doesnât represent crime thrillers. I shouldnât query them.
Querying an agent that does not represent your genre will get your rejected. Easy as that. Your crime thriller could be awesome, but if they donât represent crime thrillers, they are not going to take you on as a client.
MISTAKE 2: TOO LONG QUERY / SYNOPSIS
Query letters should be around 250 words. Not hugely long, not one full page, not two pages. You donât want to tell the entire story, aka a synopsis, in the query. You want to cover the first 2/3 of the story. When I glanced over the slush pile, if I saw a query letter that was hugely long it was already a point against it because that usually meant overwriting in the novel, or that they didnât actually know what their plot was, so their query was all over the place.
You are doing yourself a disservice by not following the query letter guidelines: 250-300 words. Not more. (Though if you have a really killer bio filled with important information, that could push your query to 350 and be totally acceptable.)
MISTAKE 3: COMPLETE DISREGARD FOR THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Like #1, I do not understand why a writer wouldnât look at the submission guidelines before querying an agent. Where do you get their email address from? From the submission guidelines page! So why wouldnât you take the extra ten seconds to read what they want to see?
If the agent wants to see pages, and you donât send pages ⊠thatâs not good. What if they are on the fence about your query? If they have a full client list, they arenât going to take the time to ask for more pages because they are on the fence; they needed those pages to really determine if your writing style jived with them. They are more likely to reject you and move on to the next query.
MISTAKE 4: NOT DOING YOUR RESEARCH / STRETCHING IT
Doing your research is vital. You can save yourself rejection by doing it. You can also personalize your query and set yourself apart by doing it.
For example, one literary agent can be widely known for being a horror fan. However, if you look at her profile page, youâll see she clearly states:
âI am no longer looking at science fiction and I have never accepted paranormal/supernatural/fantasy.â
So ⊠she isnât interested in paranormal. She isnât interested in supernatural. But she still got a lot of queries for paranormal horror, supernatural horror, and sometimes even fantasy horror (at least when I was her assistant). But since Bree is known for being a horror fan, people will still query her with paranormal horror because they thinkâshe wants horror.
Itâs a stretch, and obviously not true. Itâs also an avoidable rejection if you read her profile. This is true with a lot of agents. There is probably another agent at the same agency that would fit with you better anyway.
MISTAKE 5: BEING POMPOUS
Declaring you are the next best thing â that you are the next JK Rowling or Dan Brown or Gillian Flynn, well, guess what? You probably arenât. Iâm sorry. You might be, but no one likes a pompous person. Donât be pompous. No one wants to work with a pompous person. (Have I made the whole pompous = bad case repetitively enough yet?)
Itâs a turnoff and a waste of space to go on and on about why your book is awesome, why you are obviously the next Stephen King, etc., etc⊠You would be doing yourself a favor by showing the agent your book is awesome with a strong query letter and strong opening pages.
Using them as a comp title (while not encouraged) is a separate thing. When I say pompous, I mean the people who really do declare they will be the next Dan Brown and they expect their advances to be at least six figures and to sell the movie rights within a few months after making a book deal. Yeah, these people exist. They donât understand the way the publishing world works, and dealing with that sort of unrealistic expectation is not going to be fun for anyone involved.
