The Saturday Slash

Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.

I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.

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William Ross needs a jump start. He’s sleepwalking again but that’s not the worst of it. Just two weeks after he clears a client of child abuse, she murders her son, Latrelle. This is definitely your hook. Not a jump start, not sleepwalking. Blaming himself for the boy’s death, William quits law, and finds work as a party clown. I definitely think we need to know why a party clown. That's a huge leap from what he did in his former life. As he fights to make a living as a kids entertainer, a desire grows to give someone the protection he couldn’t offer Latrelle. How does this manifest? Is it already there in the clown aspect? Or is he searching through other avenues? His girlfriend, Clara, embarking on her own new venture, has not bargained on a beau-turned-clown. The two, along with their friends, Alessia, a performance artist with a heroin past, Nick, a millionaire who can’t sustain relationships, and Felicia, a driven perfectionist, comprise the Second Chance Club. Mediumship, a humpback whale, Sing Sing Prison, and a $1000 baby doll, all figure into William’s attempt to find his way. While this eclectic grouping might help make the book sound quirky, it might also make an agent wonder if it's not grounded enough, or question where this fits in the bookshelves in a store.

Second Chance Club is my debut novel. I was a grumpy criminal lawyer who portrayed my career change in a NY Times essay that generated 465 reader comments: http://ow.ly/fuI030iK7TC Great bio! And very smart to include the link. This will give the agent a chance to read your writing style and hear your voice beyond the query.

The intended market of Second Chance Club is readers who want to find their place in the world. Well, that's incredibly broad, and it further muddies the waters concerning both readership and genre.Complete at _ words, Is it not finished yet? Don't query until you have a full manuscript. it will appeal to fans of The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie and The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick.

Right now I think the biggest problem with this query is that I don't have a good idea what this book is about. You start with sleepwalking (which I don't see how it ties into the larger story), then child murder compounded with guilt, and then list some things that make it sound like a screwball comedy. I don't know what the genre of this book would be, and your stated audience is equally broad. You'll want to write the query in a way that conveys the tone and voice of the book, and as I said, right now it just feels like a grab bag.

Middle Grade Graphic Novel Giveaway! Anti-Hero by Kate Karyus Quinn & Demitria Lunetta

Two of my best author friends have combined forces with DC Comics to bring you - Anti/Hero, a new graphic novel for middle-grade featuring all original content and characters!

Piper Pájaro and Sloane MacBrute are two 13-year-old girls with very different lives but very similar secrets. Popular, outgoing Piper is strong. Like, ripping-the-doors-off-cards strong. She longs to be a superhero, even if she tends to leave massive messes in her wake. Snarky Sloane, on the other hand, is super smart. Like, evil-genius-smart. To help her family, she has to put those smarts to use for her villainous grandfather.

When a mission to steal an experimental technological device brings the two girls face to face with each other, the device sparks, and the two girls switch bodies! Now they must live in each other's shoes as they figure out a way to switch back.

Anti/Hero is a story that explores what makes a hero, how one can find friendship where it's unexpected, and what it means to walk in another person's shoes...literally!

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Jennifer Longo On Perfectionism as the Enemy

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Jennifer Longo, author of What I Carry (Random House Books 2020) is an Indies Next Winter 2020 title and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and BookPage. A California native and San Francisco transplant, Jennifer now lives with her husband and daughter on an island near Seattle, Washington. Her every hour is consumed by writing, running, walking her dogs, and reading her way down her ridiculously long holds list at the library. Find photos of Jen's dogs, daily calls to smash the patriarchy, and other fun jazz on Instagram & Twitter.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

YES. With this book, there was absolutely a moment a few years ago that made me say, “Okay. Now I have to write this book or someone’s getting punched in the throat.” At breakfast in a restaurant one morning, friends and I were talking about some other mutual friends who had recently adopted a young boy from foster care, it was the child’s first and only placement and his life had been, and continued to be with the unskilled adoptive parents, very difficult.

The kid had been acting out in (justifiable) anger, and one of the friends at breakfast said, “That kid just isn’t grateful enough. He doesn’t know how good he has it.” I had been blissfully unaware of how so many adults blame kids for their lives in foster care, how many grown-ass people actually think kids are in care because of something they, the kids, did. Because no one ever listens to the kids – they listen to adults working in the system about how hard it is for them, meanwhile the kids are actually living it and I’m over here flipping breakfast tables. That moment was after years of my daughter asking me to write a less yell-y and molest-y book about foster care - just to switch things up a little in the genre. I knew I wanted to write a book from one life-long foster kid’s perspective that highlighted the uniqueness of each foster experience, while unspooling some of the lies adults perpetuate about kids in foster care in America.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I didn’t do it alone, I can tell you that. My editorial agent (Melissa White at Folio) and my editors at Random House (Jenna Littice, Caroline Abbey, and Chelsea Eberly) are amazing. They knew what I wanted this book to explore and they helped me built the plot to make that happen. I began by listening to, and talking with, some really kind and generous current and former foster youth, by listening to my own daughter and some family members, and those kids’ words and stories became Muiriel’s life.

The plot became a chronicle of Muirirel’s last year in foster care before aging out, which let me highlight past key moments in her placements, and interactions with various adults working in the system, to explore how she and other kids maneuver their lives around those events and relationships. I wanted to hit all the lie-debunking, but still have a story about a human person that felt alive and true, and that ‘one last year’ time-frame, with it’s built in do-or-die decisions, lent itself well to what my editors and I were going for.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

I mean . . .over three years, my agent and editors and I tore this book apart and started over from scratch at least three, maybe for times. I can get really myopic about one character, or one place, and get soap-boxy about truths I want to make clear, and I can really ruin a plot that way. My team of editors help me see the actual story picture in all my books. Have I mentioned Let us all thank our lord and savior Beyoncé for editors? Because seriously. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

This will sound douche-y and I’m sure all writers say this but for real, I have a big problem with too many ideas. I have about two dozen paper notes and as many phone notes and laptop files with fast outlines of books I feel desperately compelled to write. Ideas are never the problem – focusing on one without getting sidetracked by others is the thing – that, and letting perfection be the enemy of the good; I have a WIP I am in love with and I’ve been working on for three years that I can’t get right but I just need grow a spine and finish it, mostly right or wrong or not, because it’s just going to get torn apart and re-written anyway, so what is my problem?

My husband and I talk about that a lot. He is a creative director for video games and when people say to either one of us, “Oh you write books/make games? I have the best idea for a story! It’s about this weasel who has thumbs…” and it’s like okay sounds great, you go do that because I’ve got too many ideas waiting under the window already.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Perfect follow up! I decide by picking up the mantle of whichever story I can’t stop thinking about the most (IN the shower, while driving, like it just can’t leave me alone no matter what) and I go all in and then I try to not start something else until I’m done with the thing I’m currently dedicated to finishing . . .otherwise I’ll never have anything finished, just a bunch of half-done stories and that would get me down. Some people can write multiple books at a time and I think that’s amazing. But the way I quell the temptation to jump around is letting myself at least make notes or outlines on other stuff as much as I want – but my dedicated writing time is for The Thing only. 

I have 5 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

First of all, I Stan a queen with five cats, your Instagram feed gives me life. And B. I can’t write very well without my sweet, sweet babies beside me. I have three pals I write with: James Taylor the Cat (She’s a girl) then there’s our two little dogs from the Milo rescue in San Francisco: Henri and June. Henri sits in my lap and I rest my laptop on him, or he sits behind me as lumbar support. God, I love them so much!