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.

If the Saturday Slash has been helpful to you in the past, or if you’d like for me to take a look at your query please consider making a donation, if you are able.

If you’re ready to take the next step, I also offer editing services.

My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.

In the glittering backstreets of modern New York, old scars and secrets give birth to magical calamities.I think this is interesting but I'm not sure that it's quite hook-ish enough, because it's very non-specific. I do think it's decent though, and if you follow it up with real meat, it could work.

To the venandi, power is a matter of life and death. This is definitely not real meat. I don't know who or what the venandi are, so it doesn't really matter to me. And power is kind of always a matter of life and death, no matter who you are. I'd strike this.

Their hidden society is structured upon the notion of noblesse oblige — privilege entails responsibility. Okay... this makes them sound like they are the good guys, whereas power being a matter of life and death as alluded to in the line above, makes them seem power hungry, so it feels contradictory to me. Their second hearts that beat alongside the first draw power from the ether: an energy source from the realm of purity, the first out of reality’s three dimensions, which manifests into eight different types of magical abilities as it passes into the mortal realm. Way too much world building, no plot. I'm not really intereted in second hearts and ether and 8 kinds of magic, because I don't know who they are, what they want, or what the plot is. Right now this goes from being very vague, to become super specific - but still not telling me anything about what the story is.

Seventeen year old Hazel Labelle has always believed herself cursed, haunted by her strange ability to see the spirit world. Is Hazel a human? Or a venandi? We spent a lot of time talking about them and now we're talking about Hazel. She is an avid boxer and pioneer, What does it mean to be a pioneer in today's world? and she has not lived in one place for more than six months. The unstable nature of her life was put to rest upon reaching New York, where she has lived in peace for four years. You just said she's never stayed anywhere more than 6 months, but now it's four years - also, if she's seventeen, she got to NY when she was 13... so are her parents the ones moving her around and leading this wandering lifestyle? But recently, her peace is threatened by a series of strange happenings within the city — people are disappearing in groups without a trace, their bodies found burned and covered in odd markings. Why does this threaten her peace? What does it have to do with her ability to see the spirit world?

When Hazel is attacked by a mysterious man in a mask during a rebellious one night road trip with her friend, an intrusion that results in the kidnapping of her father, her fragile reality starts to crumble. Really convoluted sentence here. And what does it mean that her reality is fragile? Fragile how? Connected to her visions? Does the road trip matter to the story? Simply say - "when her father is kidnapped." You don't have a lot of room to go into this level of detail in a query. Drawn into the twisted dark world of venandi, I'm completely confused as to whether the venandi are good or bad Hazel is put through a dream trial that unveils a fledgling venandi’s magic, only to discover she possesses a cursed power that is not meant to exist. She also begins to suffer from flashes of images, bits and pieces from a past she cannot remember. With the help of the residents of the Phoenix Headquarters, Who are they? How did she meet them? Are they venandi? and she will face down age-old schemes, bitter royals, and a world-shattering betrayal that will leave her unable to tell friend from foe, illusion from reality, and lies from truths any longer. This doesn't have any impact because I don't know anything about the schemes, the royals, or the betrayals. They're just words and plot elements that any number of stories have.

For in the venandi world, ignorance equals ruination. This doesn't really have any impact either, because I don't know who the venandi are, what they want, or if they're even good or bad.

NOTHING BUT SHADOWS is a modern reimagining of medieval monarchs and nobility, heavily dusted with magical intrigue. It is an upper YA contemporary fantasy complete at 118k words, with series potential. I am currently a college student from South Korea, and I run an Instagram account (@winter.writes17) with over 34k followers.

From the query, I never would have guessed that this had any relation to medieval monachs, etc. I don't understand how any of these plot elements are connected - venandi, dead bodies in the city, her dad getting kidnapped, a guy attacking her, these Phoenix people, and then any number of things in the last paragraph. You need to get the actual plot front and center - and Hazel, not the venandi. Their hearts, etc, don't matter at all. What is Hazel's goal? Is she trying to get her dad back? He's lost entirely. I don't know what she wants, who her enemy is, who her friends are, or what the actual plot is. Work on trimming this down to the bone to get the plot front and center, not world building, or too much detail about things that don't matter (second hearts, one night road trips). Also, YA fantasy is always inundated, and 118k is pretty long in the tooth for a debut. Try to get it under 100k before you start quyering!

Suzanne Moyers on the Ghostly Inspiration for ’Til All These Things Be Done

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. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Suzanne Moyers, a former teacher who spent more than 20 years as an editor and writer for the education press. Suzanne is the author of ’Til All These Things Be Done

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?

I was a teenager when my grandmother, aka “Nana”, moved from her Texas farm to our home on Long Island.  I’ll never forget the first time I witnessed her staring into an empty corner, crying to the ghost of her long-lost father: Papa, come back! Please!  She was in the early stages of dementia, but her emotion was utterly real, driving me to learn more about her father’s inexplicable disappearance way back in 1919.   

Papa had supposedly loved his family, but after being maimed in a terrible accident, left to seek clerical work in newly-booming Houston, 350 miles away.   When they stopped hearing from him, his family assumed he must be dead, but they were in survival mode and didn’t have the wherewithal to find out for sure. It was only when my grandmother was in her fifties that she learned Papa was still alive and living a day’s train ride away, that even knowing his children needed him, he hadn’t returned to claim them.  Though my grandmother had never made sense of this betrayal, over the years, new details emerged suggesting a more hopeful postlude to the story.  I’d long ago crafted my own fantasy around these details, imagining a closure my grandmother never had but that I like to believe could be true. 

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

Deep research into the rich but troubled ‘cotton culture’ of early 20th century Texas provided ample inspiration, as did my grandmother’s recollections of events like the ‘great influenza’ epidemic and day-to-day life on her grandfather’s farm.  I also had stories from other kin who lived in Texas during that era, and plenty of photographs and heirlooms to juice my creative endeavors. I used these details and my imagination to create plot twists, conflict, and also develop unique but believable characters. 

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

I am a pantser/plotter hybrid.  I like having a basic outline for a novel and, in this case, I already had certain key elements of the story in mind. But creativity often feels like a supernatural force to me, driving me down unfamiliar yet eerily vivid paths. I always follow those paths, surprised at where I end up but always glad I’ve gotten there.     

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

Anything I wonder about becomes fodder for potential stories. And since I’m constantly wondering (sometimes annoyingly so), I have a lot of ideas! Usually my best inspiration arises from a need to understand what makes ‘ordinary’ people do unlikely things, from following a charismatic guru around the world to abandoning their families to killing their families (see below).  My problem isn’t coming up with ideas; it’s finding the time and, frankly, the willpower to develop them. A great idea is one thing, but the work of turning it into compelling fiction is another thing entirely.  Even if you’re not writing historical fiction, you have to do the initial research into your setting, learn as much as you can about your subject, get into other peoples’ messy minds—and turn yours inside out too.       

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

Having just written this heartfelt, intense historical saga, I’m thinking I want to challenge myself in tackling something completely different. To that end, I’ve started a thriller based on a true crime in which a stressed-out, religious, suburban mom persuades her ‘golden child’ to murder the rest of their family. Of course, there’s also the temptation to use my hard-won skills in writing another historical drama. I have a thick file of research about this family of Dutch female traders living in New Amsterdam (now New York City) in the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s such an intriguing subject and I’m a fool for history, so who knows where that might lead?   

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (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?

My six-year-old Havenese, Tuxi, is also black-and-white and adorable like your Dalmatian.  Both breeds are notoriously neurotic too.  Sometimes Tuxi sits next to my desk and stares at me with these soulful eyes and, even though I know he’s recently been fed and walked and belly-rubbed, it drives me crazy.  It’s how I used to feel when my kids were toddlers and they’d stick their heads into my office and ask, “Now, Mama? Now can you play?” I do keep a big bag of treats on my desk, and I’ll take five minutes here and there to throw a couple down the hall for Tuxi to chase.  If he still keeps staring at me after that, I’ll take him downstairs and put the gate up and try to forget him for a while. Because that’s the difference between having a dog and a toddler.  

Suzanne Moyers is a lifelong history geek who spends her free time as a volunteer archeologist, mudlarker, and metal detectorist.  Suzanne is the proud mom to two amazing young adults, Sara and Jassi, and resides in the greater New York City area. 

Matthew Donald On the Inspiration for Teslanauts

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. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Matthew Donald, author of Teslanauts

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?

For my upcoming book Teslanauts, I remember when I first started looking into Nikola Tesla and learning about his crazier inventions, and I thought, what if he got the funding for them? Naturally this is a pretty common idea for a book, but most others with this concept seem to be in the alternate history genre, with Tesla's inventions radically changing the historical timeline. What truly made the idea spark for me is the concept of the inventions always being there, but locked away in the shadows and forcibly kept secret by government conspiracies. Why would they do that? What is the benefit of keeping all this wonderful technology hidden? And what would happen to anyone who discovered it? That's what really got my creative juices flowing.

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

I figured post-WWI was the best place to set the story, with the war itself being a backstory to what had happened. I knew that Tesla himself couldn't be the main character, as he would be in his mid-sixties at that point, so I figured he would be more of a mentor, leader type that showed up only in passing and at key moments in the story. Instead, I thought it would be more interesting to have a teenager discover this hidden world of Tesla technology, and learn about it as the reader did. Then the plot came about when trying to figure out how he would learn of this organization, and what prompted him to look for it to begin with, and what it would be that the organization was trying to stop. The Roaring Twenties were defined by catharsis, with the Great War ending and people wanting to celebrate and have fun and forget that the horrors of the last decade ever happened. Would the war be continuing in the shadows, or some smaller conflicts? Would someone be mad enough to try and restart the war, and why in the world would they want to do that? The influx of ideas came not only from figuring out the place of the main character, but the time and place I had decided to place it. 

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

The way I tend to write stories is to have a beginning and ending already in mind, for both each individual story and, if applicable, the series as a whole. I also tend to have certain elements or concepts in mind in the middle, but those are much more malleable. The middle is where I can truly go bananas, as I know where I'm going and I get to concoct all sorts of rampant buffoonery getting there. Sometimes certain events in the middle get changed or eliminated, but in terms of the ending itself, I rarely change it, or at least rarely change the important parts. 

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

Brand new story ideas tend to not come by very often. I tend to stick to big concepts and work with them for a while, adding to them and coming up with more and more of my nonsense to build them up. My ideas tend to be kind of high-concept, ones that I can do a lot with, so it's only occasionally I get one big enough to keep my interest. Currently I've got my previous book series Megazoic, my upcoming Teslanauts and its sequels, and at least two other major ideas in the pipeline, with the possibility of spin-offs and expansions for each idea always on mind. I think of my works as franchises, with the potential of adding to them indefinitely if need be. My Megazoic books may have concluded with its current four installments, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the last you've seen of that world.

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

A combination of which one is most intriguing to me, which one I have the best ideas for, and which one I think I should be writing. As much as I love Teslanauts and the world and characters I've built within it, Megazoic is my baby, and I could write endless spin-offs and sequels to that forever if I wanted to, and honestly, part of me kind of does want to. But I also recognize that in order to grow as a writer, I need to challenge myself. I want to be known for a lot of stories rather than just one. I want to be known for my style rather than any individual story. 

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (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?

I have a cockatiel that lives with me in my apartment, and she's absolutely on my shoulder when I'm there on my computer, which is pretty much all the time. However, my computer at home is far too distracting for me to write there; so many games to play and YouTube videos to browse. Therefore, I take my tiny old laptop to a local coffee shop and do my writing there, free of distracting video games, and since I don't bring headphones I can't browse YouTube or any other streaming service there either without annoying everybody around me. Once my draft is finished though I can definitely edit it at home, so while I do have an animal companion, they're not so much a writing buddy as an editing and gaming buddy, haha.

Matthew Donald graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2014 with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. He lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with his cockatiel, Lyra.