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

Nessa Bailey wants revenge on her brother’s killer. The only trouble is, she’s in love with him. Nice... so you clearly understand what a hook is and how to use one. Well done.

Seven years after the suspicious car accident that killed Silas and sent hmmm... so, we don't know who Christian is. We can kind of assume that he's the "killer" but I think it needs clarification. Was Christian driving? Suggested rephrasing ... and sent the driver - Silas' best friend Christian - or, if it was a two car accident and Christian was driving that car, simply refer to him as "the other driver" to prison, Nessa’s life is stunted. I think I need to know more here. Is she just unable to move past it? Is she fixated? How is it stunting her? Despite her complicated emotions, Why are her emotions complicated? Was she already in love with Christian at the time of the accident? Also, the way this is written, it sounds like the emotions referred to are the therapist's, not Nessa's her therapist's solution is simple: face Christian upon his release and forgive him. Again, I think we need more about this accident. An accident is called an accident for a reason - why was it suspicious? What is Christian jailed for, exactly? Manslaughter? Drunk driving? Only, instead of apologizing, Christian stonewalls. How? Insisting upon his innocence? Again, the details surrounding the car accident need to be given just a little bit more room. And instead of forgiving, Nessa takes a golf club to anything within swinging distance. Including him? The next line makes it sound like this was in public, and she got into legal trouble. More please.

This earns her community service alongside Christian, which she sees as an opportunity to exact revenge.How? And does it play out? The cost doesn’t matter; anything is better than shouldering the guilt of never avenging Silas. But when anonymous letters appear on her doorstep, Nessa discovers that more than her precarious mental health Is her mental health precarious? I don't think that's completely clear here, minus the golf club mention. What's her situation? Is she working? Living in her parent's basement? Hospitalized? How bad, exactly, is her mental health? Can she function? is on the line. Someone other than Nessa and Christian has vested interest in the accident, and they will do anything to make sure she stops digging. And what does that mean for the two of them? Are they both in danger? Do they both have a vested interest in finding out who this is, or why they did what they did? Would it clear Christian's name? What's his stake in this? Are they thrown together, and made to work together to find the solution? Does her "revenge" plan for him come into play at any point? Is she still in love with him? Is that blooming again? How does that feel? How does he feel for her?

THE LOVELIEST THINGS THAT STILL REMAIN is a 77,000-word contemporary romance But... it also feels like there's a mystery / thriller angle told through dual POV and timelines. If this is dual POV, then the query should be as well, to an extent. One para for Nessa, one for Christian. Also... dual timelines meaning the present, and the past, leading up to the incident? I wasn't getting that out of the query, at all. If Every Summer After married Forever, Interrupted and went to therapy, you’d have my book.

Before crying myself through writing this book, I authored missing "a?"standalone Divine and The Separation Trilogy, then appeared in First for Women Magazine and Chicken Soup for the Soul. I also write romance novellas under the pseudonym Tesla Storm. Your bona fides for the articles in magazies / collections are solid. If you don't have good / many reviews for your other titles, I wouldn't mention them When I’m not writing, I teach high schoolers as a trauma-informed educator. And when they’re not giving me scathing (if honest) critiques of my outfit choices, they are good company lol. Yah. I substitute and once had a fifth grader inform me I had on too much foundation

Roxana Arama on the Inspiration for "Extreme Vetting"

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 Roxana Arama, author of Extreme Vetting, the story of an immigration lawyer who fights to keep her client from being deported and losing his family. But those who want him gone will stop at nothing—including murder. Extreme Vetting releases on February 7, 2023

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?

One afternoon in 2018, I watched a video of the president of the United States at a rally, where he compared immigrants to venomous snakes that should be crushed underfoot. He’d been bashing immigrants since he was a presidential candidate, but this was different. He read a poem to his crowd about a kind-hearted woman who took pity on a snake only to be bitten and killed by it. The crowd loved it. I was horrified. I tried to imagine what it would be like for a Trump supporter to look at me, to hear me speak with an accent, and to see me as less than a human being. A dangerous beast that should be killed. Soon I started writing an immigration thriller. I wanted to take readers inside our immigration system so they could see for themselves how complicated and broken it sometimes is. Through storytelling, I hoped to affirm the humanity the president had denied foreign-born people like me.

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

I researched the legal immigration framework, which I hadn’t completely grasped while going through the green card process—twice—and then the citizenship application. I interviewed an immigration lawyer extensively. I read news and articles about immigration, and thrillers to learn how to write one. I asked my immigrant friends how they felt about their lives in their adoptive country.

The seed for the plot was my own experience as an immigrant, though my story is quite different from the one in the novel (I arrived in the US from Romania in 2001 with a job in software development). Here’s a quick synopsis of my thriller Extreme Vetting. An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported to the country where his family was murdered many years ago. Then she finds out the killers are coming here—for both of them. As a single mom, she must protect her daughter and the sons of her detained client. The inspiration for one of my villains came from two criminal cases in Washington State where ICE prosecutors were sentenced to prison for defrauding undocumented immigrants. Once I had my main characters and conflict, the plot had momentum, and the supporting cast appeared next.

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

That usually happens between my initial outline and the first draft. Once I have a draft, it happens again with every critique from beta readers and editors. I sometimes make substantial changes to my characters and the plot—if the novel needs it. I don’t think a story is ever finished because I slowly change as a person while I work on it, and I sometimes see my existing pages in a new light. But at some point, I must set it aside and decide it’s done.

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

There are times when I’m in between projects and I’m not sure what to write next, but I usually go through the nonfiction concepts that fascinate me at the time, and I find one that allows me to spin a fictional story from it. From my passion for the history of religions, I wrote a historical fantasy, still unpublished. From my interest in artificial intelligence and interplanetary travel, I’m now writing a sci-fi. Prompts for magazines or literary contests are always nice, though not every prompt resonates with me. For now, I have more work planned than time to do it, so I won’t complain.

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

I try to write them all, especially when I’m just beginning to imagine the story or draft the essay and I’m not yet committed to the prose. I always try to work on a new concept to see where it leads. Sometimes it leads nowhere, but I wouldn’t have known that without experimenting with it. Once a story forms in my mind, I rely on my brain to develop it while I’m not thinking of it directly, as when I do the dishes or walk to school to pick up my kids. I also discovered that having multiple things to work on keeps me from feeling burned-out.

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?

When I first started writing, I used to need my own space, away from all distractions, where I could think about my story. Not anymore. I still have my office, where I go when my kids are at school because it has a big monitor where I can plug in my laptop. But half the time I write in my bed, crisscross-applesauce, on my laptop, with my door open so I can hear the kids in the house. Sometimes when I’m in the middle of a scene or an essay, one of my kids runs in and jumps on the bed to ask me something. I set my laptop down and we talk. And when we’re done, I pick up right where I left off. But it took me many years to build that kind of flexibility, I now realize.

Roxana Arama is a Romanian American author with a master of fine arts in creative writing from Goddard College. She studied computer science in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to the United States to work in software development. Her short stories and essays have been published in several literary magazines. Extreme Vetting is her first novel. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her family.

Jordan King on The Inspiration for "White Oaks"

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 Jordan King, author of White Oaks, a story about a disabled veteran whose repeated drug overdoses result in him being sent to a mental hospital with a dark secret.

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, so White Oaks started as a short story; it was actually one of the first things I ever wrote. If you read the book, chapter four is that original short story. Although it has always been fiction, there are elements that are pulled from my real life. Like my protagonist, Jason, I’m a disabled veteran and have had a lot of issues over the years and continue to deal with a lot of chronic pain. There have been periods over the last 15+ years when my way of dealing with those issues was with substance abuse. I wanted to address that head on with the short story, and I just couldn’t get it out of my head so I started to expand it and it ended up becoming like therapy. How I processed the things I’d done over the years and how I was ultimately able to let some of that stuff go and move on.

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

I just started asking what if questions. What if Jason were to get clean? Would it be voluntary or forced? If forced, who would force it and what would those circumstances be? It was obvious to me from the start that it should be forced, so I started thinking of ways to make Jason’s world much smaller. I couldn’t think of a better way to do that other than stripping him of his autonomy, and putting him in a place he couldn’t simply walk away from when things got too hard. Somewhere he’d not only have to deal with his personal issues that landed him there to begin with but simultaneously deal with fundamental things like survival. 

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

Oh absolutely. I’ve heard authors talk about how they often felt like the story wrote itself, or once the characters were firmly established, they’d take on a personality of their own. I never understood that until I started writing myself. I plot and plan and map things out before I start writing. Usually, I’ll stick to the plan (or somewhere plan adjacent), but there are times when things just kind of happen while I’m writing, things that are nowhere near the plan, they just end up on the page. Even though it can be problematic at times for “the plan” those are some of the moments I enjoy the most about writing…when the characters take over and push the story in a direction I never considered before and I just kind of vanish, like I’m narrating events rather than creating them. 

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

They come often enough to keep me busy continuously, but that’s probably because I focus on novels and those take a really long time, so if I don’t have a solid idea for several months, it’s not a problem because I’m still working on the last one. If I was a short story writer, I think I’d be in a lot more trouble as far as coming up with fresh material regularly. Successful short story writers are like magicians to me. I can rarely figure out how to write something interesting, fleshed out and complete in such a small package.

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

White Oaks is my second novel. I have a third finished (still looking for an agent or publisher!) and am working on my fourth novel now. Each time was the same. I chose whatever I couldn’t stop thinking about. There are some ideas that come and go, but the other ones (the ones that become books), I obsessed over until I felt like I just HAD to write it. Also, going back to what I said about plot and feeling like I vanish into the story. That’s probably the best part for me and when I really know I’m working on the right thing, when I sink in so far that I feel like I’m narrating events and the real world around me and anything that’s wrong with it vanishes into the story with me.

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 don’t have any pets, so no writing buddy for me. I don’t think I’d find distracting at all – it’d be a comfort, but I say that from a place of complete ignorance of what pet ownership is like. That said, my brother and his wife have a Great Dane (Duncan) they rescued a couple years ago. I just met Duncan for the first time recently and he is the sweetest living thing I’ve ever encountered. He can be my writing buddy any day. 

Jordan King earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami of Ohio. His non-fiction essay "Lost Time: A Road Trip Journal" was published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, February 2019. White Oaks was a finalist in the Ohio Writer’s Associations’ Great Novel Contest of 2019, and is Jordan’s debut novel. He lives in Central Ohio with his wife and son.