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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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.

Fate cannot be avoided. This principle at the base of Greek tragedy is the leit-motiv Are you going to be using phrases like leti-motiv within the book itself? If not, don't use it here. The voice, flow, and feel of the query should be similar to the book itself luring Not sure of this word use... do you mean lurking? at the background of “THE WEAVING SEA”, a 98,000 new adult, that's a pretty high word count for a debut new adult. 85k is considered high end for that age category. I would try to get that down before querying mythology retelling I like to call “The Iliad meets the Little Mermaid”. Quick note, punctuation like periods or commas go inside of the quotation marks, but also - you don't need the quotation marks.

At “almost-seven-years-old” Not sure why this is in quotes, but also, if this is new adult, why does the story start with him at 7? Opening the query this way makes it seem as if we're going to be spending quite a bit of time with a 7 year old version of the character Achilles is a mischievous and curious child who’s always lived in the sea with his godly mother, Thetis, determined to shelter her son from the mortal world and gives him his rightful place among the gods.

But Achilles longs for the adventure, wishes to become a hero and above all wants to meet his estranged father.

And the more Thetis tries to keep him in a gilded cage, the more he tries to escape.

In the end, some things are simply bound to happen, like Achilles’ meeting with Patroclus and the his? love for him, no matter the troubles and misunderstandings along the way.

Right now, this is just reading as a summary of the story of Achilles, and a pretty bare bones one at that. You need a lot more detail, and more importantly, you need to exhibit how your version does something different than the original - or any other retelling since then. This is currently way too vague : there was a guy who had a helicopter mom, he got away from her and fell in love, and faced trials along the way, but that's fate. There's nothing specific to your manuscript here, and only speaking in generalizations isn't doing you any favors. I also don't understand how The Little Mermaid would come into this.

Classicist at heart, I had a classical formation in a specialised high school and then proceeded to graduate in Economics for Arts, Culture and Entertainment.

Born and living in Northern Italy, I have been honing my writing craft for the past 10+ years, writing fictions both original and in the fandom ambience. Not sure about the word choice here In 2011 I won a prize in a literary contest. That's cool, but you definitely need to state which one.

Eleanor Shearer on the True Story Behind "River Sing Me Home"

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 Eleanor Shearer, author of River Sing Me Home, a redemptive story of a mother’s gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery. River Sing Me Home releases on January 31

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?

Almost 10 years ago, I went to an exhibition in London called Making Freedom, put on by an Afro-Caribbean community organization. The point of the exhibition was to show all the ways enslaved people in the Caribbean resisted and rebelled against slavery. It was there that I first learned about the women who went to find their stolen children after emancipation, and from then on I was obsessed with the bravery of what these women did. That became the seeds of my first novel, River Sing Me Home.

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

My protagonist, Rachel, a mother searching for her children, was always clear to me. So the main choices I had to make were – who are her children? And what has happened to them? The novel ended up being set across three different Caribbean countries, and this was in part due to needing to find a historically plausible way that Rachel’s children would have been sold away from Barbados even after the slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807. I chose British Guiana and Trinidad because these were recent British colonies and they desperately needed more plantation workers, so a lot of enslaved people were moved from other islands to these places. 

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

Yes! River Sing Me Home has quite a few side characters who Rachel encounters for a few chapters before she moves on and leaves them behind. There was one side character who, as I was writing him, I realized I didn’t want to let go of – Nobody, the sailor that Rachel meets on her way to British Guiana. So I decided I’d have him come along with her, and he ended up being one of my favourite characters!

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

I have new ideas all the time, but especially when I’m drafting something new. Ideas are easy and writing is hard, so in the hard slog of being halfway through a manuscript I’m always tempted by something shiny and new. The skill is parking that new idea and trusting that you need to keep going and see through the one you’re already working on.

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

I’ll go with the one where I have the clearest idea of how it ends. I can’t start a book without that final image – often that final sentence – in mind, and I propel myself through the draft by wanting to earn that ending.

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 cat, Trixie, was such a stalwart writing companion that she actually gets a shout out in the acknowledgments of River Sing Me Home. Sadly, she passed away last year, but my new cat, Biscuit, has stepped up to fill the role!

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer who lives between London and Ramsgate on the English coast so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her Master's degree in Politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations, and her fieldwork in St. Lucia and Barbados helped inspire her first novel.