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.

I read on your Publisher's Marketplace website that you are seeking YA and fantasy submissions. I am seeking representation for my YA fantasy novel, WITCH PATROL. It’s a romantic fantasy with a word count of 68,8944. Given your interest in YA fantasy, I hope it might be a good fit for you. The book is the first in a series. Good job personalizing with the PW shoutout, but I encourage authors to put title, word count, etc., at the bottom. Everyone has those - start with what only you have - your hook. Also, round that word count up to 70k. And - I'm sure you've probably heard this - but you're better suited to have a stand alone with series potential than trying to pitch a series, especially in YA fantasy, which is an overcrowded genre and age category at the moment.

Teenage girl Gwenn Cosmis is a witch who saved humans from the demons accidentally conjured by their selfish desires. "saved" or "saves?" The past tense removes any sense of tension She lives with her dad, James. James spends most of his time looking for Gwenn’s mother, Athena, another witch who also helped humans as Gwenn did. Again the past tense isn't doing you any favors Before James leaves to track down a possible lead on Athena’s disappearance, he asks his daughter to check out some demonic activity. While inspecting a portal that a demon has come through, she meets supernatural beings Scorpius Raven, the creator of the Witch Patrol, and Rebecca Rodin, a member of the Witch Patrol with an ability to track demons.

Right now this is reading more like a synopsis than a query. You're doing a step by step through the plot, rather than giving an overview of the concept. For example, everything above could be collapsed into a statement that Gwenn has a supernatural role that she's stepped into after her mother disappeared (obviously I'm guessing at that detail, but you get the picture). When her dad leaves to track down mom, Gwinn stumbles across a portal and meets these people. You're spending too much time feeding details and not getting the bigger picture across.

James doesn’t call Gwenn later that night to let her know he’s okay, a tradition that Gwenn has come to depend on. Now, she assumes the worst and must ask Scorpius for the Witch Patrol’s help to find her parents. What is Scorpius like? What does Gwinn think of him and Rebecca? Are the a threat? A friend? Unsure?

Having been brought up by James believing she and Athena were the only supernatural beings, Are witches supernatural beings? Or are they humans with paranormal talents and abilities? Gwenn must now come to terms with the fact that there are others like her. How does she feel about that? Some of them hide in another realm, kidnapping teenage girls in London while waiting for their return to power. Why would they do this? What's the point? Is Gwinn in danger? Sirius Raven, Scorpius' twin brother, asks the Witch Patrol to investigate the kidnappings. Is Gwinn involved in this? What is she doing? She's the main character but it doesn't seem like she's actually doing anything While doing so, Gwenn meets the first supernatural being who needs her help to destroy the evil.What's that being? What evil? Rightfully called The First,The first? Of what? she also believes that the kidnapper is holding Athena hostage.

WITCH PATROL will appeal to readers of a Wicked Magic by Sasha Laurens and When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey.

You definitely need to bring all of this together into a more cohesive whole. Dad kind of falls off the page, and I don't have a clear idea of what Gwinn's "job" is, why teenage girls (plus her mom) are being kidnapped, and what "the evil's" goal is. We need a clear statement of what our MC needs / wants (her mom?) what the obstacle is, and how she's going to overcome it. Right now this is a pretty vague - there are bad guys, and good guys, and Gwinn is special. That could be any fantasy YA, ever.

I have an Associate’s Degree in Writing. In 2020, 45 Women’s Magazine Literary Journal published one of my poems. In 2020, Witch Patrol was accepted for the Independent Storyteller Program on the Tales Creator website. I'm also an artist, frequently drawing my characters. My Deviant Art account has over 1,000 page views, and is the best website to see all of my pictures.

The bio is good, but I wouldn't bother with the Deviant Art mention. It's cool, but likely you aren't going to be providing your own illustrations or cover art, so it's not worth the mention.

Facing Childhood Trauma Later in Life

By: Antonia Deignan

Deciding to face the upsets, challenges, or straight up traumas of childhood is not easy. Choosing to do so at the age of fifty-five, maybe even less so, but who’s to say when the best time will be to circle back to adversity?

There were a lot of coping skills I tried on between the age of five (onset of trauma) and fifty-five (bike accident). 

At the time of my accident in 2018, some of my coping mechanisms were still in place: denial/silence/diversion aka dance. Others were left behind as I had grown out of them: substance abuse/eating disorders, self-harming. And more recently to help with normal ups and downs I had found meditation, counseling, and wellness schtick.

Occasionally, a situation presents itself however, requiring deeper survival skills. Like that moment when your world suddenly shifts, shuts down, and becomes the size of a pin hole, and as it is rapidly evaporating, you feel as though you’ve been reduced to only one basic function, which is finding your next breath. (That’s what it felt like to me.) Once that happens, like that Humpty Dumpty crash and burn bike accident, lifelong coping strategies no longer feel accessible. 

The accident revealed two things. As a survivor from way back, after the initial shock of catastrophe, I instinctively began charting toward my what next. Mangled on the asphalt underneath the totaled road bike, I trained my thoughts toward rational ones. Morphined up, and an EMT escort to the Emergency room, led to a few surgeries and decent supply of hardware for my upper limbs. On the mend, I turned to small repeatable patterns, baby steps of realistic goals, tiny, doable, toddler-type milestones to reach for. Like the quiet young girl who attempted to protect herself from abuse growing up, I narrowed my focus to those minute-to-minute accomplishments. And I prayed. Ok. I may have been a tad bit impatient at times, and experienced an occasional emotional meltdown, but mostly I was relentlessly disciplined on a path toward returning to full and robust health. 

While braced in thermoplastic splints from shoulders to knuckles, I hummed melodies in sync to my stretching fingertips, in, out, in, out, jazzing up the circulation in my arms. I tapped finger pads on countertops, opened fingers, closed fingers. I begged my physical therapists to (please) push me harder. It wasn’t what I couldn’t do, (and didn’t for a very long time) it was what could I do. 

But the fact was, (the second takeaway) emotionally and psychologically I had been stripped of my default self, the identity I’d nurtured from way back, and relied on. What had saved me so long ago (dance) I began to understand, had also buried me.

Creative movement, sweaty calisthenics, therapy band, and body weight drills, twenty-mile bike rides and 5k runs, dance – these were still my tried-and-true identity markers.  The trauma of my childhood had been packed tightly into a highly disciplined girl who eventually became a professional dancer. What the aftermath of the accident helped revealed was, this disguise beautifully and tragically hid that little girl’s broken and betrayed heart. 

In the first six months post bike accident, mostly in bed, mostly drugged, I no longer knew who I was. 

Without much else to grab on to, I picked up a pen. At first, it was just ugly, messy, confusing, remembering. But I kept going, opening fresh journals, running out of pages, waking up in the middle of the night to write something down. I asked for a laptop and began saving documents. I landed in a writing circle on Zoom. (It was Covid at this point, the lockdown and onset of social distancing began two years after my accident while I was still recovering.) I felt like the Phoenix rising out of her ashes. I began to embrace miracles, the most important one being I could let go of how I had identified myself all my life and begin again.

By hunting down and writing out my stories, I saw my past obstacles differently, and I sat with my perceptions of those obstacles for a long time. My writing allowed me to unlearn and relearn the knowns and unknowns of my past, and ultimately, gave me a chance to employ a more loving lens there, on a history previously gripped mostly in fear. I understood how dance enabled me to move forward and protected me but that I had a chance now to be more than a silent performer.

With my writing, I unearthed that intense inner focus I used to overcome the aftermath of abuse. With my writing, I unearthed how I leaned into the whelm of joy, and that I trusted those experiences of joy when I was a young girl and turned them into my salvations. With my writing, I learned that my creative expression as a dancer, was how I tapped into my inner stillness, a place of beautiful longing. I could “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world” – Joseph Campbell

And so, at the age of fifty-five I circled back and studied my past. And with the new tool of writing, I found a different way to move and be, empowered instead of ashamed, included in life instead of separated away from it. My writing, like my dancing before it, spelled out longing. But when longing accompanies sorrow, and is then held with care and reverence, it can invite transcendence. * 

My writing, in fact, was bringing me home.

*Inspired by Susan Cain’s Bittersweet

Antonia Deignan is a mother of five children by choice, a dancer by calling, and a writer by necessity. She was born on the east coast, but lived primarily in the Midwest, where she danced with multiple dance companies and raised her children. She opened her own dance studio and directed a pre-professional dance company before a bike accident wish-boned her path, and her identity. She has multiple publications in magazine and online formats. Her memoir, Underwater Daughter, will be published in May 2023.

Writing a Hybrid Novel: The Story of a Process

by Blair Austin, author of Dioramas

I’d like to start off by saying I have no idea how to write a hybrid novel even though I have written one. The truth is, Dioramas found its form by trial and error. Every book is a graveyard of the books it failed to be. I wish this were not true but it is.

Dioramas first came to me as the voice of an old man speaking out of the darkness. From his voice and situation—both of which arrived in a single moment, language and idea at the same time—I knew the world he lived in, I knew the strange, rainy city and I could feel the auditorium full of people listening to him lecture. This was a world far in the future, built on the ruins of our own world, that looked and felt like our past. I even knew it was summer and it was raining outside and because the old man (who later became Wiggins) was speaking about The Diorama of the Taxidermist, I knew that this was a world obsessed with the museum diorama. It was a world with dioramas everywhere—in ever-proliferating museums and also in department stores, in people’s homes, even inside children’s transparent candies. I came to know this all at once when Wiggins began to speak.

The problem was, I had to discover what that first vision, that first diorama of a taxidermist, himself taxidermied, really implied about this city. So begins the story of mistakes that went on for somewhere between seven to ten years, depending on when you start the clock.

A host of different “modes” of telling kept coming up. There were “lecturing,” essayistic sections. There were short sections describing dioramas, with animals and people displayed, that were essentially ekphrastic tries at describing “works” that did not in fact exist, like you’d describe a sculpture or painting you saw in a museum. There were prose poem forays into the meaning of it all that came from the half-gone memory of the lecturer in the form of reminiscences about his past, and finally, a long travel narrative where Wiggins journeys by train across The Diorama of the Town, hundreds of miles across. In short, a kind of controlled chaos that had to be organized in such a way as to pull a reader through. 

I knew I needed a structural apparatus to give shape to the book, so I decided to break the thing up into two, separate, stand-alone novellas. Book One would be called, “Animals,” Book Two, “People.” Book One would be organized around the “logic” of poetry and feel like Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, or so I thought at the time, where the pieces fit together with compelling echoes across the prose poems and a feeling of the deeps all around. I arranged Book One carefully so that there was a pull—you were pulled through and you couldn’t quite figure out why—and a feeling of connected but unstated ideas, repeating image clusters, all (and this was the key, I learned along the way) held together by the struggling consciousness of the fussy old man, Wiggins, whose eye was very meticulous. The book would be how he felt about everything (which, being a reserved person, he would never admit to but accidentally “tell” us); this would be the emotional core of the book. And then Book Two with a train journey would speed along just by virtue of its travel narrative and the building sense of the two men, Wiggins and Emery, coming to understand one another. Ultimately, Book One would “teach” us how to read itself and how to take Book Two.

At issue the whole way was the question of whether it was possible to paint the portrait of an imaginary city entirely through dioramas—its history, its physical characteristics, its people and habits—the entire scene. What would stay or go, then, would depend on how each section advanced that picture and whether it contained Wiggin’s inner life.

But the thing is, I couldn’t get out of the way and kept going down false paths, wrong dioramas, straining toward what I felt the book was about all along: the unsayable. The thing beyond language that we intuit but can’t speak because there are no words for how it feels. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I had it—the thing itself—and would state baldly in the text what I thought the “core” was. Only to return, sometimes years later, to see I’d gone down the wrong path because everything from the very beginning would be, and would have to be by its very nature, hidden in plain sight. Death within life. The inside in the outside, separated by glass. The past in the present.

The biggest problem was, if I reached for story, straight narrative, there would be no reason for the very core of the book to exist: the dioramas themselves, static and nonnarrative, would have to go. On the other side of the coin, if the book were going to be a “pure” one, inscrutable with only the cold dioramas there to see, there would be no reason for character or I’d have to twist myself in knots, beating the conceit to death, only to have in the end a simple, boring conceit to show for it. And in a book of cold dioramas there would be no reason for the central consciousness of Wiggins himself.

The hybridity that resulted was just the result of the effort to balance the push-pull of the book’s two poles, the human and the inhuman, so that each made the other possible and at the same time impossible, existing side by side in every moment. That balance represented by the diorama, between the living and the dead, the inside and the outside. The false binaries of existence would be—I thought, anyway—the book’s very core. I didn’t set out to do this or that. If I’m honest, I really wanted that cold, “pure” book—inscrutable and unknowable and built on the back of poetry—the book I couldn’t have.

I suspected I was writing a conceptual novel. I also told myself I was writing a book of “world-building.” I was both right and wrong, I see now. 

Funny enough, just to get away from all this conceptuality, when the book was ready to go to Dzanc, I began what I hoped would be a straightforward, realist detective novel set in a Michigan truck stop. But, yet again. That wasn’t my path, at least for now. I am going to have to intuit my way through whatever I write. If I’m lucky.

Blair Austin was born in Michigan. A former prison librarian, he is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where he won Hopwood awards for Fiction and Essay. He lives in Massachusetts. Dioramas is his first novel.