Hello friends,
Happy Memorial Day if you’re in the States! Summer is at last upon us! Though I’m not sure it makes sense to say “Happy Memorial Day”; it’s a pretty grim holiday, all things considered, and it’s kind of weird that we all go to the beach.
Fittingly, this is actually something of a memorial newsletter. It also features a writing resource I’ve been using since 2014.
First, though:
News
On June 8, 2024, at 2pm, I’m giving a reading at the Free Library of Philadelphia! Details here.
I’ll be discussing my novel-in-progress alongside Molly Russakoff, owner of Molly’s Books in Philly’s Italian Market. (I love the displays of old paperbacks they put on the sidewalk.) We’ll be at the Parkway Central Library, Room 108. Come listen to me read the first chapter of my novel and talk about what the hell I’m doing with it.
And:
My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” will be published in Diabolical Plots in 2024.
My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in 2024.
My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in mid-2025.
Subscribe to get notified when these come out!
QueryShark
QueryShark is a blog about, as the title suggests, writing query letters. (A query letter is the letter you send to a literary agent, asking them to represent you.)
It was started by a literary agent named Janet Reid. People would send her query letters for critique, and she would critique them right there on the blog. Sometimes they’d revise the letter, even two or three times, and she’d critique the revisions, too; you can actually watch the letters going from unworkable to polished, with an explanation of the why and how. Many of the “finished” letters eventually got requests from agents – you can see which ones on the site. And some of them even turned into published novels, which I know because back in 2014, I read the full archives and recognized some of those books!
If you’re interested in querying literary agents, I think you can truly do no better than to read the full QueryShark archives. In 2014, I read every letter, every revision, and every critique, and I wrote down every actionable item Janet suggested – everything from “Skip setup, go straight to conflict and stakes,” to “If the agent doesn’t specify what they want, send the query and the first three pages in the body of the email.” The critiques can be cutting but they’re direct and invaluable. This blog single-handedly taught me how to nail down a protagonist, an antagonist, a conflict, and stakes in under 200 words – which not only helped me write query letters, it made me a clearer, more directed writer and strengthened my understanding of structure. I still revisit those notes, not only when querying but when outlining or revising, just to make sure that (a) I’ve got the key elements of the novel clear in my mind, and (b) I know how to talk about them on and off the page.
Tl;dr: If at any point you’re thinking maybe you want to pay someone for a query critique, start by instead reading the QueryShark archives – which are free – and doing everything she says.
Janet died on April 14. She wouldn’t remember me, but she played an outsized role in my development as a writer, even beyond QueryShark. I met her twice, both at events organized by a nonprofit called Out of the Binders, which I learned about through her blog. At the first event, she critiqued my query letter, recommended an agent, and was extremely encouraging. (After she read the letter, she looked up at me and said, “Got a copy of the manuscript?” and I didn’t! Lesson learned!)
Later, I volunteered as the logistics chair for Out of the Binders’s weekend-long New York conference. Through volunteering, I made writer friends I still keep in touch with, another debt I owe Janet. I met her again at that conference, and I still have the sign from her panel, propped up on my bookshelf behind my authors’ copies.
The In Memoriam on Janet’s blog – a blog that I continued to check on at least a weekly basis, right up until her death – offers more lovely memories of her.
I hope that QueryShark stays active. It’s been a tremendous service to the industry, and to me personally. But, just in case, hustle over there and take some notes.