I was floored to receive so many #Pitchwars entries from writers asking for my help. And while I unfortunately just don’t have the ability to send personalized feedback to everybody, I did see a lot of common issues in many of the entries. Now, first, let me stress: Deciding to pick someone else is not […]
******THIS IS MY WISH LIST FOR LAST YEAR, 2015. PLEASE CHECK BACK IN JULY 2016 FOR THE CURRENT YEAR’S WISH LIST AS THERE ARE SOME CHANGES***** ABOUT ME: (The official bio) Laura Heffernan is a California-born women’s fiction writer, represented by Michelle Richter at Fuse Literary. One Saturday morning when she was four or five, Laura sat […]
This may be my last one of these posts for a while. Things are going well, and while I definitely think it’s important to remember the good things in life, I’m also really busy and it’s getting harder and harder to make time to stop and write them all down. I definitely encourage you to […]
Now that Query Kombat is over (and with New Agent coming up on Wednesday), I want to explain some of things that impacted some of my votes. Hopefully, it’ll be useful for future contests and people thinking about submitting to me in Pitch Wars. Yes, I frequently picked the entry with the voice that spoke […]
One of the hardest things about writing a query is trying to infuse some voice into it. But it’s also really important to make sure your query fits the genre you’re telling me your story fit into. Consider the following (made up) query: Ten-year-old Harry hates living with his aunt and uncle: They make him […]
I’ve been reading a lot of first pages over the past couple of months. A lot, a lot, a lot. (My best guess is around 300, so while I am prone to exaggeration sometimes, when I say “a lot,” I mean it.) And here are some (made-up) examples of problems I see over and over. […]
With QueryKombat right around the corner (and PitchWars coming up soon after that), here’s a glimpse into things I do (and do not) want to see on your first page. Do: Show us your character’s awesome voice. I want it to sound like they’re talking to me directly (without them actually breaking the fourth wall […]