McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Query that Worked (or, How I got my agent)

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Kali:
I have indeed read them, and I also recommend them to anyone who shows any interest in books about writing.  Cogent, pointed advice with clear examples.  I still find myself using his advice on combining two or more characters into the same person as a way of creating one strong character with depth and layers as opposed to multiple weak ones.  A police detective and a demon-possessed assassin both vanished from my latest story, their roles absorbed into already existing characters to the betterment of... well, everything.  The plot.  The characters themselves.  Their interactions.

I also leaned heavily on his advice from "Fire in the Fiction" to not try to make your monster scary, make him scare your protagonist.  Show the fear from other people and he could look like a fluffy bunny (LOOKIT THE BONES!) and the reader will get that he's scary.  I flipped it, in a sense, showing a hideous monster that nonetheless made the MC feel attracted, but it was this advice that helped me work through those scenes.

Ah, I could go on about those books all day.  Between Maass's two and "Self-Editing for the Fiction Writer", I'm not sure anything else about modern fiction needs to be said.

LizW65:
Are these resources aailable online, and if so, can you please provide links?  Thanks!

Gruud:
I had a similar (yet different) question.

You mentioned in one of your posts that you had setup a website for yourself, with a blog, etc. "just like the sources told me I should"

Paraphrasing, broadly.  ;)

If you used a single source for this advice, as well as actual info on how the web site (or presence) should be structured, what it should inculde, etc. could you share that info as well?

Josh:
You'll find Donald Maass' books on his agency website as well as Amazon.com.

Here's his book link: http://www.maassagency.com/books.html

Here's the link to the Fiction Writer's Virtual Toolbox: http://www.jrvogt.com/writerresources.htm

At the bottom of the page, you'll find Amazon links to all these books we've been talking about.

As for a website/blog, I don't have a central link for that (though I think I should track some down for the Toolbox, thanks for the idea!). But if you look up some of your favorite authors, you'll likely find the majority of them have websites--some more professionally designed than others. A friend helped set mine up years ago, and I've fleshed it out a little since, adding the blog and all. You'll commonly see things like a welcome/home page, a blog page, a bio page, maybe some writing samples or free chapter reads from published authors.

Kali:
If you check the blogs of some agents, they usually dispense a LOT of really good advise about querying, submitting, and even marketing to some extent.  That's where I usually see the advice to get a web presence if you want to be an author these days.  I'm hating every minute of setting mine up; after years and years of being a net-recluse, I have to actually put my real name on the site!  HORRORS!  But IF I get an agent, and IF the agent finds me a publisher and IF anyone reads it, it's sort of another part of reading a book these days.  I know if I read a book by a new author, I'm likely to Google them and see if they have a web page I can poke around on.

A woman on the NaNo boards I'm beginning to suspect is in the publishing industry (her critiques are spot-on, and her advice is usually an echo of what I read elsewhere) posted a very long, but very nice, list of things you should be looking for in a web site and what you should put on yours.  I posted it in the Accountability thread, and I don't want to hijack Josh's thread, so you can look there to see what she had to say.  I'm basically following her guidelines on what to put on a site as I'm setting mine up.

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