YA Today

"What is a chode?" I asked my sixteen year old daughter, when I heard her and her friend laughing at the new nickname they'd recently given one of their male friends. When she told me, I was honestly a little surprised. Mostly because she actually knew what a chode was, and then I felt another grey hair spring forth. Am I really that old?

Writing a YA series has been a great experience, but it had also been challenging to walk the line of what's appealing without crossing over into adult. I've read many YA paranormal romance and some authors are better at it than others. This day and age, the YA audience could probably teach me a thing or two, so I'm not as worried about writing conservatively as I am about writing a great story, with real dialogue and tension.

My goal is that the YA audience will identify with my characters. They're not perfect, and they make mistakes. But one message comes through in this story, and that's forgiveness.

Query Letters- Yikes!!

Okay, this was painful, and I don't mean your average, run of the mill, paper-cut painful. We're talking severed limb here. Writing a query letter, a more difficult task than writing the book, at least in my opinion. I searched google for advice on writing the dreaded thing, and found a ton of information. Unfortunately, I also discovered in pretty short order that everyone's an expert, and for every "helpful tip", I found two to contradict it.

So, how did I write this stellar query letter you may ask? With a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and about ten revisions. But I learned a lot along the way, and this is what I believe to hold true: Keep it short, concise, and professional. Address it and format it like a business letter, even if it's an email. Introduce your book, and include genre, and word count in the first paragraph. In the second paragraph, provide the hook/short synopsis for your novel. In the third paragraph, sell yourself. Mention any previous publication, awards, memberships, etc. In the last paragraph, thank them for their time and consideration and it always helps to include why you think they would be a good fit to represent or publish your book.

I read several query samples online and found the following sites to be particularly helpful:

Sample Query Letter .pdf  I found this sample to be the best and most helpful.
Charolette Dillon There are a lot of good resources available here.
Nathan Bransford This is great advice from a literary agent's perspective.

I had a question last week about writing in deep POV. Here are some helpful links that do a great job of describing deep POV with examples.
Deep POV Daily Writing Tips
WOW- Deep POV
RWA-Deep POV

I hope this is helpful :) Have a great week!