Our very own JAMIE HARRINGTON HAS AN AGENT!

Yep, you read that correctly!

Jamie joined us not long after we started here, and has been an intricate part to our site. (She and her husband created it for us.) So we couldn’t be more thrilled to announce that:

Victoria Horn from Liza Dawson Associates

has signed on to be her agent!

Congratulations to Jamie and Victoria, I am sure they will make a great team!

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Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

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Kiersten Writes all sorts of hilarious things, but she’s first on this list for me because she got a three book deal with Harper Teen this week. So let’s all raise our mead in a manly huzzah for her! (What? You guys don’t drink mead for breakfast? It’s got protein people…)

Rhonda Stapleton is too cute for words, and her website. It’s so pleasing to my eye. It’s like the fashionista of author blogs.

And then there’s Scott Westerfeld. He’s given up electricity for good, and now uses steam to power his website. That’s enough for me to be in <3 with him, but he wrote Uglies too. Tally Youngblood–I sort of want to be her.

If you love Zombies, then you’re in good company over at the snarfalicious home of Carrie Harris. She’s also the founder of the (semi) secret order of the blog ninja. Someday I will be a member of the order. It’s only a matter of time.

I am newly enamored with Lara Zielin. She’s just a fun girl, and I can’t wait for her next novel, Promgate.

Natalie writes over at Between Fact and Fiction, and that makes her automatically cool, but she does something else–she draws! Her drawings are absolutely adorable, and I am in love with them all.

I absolutely adore Beth Revis. It’s a little evil of me, but I kind of can’t wait for school to start so she can share her hilarious stories with us again!

If there’s one girl’s story I can’t wait to see published, it’s Rebecca Sutton. She has a story so cool and fabulous that if I could convince her to write the sequel right now… I totally would.

Different people have different gifts, and Sara Tribble has the gift story telling. This girl has the COOLEST ideas for books… she is always coming up with the best stories and I had to let you guys meet her!

I’ve read Stacia Kane’s next book already. Let me just tell you that it’s beyond fabulous… and this girl is a genius.

And, of course, we can’t forget the slush princess herself–Jodi Meadows. Seriously, this girl’s story makes me freak out every time I get in the bathtub!

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Most of the time I find something I love in the story. I’ve even made some great friends from it. On occasion, I’ve even read a book or two right before a big publisher bought them. I love doing that, and I love being able to help a fellow author find the flow in the story.

But, on very rare occasion–I’ve read books that suck.

Now, before you boo me, and I understand if you want to boo me–just hear me out.

When I read these books, it’s hard to tell the truth. I mean what am I supposed to do? Send them a quick email explaining that I think their never has any chance of ever seeing publication?

Um, no. That’s the worst idea ever. Don’t do that. Don’t be a pompous butt head. Because, let’s face it–Who am I to say that? I’m just an unpublished author myself, and I have no right to tell anyone their stuff sucks, and guess what.

Unless you’re Stephen King… you don’t either.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t tell them their manuscript needs work, but you need to tell them what’s good too.

Find the diamond in the rough.

Who knows, maybe they rock at dialogue, maybe they do a fabulous job describing a fancy palace, heck… maybe they have superb comma placement. Whatever it is, tell them about it.

Now, about the fact that their book sucks, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to tell them why it sucks, and what you would do to make it better. Just remember: a little bit goes a long way!

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I’m asking you, dear reader… how?

Here I sit starting at a query, and I know the story is a good one. I know it has a good hook, a great conflict, and frakkin awesome characters. So how do I summarize it and get an agent to read it?

A month or so ago Nathan Bransford did an agent for a day experiment on his blog.

Basically, there were 50 queries, and your task was to go through and decide which ones were actually published books. I got about three into the list and realized something. Queries are kind of boring, and they shouldn’t be!

Now, I’m frustrated because I don’t want to bore with my query. How can I hook them reader?

How can I get the voice of my smackin story into these two teeny tiny paragraphs?

How do you do it? I am dying to know!

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Now, I consider myself to be a bit of a technology freak, so when I read about the special writing software just for me, I had to try it out!

I contacted the software company, and they graciously offered me a copy of their software so I could write a review.

I have to say that while some of it took me quite a while to get used to, there are parts of this software that I find invaluable to my writing.

The coolest feature by far is the tabbed writing feature. Basically, each chapter of your book gets its own tab and you can move them around as you see fit.

I love the flexibility of being able to move my stuff around, reference notes and outlines easily, and to open a chapter without having to scroll around to find it. The tab feature alone makes me like this software, but another cool feature is the ability to quickly scan for over used words and phrases.

Not only can you scan for the phrases, but you can set all your own attributes, so if you don’t want it to search for something in particular, then it will just skip right over that.

I love this feature, and discovered things about my book that well… let’s just say I have a tendency to overuse certain words… okay?

It also has a really cool roll back feature that lets you look at older versions of your work, so if you decide you spent an entire day over editing the crap out of something and now you want it back–then all you have to do is roll back to a previous version.

I did find a couple of things I wasn’t so crazy about with the software though. Most of my friends write in word, which means they edit in word as well. We use the little comment bubbles out to the side and the track changes feature in order to peer edit each other’s stuff. You can’t use word bubbles in page four, and you can’t see the tracked changes, so if your friends are using that, then there’s really no way for you to check their comments other than to open up your MS Word stuff. You can upload .doc files into the software though, so that does make up for this flaw a little.

I really like the ability to comment out to the side of someone’s work, and I love the track changes feature for when I am line editing something, so this is a major thing to me. I wish that the software somehow offered the same amazing editing and change tracking that word offers while still having all the great features like the tabs and the overused phrase counter.

I am still mostly using word to write my documents, and haven’t completely fell in love with pagefour yet, but I have been using it more lately, and I promise to update you as I continue to get more familiar with it.

I would love to hear about the software you use to write your manuscripts with. Please let me know in the comments below.

I’d also like to extend a special thank you to pagefour for providing me with a free copy of their software for review. If your company makes a software designed specifically for writers, you can contact me at jamie (@) totally the bomb (.) com (remove the spaces and parentheses) or just leave a comment below, and I will be happy to review it.

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Write what you know.

How many times have you heard that? I am guessing if you’ve been at this any amount of time… quite a few. What’s that? You write fantasy and you’ve invented a whole new world entirely in your head so how could you possibly write what you know?

I am here to let you in on a little secret… that isn’t what that means! Do you think  JRR Tolkien knew a tiny creepy grey guy consumed with greed that lived in a cave? Probably not. But, chances are he did know a thing or two about greedy people and how they acted… so when he wrote Gollum, he used the voice of one of those guys!

That’s the key. You can tell any story you want, and I don’t care if you set your story inside a giant’s cell phone… as long as you use voice to make your characters like real people, then your story will be relatable. I know it isn’t as easy as it sounds, because if it were then my pomeranian would be churning out a novel right now…

But remember, you know voice. You hear people talking and see them acting every day, and each of those people has their own voice. So next time you see some crazy cat throwing a fit at the bank… pull out your notebook and write it down. Their words, their hand motions. Even the reaction of the bank teller. Your story will be that much better for it.

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In high school, my English Teacher insisted we learn to write without using too much passive voice. I remember questioning her methods and thinking her ideas were pointless.

I WAS wrong. When you are writing in first person past tense it’s difficult not to write with a passive voice, and the story moves so much better if you don’t do it.

So, go through and check your manuscript for the passive stuff. Now, don’t get me wrong. Don’t get rid of every ‘was, is, are, were, am, etc.’ in your book, but trim it down.

A wise man once said to me: If you can replace WAS with a better verb and make your story say the same thing– why wouldn’t you?

If you are having trouble understanding passive voice, I have compiled a few resources for you to check out below:

Passive Voice Handout

The Passive Voice

Grammar Girl

Just for fun…. I invite you to go through the first chapter and highlight the word was. How many times did you use it?

I used WAS four times in the first chapter of my book that has been edited several times, and in my unedited work I used it eight times.

What about you?

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So, you’ve written a book… and now you need people to look at it.  What now?

This is a tough one. You don’t want to show your book to your friends yet, because it isn’t finished, and your significant other will look it over, but chances are… he’s not your target audience.

So, now you have to find Beta Readers and critique groups.  You can check out forums like Absolute Write to search for Beta Readers. Or you can find a group of trusted writing friends to share work with.  Both of these are great in their own respect.  It’s tough when you find a brand new person to read your work, just because it means that they won’t personally know you, or what hurts your feelings.  Your friends, on the other hand… will work extra hard to find the stuff they love in your story mixed in with the stuff they hate.  (If they don’t do that… then you need new friends.)

So, now that you’ve found your preferred type of reading group… you need to know how to get together.  There are several different ways.  The first is just with emails and chats.  You need to use a good group chatting program so you can get together and talk about your stuff.  I recommend Yahoo Messenger or Aol Instant Messenger for this. Both of these programs are top notch, and make group chatting a breeze.  Google Talk is okay, but it’s just not as well designed as the other two are.

If you are feeling extra technological, you can start up a private Yahoo Group what’s cool about this is that you can upload files, keep databases with everyone’s contact information, and manage most of the stuff through email.  Then you and your friends have a small message board type place to talk freely about each other’s work without saying the same things over and over again.  This is my favorite option.  But make SURE you set your settings to private!  This is very important so you don’t accidentally make all your work public to the world.

So, if you have a critique group just starting out, give Yahoo Groups a whirl and let me know how it works out for you.  If you have questions about how to set it up, let me know in the comments below!

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http://giveagirlapen.com

You will probably have to resubscribe to our feed, and refollow. But we are very excited about our new home! Thank you so much for reading the blog. We hope to have many more writing adventures with you at our new and improved address!

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Now, the question posed to me is, how do we make twitter work for us as writers?

Well, the thing is this… with social networking sites like twitter, facebook, etc. you only get out of them as much as you put in. If you aren’t actively following people, participating in twitter convos and checking your tweets daily, then you aren’t using twitter to its fullest potential.

The first thing you need to do is stop using the twitter webpage to manage your tweets. Instead, download a program to tweet with. I like twitterfox, but a lot of people swear by tweetdeck. I won’t go into the specifics of how to use these programs here, because there are loads and loads of websites out there dedicated to just that, so instead I will get to the point! (Wow, it’s just like my first draft, I spent half the article setting you up for the juicy part!)

You need people to follow, and there are some great people to follow out there. I started with this list: 25 Good People to Follow.

You now have a way to tweet, and fun people to follow. The only thing left is what you should be tweeting. Start out simple, ask questions to people about the writing process, ask them about query letters, agents will answer your tweets all the time, and they love to answer them via twitter because it gives them a chance to answer mundane things that people ask all the time, but to a large audience.

The other day I told an agent I felt a little guilty asking them up on twitter, their answer:

Now, this isn’t your free license to just annoy every agent/writer/publiser on twitter. Look at their tweets, find a common interest, and try to make a friend. It will be obvious if you are fake. But, if you are genuine, and you are really looking for people that share your love for writing, then twitter will work for you.

Take some time this week tweeting up people, and look through their twitter pages… see who THEY are talking to, and follow those people that are talking back and forth with them about writing. Ask the questions you were scared to ask, and listen listen listen. You will learn so much from these people 140 characters at a time!

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