During the month of November I am participating in the worldwide annual paroxysm called NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Here in Quebec City, about thirty people participate each year. You would think they would write in French, but although the activities are all carried out in French, most write in English. I think it is partly the youth culture. Many write fan fiction. There are some serious writers working towards publication or maintaining published works, bu

Well, it was an intense day. I realized last night that I hadn't written the query letter I would need if anyone was interested in my work, so I ended up spending part of the night writing and fine-tuning the query letter. I drew on some online resources to work out what was needed. In particular, one helpful blogger, Chuck Sabuchino (https://www.writersdigest.com/successful-queries/successful-queries-agent-jim-mccarthy-and-the-big-rewind), gave a series of examples of succes

I discovered this event on Twitter in December by accident. I happened to log onto Twitter the day in December the event was in play, and after some puzzlement worked out what was involved. PitMad is a quarterly event on Twitter where writers can pitch their books to editors and agents. The basic idea is that, for the day of the event, only writers, editors and agents participating in the event are to use the #PitMad hashtag, and this is used in conjunction with a Tweet that