Looking for inspiration ...

My newest project is driving me reasonably nuts. It's not a bad situation, the stress of getting the story together is a great tool for inspiration. I keep running story lines through my head, testing this solution and that angle, and sometimes they're bad, sometimes there's diamonds in the dust. The important thing is to keep the motivation going  when the mountain is very high and I've fallen down for the millionth time ...

Denmark!

Great news for us!

The Changeling has been picked up by Rosinante, a Danish publisher. That means that all three of our children's books are sold to Denmark. How cool is that?
The new one - also a horror story - lives under the working title of "The Park", (I know, not the best title, but I'm sure we'll come up with something better as we progress). We have a delivery date of August 2nd, so that it will get printed on February 1st next year - hopefully it will be accepted, and also sold to Denmark.
It's nice when this happens, gives us a boost and is really inspiring.

Keep it moving - the art of query letters ...

The most important thing to do - apart from actually writing manuscripts - is to keep the material moving. Sending our words out into the world and see what happens. So we have decided to do just that and the past few days we've spent time making a query letter. It's is difficult. We've done this quite a few times - anyone serious about their writing has to do this, and so there's much energy and agony over every word and phrasing.
The intention?
To get an agent or a publisher to ask toi see more of your stuff. So how do we do that? By being as straight forward and honest. No flippancy, no bragging, no overly self-praise. The material has to speak for itself, but you also need to convince the agent or publisher to want to read it. If the query letter is full of spelling mistakes (very important for us second language English speakers), or it's a "glory to us" letter, the person who reads it will most likely never make it to the second paragraph. In other words, the letter shouldn't sound to desperate, but not to "whatever" either.
Jeez - they should have classes in this ...
Anyway - the letter will be sent out this week, and then the wait for the phone call begins ...
Thankfully we are so busy with new and ongoing projects, we will (ha, ha) manage to put it out of our minds and be a bit que sera, sera about it.