Month: March 2013
Kath here. Please welcome longtime WU community member LynDee Walker. LynDee is an award-winning journalist. She traded cops and deadlines for burp cloths and onesies when her oldest child was born. Writing the Headlines in Heels mysteries gives her the best of both worlds. Her debut mystery novel Front Page Fatality is receiving advanced praise.
“Author LynDee Walker sure knows her way around a plot twist. She kept me turning pages late into the night, following the rollercoaster adventures of her fashionably feisty heroine—crime reporter and designer shoe fanatic Nichelle Clarke. Front Page Fatality is smart, funny, and loaded with surprises. A terrific debut mystery.” —Laura Levine, author of the Jaine Austen mystery series
LynDee says, ” I have learned so much from WU over the years, and I wanted a way to give something back to the community here. This was the thing about my journey that was different that a lot of others, and I thought the story might help someone else reach their goals.
Take it away, LynDee!
Any writer who’s done more than a half-hour of research on the publishing industry can tell you there are some cardinal rules of querying. In summary: look up submission guidelines (and then follow them), personalize your query letter, wait out the quoted response time and then some before you nudge (and for the love of God, don’t even think about calling), and never reply to a rejection.
I know the rules backward and forward, the obsessive research cortex in my reporter’s brain having caused me to spend way more time than anyone should poring over agent and editor blogs and tweets.
For over a year, I followed the rules to the letter. Know when I got a book deal? When I broke one.
Now, before you reach for that phone to call up all the agents you queried with a mass email yesterday (kidding!) let me say I’m not here to advocate willy-nilly flouting of publishing’s hard-and-fast rules. But I am here to share my story and hopefully give you an idea of when bending one could help you, and how to go about it.
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News since the last time I posted: I’m delighted to announce I’ll be illustrating Michael Ian Black’s new picture book, NAKED! See the announcement in Entertainment Weekly. Scheduled for publication in Summer 2014.
Read MoreMy mother was a concert pianist.
Well, she actually gave up a scholarship to study, post-college, in Rome. But there were two things that stopped her. 1. She’d met my father who, I do believe — and I’m not just trying to retroactively protect my own existence — was worth at least waffling over and 2. Performing made her want to throw up. Already an anxious human being, my mother would play on the baby grand in our tight living room with our dog — a high-strung dalmatian — who would curl underneath it — having developed a nervous palsy all her own. (Nervousness can be contagious.)
So, my mother would play grand pieces and there are certain classical pieces — brilliant, breathtaking, demanding music — that, if heard today, send one clear message: Your mother is having that kind of day.
During my childhood, while my mother coaxed me to throw around the phrase “My mother is a concert pianist,” she was mainly a piano teacher. And when I came home from school, I heard a lot of counting. “One, two, three, four, and HOLD, two, three four….”
I was also a piano student, bouncing from one teacher to the next, until I was eventually without a teacher. My mother complained to a fellow pianist that all the teachers in town were booked up. And the woman, kindly, told my mother they weren’t.
“No one wants to teach your children piano, Glenda,” she said. We had a bad rep, maybe me especially. I never practiced. I was so wiggly that one teacher suggested dance lessons instead — a smart call actually.
But in any case, I stared at a lot of sheet music, heard a lot of music, AND a lot of counting.
It’s this counting I’d like to apply to the making of a book by way of chapters and narrative point of view.
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