THE SHIT NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT WRITINGHOSTED BYBIANCA MARAIS, CARLY WATTERS AND CECE LYRA
This is a podcast for emerging writers who want to improve the quality of their work and learn more about the publishing industry. Your one host, Bianca Marais (the bestselling author of 'The Witches of Moonshyne Manor') interviews authors, agents, editors and just about anyone and everyone who's involved in bringing a book to market. She's joined by her cohosts, literary agents Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra from P.S. Literary Agency, who read and critique query letters as well as opening pages in their Books with Hooks segment. Expect good advice, honest insights, and a few laughs along the way.
This book is inspired by my time living in the archipelago of Hado Guai. My Pacific Northwest inspired stories have been published in Northward magazine aired on Smithers Community Radio exhibited at the Robert Bateman Center and screened at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. I have a degree in biology and psychology, but somehow found a day job in social impact. I've taken creative writing courses at the University of Toronto, school of continuing education and tirelessly study the children's books I read to my son every night before bed. I live in Bragg Creek, Alberta with my husband, two year old son, and golden Mountain dog Rosa who still misses her beach walks on Haydek Guay. I'm seeking an agent that is a champion and a cheerleader As I roll up my sleeves and enter the world of publishing, I'm keen to work with an illustrator such as Vancouver based redacted. Please see the attached manuscript, sincerely Allison. Wonderful, Carly. Thank you so much. Will you give us the word count there and then you'll take on that? Alright. So word count, 369 words. So let's talk about the comps here. So first, actually, I should say, I really like the title. I will say that. I really like the title. Now in terms of the comps, so John Klassen's all of his books really are very morbid. And so you say here, like, the dark humor of this is not my hat, Like, when you reference that book, I think you're probably trying to comp to the fact that that is his book about the ocean. So maybe that's what you're comping to. But his books are very, like, I don't know, morbid in a great way, which kid like, I I have this book, and I read this to my kids, and we always just kind of, smile at the end. So if you've read the books, you know, what I'm talking about, like, kids do love going to those dark places. And so, yeah, you said dark humor. I don't see in the query letter where the dark humor is coming into play, which makes me think it's not the dark humor that you're comping to. It's the fact that this is his book about the ocean. So that's something that I wanted to say there. Okay. Now in terms of the body paragraph, so the body paragraph and the author bio paragraph are kind of the same size. And we all
15% off your entire first order at happy mammoth.com. Just use our code, which is the acronym of the podcast, tsn0tyaw@checkout. That's the podcast acronym at checkout at happy mammoth.com. Hi there, and welcome to our show, the shit no one tells you about writing. I'm Bianca Marais and I'm joined by Carly Waters and Cece Lyra from PS literary agency. We'll be kicking off today's episode with our usual books with hooks segment, after which we'll go to today's guest. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode. We are working on our books with hooks this morning. So excited to have another edition with you guys. As always, I'm gonna read our little disclaimer. But just a reminder, this is an unscripted program, and our conversations have been edited and condensed and is not a full picture of our feedback or conversation directly with each author. As always, refer back to our written notes for the fulsome picture, and here are some of the ways that you can support us. Rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts. Tell all of your writing friends about us. We'd love to help as many authors as possible. Follow us on sub stack for our newsletter. You can get our stacked newsletter on a weekly basis, bonus videos, articles, essays, advice, and more. I actually have a really fun segment coming up for our Substack on Fridays. I'm gonna start putting out I think it's gonna be about a May. I have a whole huge whack of query letters from published authors that were so generous to share them with us. And I'm gonna put those in there so you guys can see what does a query letter look like that actually got picked up by an agent, got a book deal so you guys can actually see the real deal. So that series is starting on our Substack. I believe starting in May is when I'm gonna roll that out, so I'm really excited to share that with you guys. So definitely make sure you are following us on Substack if you are not. Today, we have a very exciting guest with us for our awesome
Feminists of the Ozarks who filled the hills and hollers of my childhood. I am a member of Chicago North Romance Writers and the Women's Fiction Writers Association. While not writing, I'm chasing my 4 boys, 2 human, 2 feline in the Chicago suburbs. Interested in more? Please feel free to contact me. Thank you for your time. Beckon James. Wonderful, Carly. Thank you. Seems like there was a heck of a lot going on in there. I don't know how we can offer to shorten that, but I'm gonna make that your problem. Here we go. Alright. So I think in my work count, it only clocked in at 324. So it's not actually too long, and there's actually a lot of content in here. Okay. So let's get into my critique. Jezebel, this is not a unique title. I will say that off the bat. I think we can do a lot of work here to, you know, just make something more compelling, just more unique. So I think there's definitely a lot of work to do there. I think about your comps. Single drunk female. We are the Brennan's. A very typical family. All of your comps have 3 to 4 word titles, and so you have a one word title. So you are the odd person out here in terms of your comps. So I would just be, like, realigning yourself with your comps and finding yourself a 3 to 4 word title, I think, would be your goal here. Okay. Next is we're kinda getting into the body paragraphs here. They're kind of a short. There's multiples of them. So we'll just start at the top here. I'm gonna start with the recovering addict bit. So I feel like the kind of addict matters here. Like, if it's gambling or alcohol or drugs or sex, like, what what is the addiction? I don't know. I feel like I need this to frame my understanding of, like, why she was decried the town Jezebel. I don't know. I think that could be important to me in my understanding here. I'm really interested in the grieving teenager bit, but I think one of my issues with the query letter is there's so much just, like, dropped kind of in our laps here, but it's kind of just being a bit vague. Right? I'm like, okay. Grieving. Like, grieving, what exactly? Because we also I think we get the mother's point of view. It says multiple POV, so I'm assuming we have
Of our written notes. Cece and I, we carefully detail everything that we talk about on the show in our notes. And if you are a paid Subsak subscriber, you have access to our exact notes. And that is it for me today. Thank you, Carly. And for our listeners, please don't forget to send us all of your good news. I'm hearing excellent good news from people's critique partners in their beta groups. I don't know if you're all too shy to reach out and boast or or share your wonderful news with us, but please don't be. We wanna celebrate with you. So email the podcast. There is a tab on our website that says share your great news, and we'd love to share it with the rest of our listeners to motivate them along the way. Okay. As per usual, we're diving straight in. Cece, will you read us your query letter? Dear Bianca, Carly, and Cece, I have learned so much from listening to the shit Shit No Tells You About Writing and hope that you will consider and provide feedback on my query letter and first five pages of my novel. I am seeking representation for my 60,000 word debut book club type novel, 1 Boy's Life. Although a mainstream novel, if heartwarming were a genre, that would certainly fit. It would appeal to fans of Jan Curran's Mitford series from the early 2000. More recent comparisons might be to the community spirit found in Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series or the family relationships in Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Mid thirties widow, Beth Anderson, has an encounter with Mike, a 12 year old boy and eventually his faithful dog, Homer. The boy is a true orphan, determined to make it on his own after the death of his mother a few months before. Taking Mike and Homer under her wing, the threesome navigate a number of challenges, including bureaucratic agencies, an attempted kidnapping, a home invasion, and a custody battle. In the midst of
But it really wasn't, and here we are today. I love seeing woman game designers who are writing now. I mean, Naomi Alderman, you know, the power and the future. Love, love, love those books. I got to interview Naomi for an event recently. Is there something about game designing that really lends itself to storytelling when it comes to writing novels? Because I was somebody who missed the whole gaming thing and I never saw it as storytelling. But now obviously I look at it and I'm like, oh my God, this is storytelling. Of course, it's storytelling. So when it comes to sitting down and outlining the game, when it comes to outlining all of your chapters, because this must have had a lot of moving parts. So for our listeners, you know, there are different husbands that come at different times. Sometimes a husband comes back. Sometimes Lauren meets someone who was once her husband but is not her husband in this particular life and they're doing something else. So, you know, you juggling with Jell O here, trying to keep track of all of these different things. Does the game designing element help when it comes to that or how did you approach that? I think there's absolutely some skills that you learn in game design that are incredibly applicable to writing a novel. One of them is just a really strong awareness in the game of what a player could know or could be doing at any given time. So you kind of need to know where they've come from, what they might have with them, all of this sort of thinking about how will they feel, what might they do next because they are so nonlinear most of the time in the way that you navigate them. You really have to think a lot about what people will bring to a particular scene. And so that I think is very useful. I definitely found it interesting thinking about structuring the husband, thinking about what people might be thinking at particular times. Will they be going, oh, why doesn't you do
