The Saturday Slash

Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.

I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.

If the Saturday Slash has been helpful to you in the past, or if you’d like for me to take a look at your query please consider making a donation, if you are able.

If you’re ready to take the next step, I also offer editing services.

I am seeking representation for my novel, Missing Connections. It is a contemporary romantic comedy and is 45,000 words long. First off, I think it's more impactful to hit the agent with your hook, if you've got a good one. Tell the something they don't know. Every single query letter is from someone seeking representation. They know that. Wow them with something else. Seconly, your word count isn't long enough. Even if this is YA, it needs to be at least 55-60k.

(This is where I write some sort of a connection I have to the agent like if they represent some of my favorite authors then I mention it in this paragraph! Depends on the agent though, sometimes I don't include this...) I recently read and reviewed 'Red, White & Royal Blue' for the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper. I absolutely adored the novel and as soon as I turned that last page, I searched to find out who represents my new favorite author, Casey McQuiston! I truly feel that the comedy and romance in my novel resembles her work. (You can find the published article here: https://www.independent.com/2020/04/16/red-white-royal-blue/ This is good, but it almost feels like currying favor. I wouldn't include. Get to your book!

Missing Connections offers a hopeless romantic’s take on love and her yearning for a storybook ending. Definitely need to beef up this hook. This describes any love story, ever. Is your main character a tone-deaf piano tuner? That's interesting! I know she's not, but- see what I mean? What makes your story different from every other romantic one out there? The novel’s narrator, Amanda, is a teenage writer who draws her love stories from the real world and reimagines them through her successful online blog. She explores the stories of six different young couples in various places (Singapore, Santa Barbara, New York and more!) as they meet through chance encounters.

While Amanda is writing about other people finding love through chance encounters, You want to avoid using the same words and phrases more than once. If you do it in a 350 word query, how much does it happen in the manuscript?>/span> she’s lusting for love like the ones she dreams about. The characters she writes about come from diverse backgrounds, and find each other in unusual settings. From near-miss-car-crashes to an audience member and a musician making eye contact at a Broadway show, this novel develops unique perspectives on young adults as they find the “one”. The stories she imagines reflect her desire to see people come together, while the alternating chapters trace her own love story gradually building to an exciting romantic conclusion in which she finds the closure she has been imagining for others. Okay, but you spent more time talking about ficitonal characters within the novel than you did on your narrator. The main story is about Amanda... not Amanda's stories. They only illuminate her wishes and dreams. The focus of this query needs to be on Amanda, not on her fiction.

I am 17 years old and a high school junior currently living in southern California. As a young girl growing up in southeast Asia, I traveled frequently. Through this experience, I discovered my love of storytelling and connecting with people from diverse perspectives and backgrounds. I am a freelance writer and book reviewer at the Santa Barbara Independent (#1 Newspaper in Santa Barbara). I am also studying playwriting in a workshop at the local Equity theater now and taking a screenwriting class at the SB city college. This is a great bio for someone without fictional publishing credits. You are putting yourself forward in a professional manner and pointing to your accomplishments while also being honest about your age.

I have dedicated the past two years to writing Missing Connections because I know what YA readers love, and I believe this is it! A beach read with emotional tugs on the heart and comedy laced throughout, this is a novel for anyone who can relate to how teens who read first imagine, and then experience, love! I don't know that this is necessary. It adds a nice way to sign-off, but it's also not doing a lot of work Right now there are more words in this query dedicated to you than there are to the novel. Refocus to make Amanda and her story stand out.

How to Nurture Your Mental Health as a Writer

by Ben Grant

Mental health is a state of psychological and social well-being in which a person realizes his abilities, effectively resists life's difficulties and stress, carries out productive conscious activities, and contributes to the development of society.

First of all, this is realized due to the stable, adequate functioning of the psyche, as well as the basic mental cognitive processes: memory, attention, thinking. 

How to raise and maintain your mental health?

Proper nutrition

I need to eat as needed. Our body receives the necessary nutrients and energy from food. The need for them depends on age, gender, lifestyle, health status, and many other factors.

The formula is simple: you need to eat as much as the body requires and expends.

Energy is spent on basic activity (breathing, digesting food, thinking, heart function, etc.). The average daily energy requirement is 2,000 kcal for women and 2,600 kcal for men.

Eat balanced. In nutrition, it is important not only the energy received but also that it comes from different nutrients and the proportion of these substances is balanced. Each nutrient plays an important role in the body, and different product groups contain different basic substances, vitamins, and minerals.

Today, many are trying, for example, to reduce the number of carbohydrates consumed, which can cause a deficiency of some important nutrients. 

Eat varied. A varied and balanced menu should include products from different groups, but you need to vary products within groups. For example, different vegetables and fruits contain different and different quantities of vitamins and minerals. If you eat varied, you can get the necessary nutrients, the body will be more healthy and will work better.

Very often routine and habits become the cause of a uniform diet. The diet needs to be reviewed from time to time so that it is not the same all the time. Nutrition can turn out to be monotonous because a person consciously decided not to eat certain foods or he doesn’t like them. In this case, you need to carefully monitor that the necessary nutrients still come from other sources. 

Physical activity

In order for you to go write every day and not lose your skills, you need moderate to high-intensity physical activity for at least 60 minutes a day; Physical activity lasting more than 60 minutes a day will bring additional benefits to their health.

Manage your emotions

Remember all your successes. In fact, I think this method is the most effective. Retrieve at least three examples of your personal success. Remember something related to the current task and work.

Example: Instead of being nervous about your poorly written text, better remember that you have achieved success in the past, and how the publication liked your article, book, etc.

Interestingly, according to research, this strategy works especially well in women. The next time you feel that you are losing control of your emotions, remind yourself of the things that you are proud of in your life.

Know your weaknesses

Each of us has our own emotional weaknesses, our own “vulnerabilities”. Some react violently even to light criticism or become furious when they think that they are laughing at them. Others cannot stand it when they reject their ideas. Still, others are inferior, driven by guilt, desire to please, or fear of scandal.

Knowing your weaknesses makes it easier for you to recognize when the other side is aiming at them. This, in turn, allows you to control your natural response. If you do not like being reproached for being disorganized, and you are aware of this, then you can prepare in advance for a meeting with such accusations. If someone claims that you are scattering, just brush aside his words.

If you have been verbally attacked because of poorly written text, try to look at your opponent as a person who simply does not know how to behave. Believe me, it will be easier.

Learn to smile

Be grateful for everything that is in your life It is simply amazing what a positive effect we get when we start saying "Thank you!" for everything that is in our life. Thanks for the gift of life. Thanks for the delicious food. Thanks for the smiles of relatives. It is in your power to make a supernatural and very powerful change in your life for the better, and I urge you to do it right now: Be grateful even for the most seemingly negative situations that arise in your life. Sickness, pain, and loss are some of the most powerful teachers we have at our disposal. They point us to our mistakes and wrong choices. They show in which direction we should grow and work on ourselves. They show the power that is within us. And besides, such negative things remind us how incredibly expensive and valuable our life is.

Change the mindset

●      Learn how to engage in internal dialogue

Tell yourself, “I can do better,” or “Next time I will do better,” or something like that. According to a recent study, this is an effective way to increase productivity and begin to make more efforts to solve the problem.

The main thing is to believe what you say. After all, this is not magic, but hard work on oneself

●      Turn negative thoughts into neutral ones

Do not torture yourself in trying to make bad good in a second. Go towards it gradually. 

How to stop being afraid of failure

●      Remember: failure means you do not standstill

Mistakes are not made by one who does nothing. If you fail, this is a sure sign of movement toward the goal.

●      Think of failure as an experience that helps you become better

Most likely, you will not make the mistake again. You will find your weaknesses and the next time you will do it differently. What if it fails again? So, you will gain experience again. And so on until you reach what you are going to.

Adhering to all of the above tips, you can succeed not only in writing books as an author but also in life.

Ben Grant finished his study last year but is already a true expert when it comes to presenting a text in a creative and understandable manner. Now he’s a writer for TropicHealthClub. Ben is thirsty for knowledge and is always on the lookout for tips to share with his readers.

Swati Teerdhala On Finding Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Swati Teerdhala. After graduating from the University of Virginia with a BS in finance and BA in history, she tumbled into the marketing side of the technology industry. She’s passionate about many things, including how to make a proper cup of tea, the right ratio of curd to crust in a lemon tart, and diverse representation in the stories we tell. The Tiger at Midnight, her debut novel is now out in paperback. The sequel in The Tiger At Midnight series, The Archer At Dawn will be published in May 2020. She currently lives in New York City. You can visit her online at www.swatiteerdhala.com.

 Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

The first spark of inspiration for THE TIGER AT MIDNIGHT trilogy came from a visit to an ancient fort on a vacation I took a number of years ago. I was wandering the Fort, imagining the lives of the people who lived there, when I came to an open window. I looked down and I thought to myself, “what sight would make a hardened soldier absolutely stop in their tracks?”  Immediately the answer came to me. A girl. And that was the inspiration for my trilogy–and the first scene in the first book. 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it? 

I built the plot slowly after figuring out the kind of story I wanted to tell and the characters. Character was more important than anything and it informed the entire plot. Once I had Kunal and Esha, two people on opposite sides of a war-torn land and conflict, the rest of the plot fell into place fairly organically. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to pap 

Yes! All the time. I think there is this nebulous, unformed space between the plot in your mind and the plot on the page where things can shift drastically. Sometimes you might have an idea that seems utterly brilliant in your mind but the minute you write it down all you can see are its glaring problems. There is something about seeing ideas on paper that changes how you receive them. So, I’ve definitely thought through an incredible twist or scene only to have it completely transform as I get it on paper and see that it needs something else or something more to truly be brought to life.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by? 

It’s a mix for me. In the beginning of my writing, ideas flew at me like a hail storm. As I’ve gotten deeper into my writing career and have more deadlines, it can be harder. But it’s funny how inspiration can come from the smallest thing. I heard just a snippet of music the other day that invoked an entire scene in my head. It wasn’t a story idea, but it was enough of a wisp of one that I could grasp it and hold onto it. One day, that wisp will become something bigger. And that’s become more of my process nowadays. Layering and layering until I have the right story.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

This is something I’m still trying to figure out! Usually, it’s whichever story is grabbing me at the moment. There’s always one idea or concept that refuses to let go and demands to be heard. And it works. I try to typically have a few stories simmering on different temperatures at all times. Some take shorter, some take longer, but all of them will eventually come out fully cooked.

 I have 5 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. I recently added two Dalmatian puppies to the mix. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I don’t have a writing buddy other than my tea mug, which I use faithfully every day. I do love to write in tandem with a friend as an accountability buddy. On days when writing is hard, it can be really encouraging to have a buddy to “sprint” with and to talk to about your work.