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.

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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.

Harmony “Goldilocks” Gold is hunted by a “Charming” guard she can’t help falling for as, haunted Using "hunted" so close to "haunted" had me mentally confusing the two. I didn't realize he was pursuing her until I had read further by the tragedy and accusations of her past, she travels across the kingdoms to see the trial of her abusive father. I realize I might be alone in this, but I don't understand why Charming is in quotes - is he prince Charming? But a guard? I think this opening sentence is a touch convoluted and must be unraveled in order for the reader to dissect what's going on. I'd shoot for simplicity in your opening hook.

The Criminal is a twist on the story of “Goldilocks” and tells the story of Harmony Gold, a sarcastic fugitive forced into a life on the run by her abusive father and the death of her mother. In desperation to survive after the loss of loved ones, Harmony slowly becomes the criminal the world thinks she is, taking on the identity others have given her. Harmony struggles for freedom and desires a normal life but has to come to the realization that neither is in the cards for “Goldilocks.” Right now, this is running in circles - you've got an opening para that sounds like a pitch, but then you go into an overview statement here. We need to know why the world thinks she is a criminal, and how she evolves to become one. Right now these are broad statements that don't tell us much at all about the actual plot.

But when Harmony finds an advertisement for the trial of her father, she sees a way towards the freedom she so desires. If only she could lose the guard chasing her. And if only she could stop falling head over heels for him. Why would there be an ad for a trial? Is it just like a news statement? Why would the trial be a path toward freedom for her? Why is a guard chasing her? How can she fall head over heels for someone she is evading? Do they interact? Surely they must be thrown together at some point in order to fall in love? You'll see from my questions here that the plot isn't reallly present in the query.

Now Harmony must decide: is freedom what she really wants? Or will she redefine her identity as something more than a criminal? Why does she have to decide? What forces that?

The Criminal is an 87,000 word YA novel appropriate for both MG and adult audiences. That's a pretty large statement - that this book can be read by MG to adults. You need to be more narrow, b/c the counterargument is that they won't know how to market it.It is the first in a seven-book series You definitely don't want to be pitching the first in a 7 book series. It needs to be a standlone with series potential - and that needs to be an accurate statement. entitled Once Upon a Tome with themes of identity and racial discrimination. Really? Where? I had zero idea that this was the case from everything above. The writing style is a cross between Gail Carson Levine and Sarah J. Maas with a little bit of Chris Colfer’s middle-grade whimsy.

I am a dual citizen of New Zealand and the US, a dog mother, and a tea enthusiast. I have been writing with the intent to publish since I was twelve and recently self-published a poetry book entitled Imagine This: From Pain to Possibility about the severe pain and medical conditions I face and the ways I push through. The book has sold about 75 copies so far. I hope to publish more books in the YA fiction realm in the future. Without extremely impressive self-publishing sales, don't mention it at all. Also, most people who are writers have been writing since they were children. If you don't have anything incredibly relevant to include in your bio, don't be scared to leave it simple, and skimpy.

Why Fun, Romantic Reading Should be Prescription Reading

By Jessica Clare

It’s 2022, and we’ve been through hell.

(That’s it. That’s the statement.)

Okay, but for real. In the last few years we’ve been through an absolute rollercoaster of things. We’ve had contentious elections. Bombings. Social movements. Beloved celebrities dying. War. Inflation. Housing crises. Supply crises. Everything crises. And a pandemic that’s given us all kinds of post-traumatic stress. 

(Does anyone else get unnerved when someone stands a little too close in the grocery store line? Just me?)

As a collective people, we’ve been through a lot. And I’m a firm believer in books as escapism. When I was a child, I absolutely loved books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where these displaced children went to another world and became important and powerful. I loved The Secret Garden, where a displaced girl found a special home for herself that no one knew about. As a teenager, I loved Anne McCaffrey’s Pern Books, where people on a strange planet rode dragons and saved the world. I loved epic fantasy, too, where farm boys discovered they had special powers and rode off to adventure. I was never a huge fan of dark, angsty stories with terrible things happening to people. I hated a tragedy. 

There’s enough of that in the world right now.

So I think to unwind, it’s time we take some of the ‘fun’ back for ourselves. What better way to do that than to read some escapist, light, fluffy fiction where there are no bad guys and the biggest question is will they or won’t they?  What’s wrong with that?  We go through so much on a daily basis that when I ‘escape’ into a book (just like those kids escaped into Narnia) I want to be wildly entertained. I want to know what I’m reading is SAFE and HAPPY and will end in a way that makes me smile.

I don’t want to cry while I read. I don’t want to feel grief. I don’t want to be frightened out of my wits or horrified at another person’s actions.

I want to be wrapped in a fluffy, cozy blanket of feel-good that’s provided by the author. I want to awkwardly fake date Adam Carlsen (The Love Hypothesis). I want to go on my sister’s honeymoon with the annoying best man (The Unhoneymooners).  I want to have a sexy handyman help me get out of my comfort zone (Get a Life, Chloe Brown). I want to hire a sexy escort to help me navigate love (The Kiss Quotient).

I want to close a book with a sigh and a smile. I want a few hours of the day to be nothing but sheer joy. We need that right now. And if we’re feeling sad or stressed or lonely, we need to be able to turn off the news or the internet, and have a nice, cozy place to dive into that will envelop us in a warm hug and show us that people are good, bad dates can be funny, and occasionally you just might date a sexy boat captain that will build you a gazebo to show you how much he loves you (It Happened One Summer).

New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare writes under three pen names. As Jessica Clare, she writes erotic contemporary romance. As Jessica Sims, she writes fun, sexy shifter paranormals. Finally, as Jill Myles, she writes a little bit of everything, from sexy, comedic urban fantasy to zombie fairy tales

Catherine Hokin On Being A Visual Writer

by Catherine Hokin

I am a visual writer.

No, you didn’t read that wrong. What I mean by that statement is that I am inspired by the things that I see and by the way images are used to tell stories.

 Pictures or films or photographs are most often the inspiration for my novels. If you know me you won’t be surprised by that. The walls of our house are covered in paintings and film posters and prints. My noticeboard plays host to the maps I draw – from country down to street level – of the places I am writing about and the cinema is my favourite hang-out.

Like all historical fiction writers, I am obsessed with research and my starting point for this – and for idea generation – is usually physical places. I prowl round art galleries, museums, streets and sites of historical interest like a magpie with a smartphone, snapping at anything that sparks my interest. And, because my books are set in Berlin, it’s usually Berlin where I can be found going walk about.

Both The Commandant’s Daughter and The Pilot’s Girl, the first two books in what will be a four-part series about photographer Hanni Winter, started this way. A good photograph –which my main character becomes a master of, although not in the way she imagined that she would – can take us on a journey. It can also tell a very different story to the truth and that’s where my writer brain starts. And where book one of the series, The Commandant’s Daughter began.

The image which kicked off Hanni’s story is in Berlin’s German Historical Museum and was taken in 1933 on the night Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. It records a moment from the torchlight procession which Goebbels organised to sweep through the Brandenburg Gate, past the Adlon Hotel and along Wilhelmstraβe to the Reich Chancellory where Hitler was waiting to be adored. The photograph is in black and white and yet it isn’t: the river of torches springs out of the frame like molten silver. It is glorious and it is also, when you stop and consider what the picture commemorates, truly terrible. And that was my starting point. A little girl standing on a balcony, staring down enraptured at the dancing flames, who is about to be taught to properly look at them. A little girl who, from that moment, will never see the world in the same way again.

The Pilot’s Girl also had its start with a museum and a photograph, but this one can also claim an artifact (a very big one) and a film in the mix as well.

The museum this time was The Allied Museum which is located in an old movie theatre in the area which was once the heart of the American forces in Berlin. I went there already knowing that I wanted Hanni’s story to advance from 1945/46 into the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49. What I didn’t know was that I would be able to climb into one of the airplanes that was used to fly supplies into the city and is now a museum exhibit. And what I also didn’t know was that I would find my key character – the blockade pilot in question – grinning down from a wall there. The first thing I noticed about him was that he bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery Clift, the American heartthrob from the 1940s and fifties. I grew up in the days of Sunday afternoon films which I used to watch with my father who was a massive film buff and I’ve had a bit of a thing for a chiseled jaw ever since.

When I got home, I started to watch a number of films which were made and set in Berlin at the end of the war and one of those – The Search – starred the aforesaid Mr Clift. The film  tells the story of an American soldier who is stationed in occupied Germany in 1945 and finds a young boy living wild in the ruins of the city. The film is fascinating for lots of reasons – not least that most of the children who feature in it were actually from Displaced Persons Camps and had lost everything in the war, including their families and sometimes their names. Clift also apparently made a lot of alterations to the script so that his character was less a hero and more a flawed human being shocked by the truth of life in post-war Berlin. His character is part of the city and also not; highly visible but also able to retreat back into his American safety-net. And that was where I picked up the thread…

My character Tony in The Pilot’s Girl looks like Montgomery Clift but that is where the resemblance ends. I have taken the idea of a dashing hero who is the toast of the city and made it very dark. But his beginning was in a photograph in the same way that Hanni’s was.

And what about book three in the series which is coming next year? I’ve gone back to a film again – a shocking piece of propaganda shot by the Nazis in the ghetto town of Theresienstadt – and to photographs of the bombed out remains of Dresden and the empty spaces in Czechoslovakia where towns like Lidice were raised by the Nazis to the ground. And Hanni is now something of a celebrity herself, mounting – rather dangerously given what it contains – her first exhibition.

As I said, I am a visual writer. Images tell stories to me. I tell stories from them. Fingers crossed for the next magpie expedition…

Catherine Hokin is from the North of England but now lives very happily in Glasgow with her American husband. Both her children have left home (one to London and one to Berlin) which may explain why she is finally writing. You can find her on  Cat Hokin FB page or on twitter @cathokin