Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Hey, fellow Atlantan! I'm in Midtown. Atlanta Writers Club has a small conference every year. (Nathan was at the first one, back in '07.) It happens in May, and they offer agent pitch sessions, critiques, and an hourlong Q&A session. I imagine the pitches and critiques are all filled up by now, ...

Here's one I had two nights ago: My officemate had convinced me to attend DragonCon with her this year. But when we arrived, DragonCon was not a convention happening at several hotels here in downtown Atlanta... but rather a cross between a creepy-ass carnival and a Renaissance festival. It was outs...

Okay, I bowed to the pressure from all you lovers of The Wire and rented the first three episodes. We'll see how it goes. I told my husband the other day: "I think if you get, say, 20 American people between the ages of 20 and 40 in a room, and one person so much as even whispers the words 'th...

I liked Lauren Myracle's BLISS, which came out last year. It takes place in a Southern boarding school in the 1960s. Very creepy and well-written. Myracle's more of a YA chick-lit author, but I wish she'd do more horror! I haven't read this one yet, but I heard that Simon Holt's THE DEVOURING is ver...

My husband and his brother both love Dan Simmons's books. Their favorites are DROOD and ILIUM. They're both fans of the other authors you mentioned, Mira, so you might want to give Simmons a shot.

I'm jealous of my childhood self for having so much time to reread books! Every summer I'd reread all of my Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary books, and I'd usually pick up Louise Fitzhugh's HARRIET THE SPY a couple times from the library each year. (Why did I never own it? It's a mystery. I should pick...

Check and see if the agent has any specific guidelines for picture books. A lot of the agents who rep picture books (and there aren't that many to begin with) will want to see the full PB manuscript instead of a query letter. Instead, you'd submit a cover letter with a brief synopsis (1 or 2 sentenc...

I'm doing the second full rewrite (argh) of a YA magic realism novel. Actually, the first draft was a straight-up YA contemporary, but it was mostly plotless and boring. The second draft was more of a lesbian romance, but an agent who critiqued the first 20 pages or so said that it was still lacking...

Ah. Good point about making references to technology. My characters have switched from calling / e-mailing to mostly texting, too. I try to make sure that none of my main plot points rely too much on any given item of current technology -- like, say, my character has to send a really important e-mai...

Mentioning brand names and famous people is fine from a legal standpoint. The only time you would have a problem is if you misrepresented a company or product in a potentially harmful way -- e.g., the people in your story are all poisoned from drinking Diet Pepsi, or a bunch of kids get a weird skin...

PublishAmerica is a (rather notorious) vanity press.

No legitimate agent would rep a PA-published book*. Sorry.

(* = Unless you stopped publication of the book, got your rights back from PA, and tried to get an agent to help you publish it with a legitimate publisher. But even that would be tricky.)

The use of italics to denote thoughts just makes me go ick, ick, ick. Quotation marks even more so (although the last time I can recall seeing quote marks used for thoughts, I think I was still carrying a bookbag to school...). While italicized thoughts are certainly still acceptable in fiction -- i...

Some of my favorite comfort books are David Sedaris's essay collections. If the husband and I are traveling for Christmas, we will usually pop one of the Sedaris audiobooks in the car. If not, I like to curl up with either Holidays On Ice or Naked . I've read 'em both a million times, but they never...

I set writing-related goals for myself that I put on a couple of calendars -- a Google calendar, my Outlook calendar at my day job, and a paper calendar that hangs in my kitchen. That way, I can't escape my goals for a particular week or month! Sometimes my goals are word count-related, depending on...

I read Twitter. I don't usually read it during my workday, so when I get home I usually have a couple of pages of tweets to read. Since I follow a lot of authors, agents, and other industry folk, I can rationalize this away as "learning about the publishing industry." But then I have to re...