Mirka Muse

  A dear friend told me more than ten years ago that her physical bookshelves were emptying. For reasons of space saving, she had gone from ...

  * Disclosure: I never sought representation for my picture book texts because very few agents are open to such. Both my previous agents di...

  Conventional wisdom, CW for short, is that there are the right times and the wrong times to query agents and editors. The month of Decembe...

  You may be right to take the title of this post two ways. The first is asking about the imaginary audience for one’s words and stories. Th...

  Editors, I’m told, don’t like prologues.   A story needs to start in the present. Prologue forces us readers to scroll back before we’...

  On my previous agent quest, one of the agents I queried had this question on her submission form: Was the manuscript, in whole or in par...

  Going back to Karen Jones Gowens’ list of questions for writers,   ( see here ) I will address my personal take on the matter of whether s...

  plat·form /ˈplatˌfôrm/ noun 1.       a raised level surface on which people or things can stand. "there are viewing platfor...

  The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind. Because it depends on who you ask. So, what makes a truly great story? For many, it’s...

  I see this question on writers group chats. Should I have a book launch party? Where? How? Is it a must?   I really like this post by ...

  A writing colleague who had beta-read for me (and I for her) and who, like me, had been on occasion paid to freelance edit, let me know on...

  In Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (an alternate sort of Bible for writers) there is a poignant chapter on the bloated expectations authors hav...

  I have writing friends who say they are giving up.   They’re giving up writing new stories, querying agents, submitting to small publi...

  Querying and pitching one’s work is a craft in itself. Books and hundreds of websites of how-to are devoted to this craft and will greet a...

  An agent recently published a post where agent explained that she & other publishing professionals can assess a query in fifteen secon...

  There’s a right way and a wrong way to ask writers to help your writing journey. I learned the hard way, making most of the usual mistakes...

  There are vigorous discussions on (what else) the Interwebs regarding the replacement of creative wordsmiths (what we aspire to be) with a...

  If you’ve heard the term, you might have wondered what it is. There’s a good post on Upmarket Fiction here .   But this post is about ...

  *First, do away with the word “aspiring.” If you are writing you are already a writer, not an aspiring writer. The aspirants are the fol...