A Bit of Everything

Nathan Bransford wrote a post on Unagented Revisions. He explains how it works when an agent suggests revisions to an author before taking them on as a client.

Evil Editor answered an important question about how to write a good query.

Author May Vanderbilt wrote a short but useful post about writing and revising rules of thumb.

Author Anne Dayton wrote about cutting favorite but unneeded passages from your writing. To quote from it:

In The Book of Jane...we had this awesome character Yasmina who did all kinds of hilarious things. She was really hapless and she was always getting into trouble, and provided a ton of comic relief. The thing was, that was all she did. She didn’t have a plotline, and didn’t grow, and ended up feeling really flat and extraneous because of it, no matter how ridiculous her antics were. May and I worked with her and worked with her, trying to save her, but finally, she ended up on the cutting room floor. It was so hard to say goodbye, because she was a pretty major character. But in the end I’m so glad we got rid of her. She added something to the book, but she also slowed it down and made it more complicated and less focused than it needed to be. The book was better for it, and I learned a valuable lesson about holding onto things for the wrong reasons...