Hi, I’m Laurie (she/her)! This is my fifth year as a YA Pitch Wars mentor, and I could not be more excited to be back in 2021. Pitch Wars is a mentoring program where published/agented authors, editors, or industry interns choose one writer each to spend three months with revising their manuscript. It ends in...

For my last post, I felt a bit down about the constant ugliness in the world. I didn’t want to link to the specific issues that bugged me because I didn’t want to give them any more coverage. So I challenged myself to find good things happening. People helping people, instead of tearing each other...

I mentioned in a previous post that I have a thing for contests. It may be time for me to step back and do things the old fashioned way, but as a PSA to all of you out there in the query trenches, here are a few of the amazing contests coming soon to a...

Online pitch events are exciting and addictive when you have a query-ready manuscript. Recently we’ve had WriteOnCon, Operation Awesome’s Secret Agent Contest, Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars, and Adventures in YA Publishing’s Pitch Plus Five. And that was just August! The primary goal of contests seems to be grabbing an agent’s attention and garnering requests for...

Source Over the past few months, I’ve been working on revisions. While incorporating feedback from various sources on my own work, I’ve also critiqued pages for others from a wide range of genres. The elusive voice, the unique filter that makes a work our own, strikes me as both the most difficult thing to revise...

Visit Pens for Paws here This year’s Pens for Paws Auction is right around the corner! This online auction, hosted by my friend Angelica R. Jackson, raises funds for Fat Kitty City, a no-kill, cage-free cat (and dog!) sanctuary in El Dorado Hills, California. She has fabulous items for writers and others in the publishing...