Adventures in Surfing

Aside from working on The Dogwatchers, I’ve spent quite a bit of the past week checking out other writing-related blogs. I was surprised to find how many unpublished writers, or writers with small publications like mine, have blogs on writing similar to this one. Even when entertaining and well-written, these often have a small following, mostly people who seem to know the writer. At first, I found this slightly discouraging – everyone seemed to be doing just what I am! – but then I realized that there’s actually quite a bit to be learned from these blogs. People have different experiences and knowledge, so the fact that they’re similar in theme doesn’t mean that this has been done to death. For example:

Blogs like Fiction City and this one, reminded me a lot of mine. They follow the writer’s life as it pertains to writing, sometimes stopping to analyze a writing technique, and are fun mostly for the same reason mingling at a writers’ conference is fun: enthusiasm for the craft and, sometimes, commiseration. This is why people who are doing NaNoWriMo get together. It’s fun to hang out with other writers. (Liz’s Ink also has, on the profile page, a nice long list of writer and agent blogs.)

Hedgehog Librarian is a cool blog by a librarian, which includes book reviews. Yapping About YA also has book reviews, as does YA Fiction Fanatic. Officially Twisted, too, reviews a few books that sound awesome – steampunk and werewolves and superheroes, oh my. If You Give a Girl a Pen . . . has this fun contest for the worst possible agent query.

Speaking of agents, there’s another whole realm of blogs I’ve been exploring. These are probably much more interesting to writers than non-writers (that might describe much of today’s post), but are exceedingly interesting to me. Some agents talk about strange queries, while others post sales trends and what publishers want right now. (The unanimous conclusion: MORE vampires.) Some talk generally about writing. At least one says that she strongly prefers to get queries from the kinds of people who read her blog, because those people tend to know (and care) what she wants to see. A few of the blogs I’ve been reading:

–Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown Ltd.
–“Agent Kristin” posts about meetings with publishers, questions from writers, and more.
–Query Shark is excellent fun. If you send a query to the agent (Janet Reid) at her Query Shark address, she’ll post it on the blog and dissect it there. You can then resubmit as many times as you want. Sometimes the Shark even accepts a work after a few revisions. (Unfortunately, she doesn’t represent YA fantasy, but the blog is still a great resource for query writing.)
–The Rejecter is a blog by an assistant at a literary agency, and again contains great advice for queries.

I’ve checked out at least a dozen more blogs. I doubt I’ll be up for conscientiously following many – maybe any – of these, but they’re certainly fun and informative to drop in on.