Entering my vague era

News

Hello friends! This edition of the newsletter is packed with updates! (Don’t worry, agent, I promise I’m not revealing anything I’m not supposed to yet.)

First off, I’m now offering editorial services on queries, synopses, and first chapters—if you’d like detailed notes on your querying materials, you can book here, and if you don’t need feedback currently, please tell a friend! Referrals and word of mouth make a huge difference.

Also last month, Round Table Mentor/Mentee pairings were announced! I’m mentoring May Zullino, whose adult fantasy is gorgeous, romantic, and horrifying (complimentary). You can give them a follow on Twitter here if that sounds up your alley!

One other item of housekeeping—I recently updated my website to include editorial services and also to just be prettier in general, because I like pretty things. Feel free to check it out!

Writing updates

Since my last newsletter, I finished my second draft of my Arthurian myth x American Gods book and sent it off to my first round of beta readers. I’m also waiting for edits on a different project, and I’m gearing up for yet another round of revisions for my ShapeshifterWIP (please someone buy this book; I haven’t reworked a project this much since my very first novel). New projects are on hold at the moment, at least in the adult space, but… for positive reasons!

As you may have guessed from the title of this newsletter, January was a very, very good month for me. It will be quite some time before I can announce anything, but I have a lot to celebrate and can’t wait to share some very exciting news with you!

I also commissioned my first character art, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, make sure to do so now—I’ll be sharing that with newsletter subscribers first, and it’s going to be gorgeous!

Crafty Corner

This time around, I wanted to talk about something I think about quite a lot: how to write a strong chapter ending.

In my head, there are two general types of chapter endings—endings that make you need to read the next chapter, and endings that give you a moment to breathe and a logical place to put down the book for the day. The balance of these depends on what kind of book you’re trying to write, but in my opinion, you need both! I personally get exhausted by books that are nothing but cliffhanger after cliffhanger. As long as your overall pacing is solid and there are reasons to continue past the current chapter, I don’t see any reason to not give the reader some natural pauses.

Breaking it down further, when I analyze my own chapter endings, I tend to have four types: reveal, decision, question, and resolution.

A reveal ending is more or less what it sounds like—something new is revealed at the end of the chapter and it reads like a cliffhanger.

Example:

“Actually,” the prince said, “my brother didn’t die of illness. The physicians found traces of poison in his wine.”

A decision ending is the characters making some sort of, well, decision that sets up the next events.

Example:

I had to break into that tower. No matter what it took.

A question ending is one where the characters either directly voice a question, or the text raises one.

Example 1:

Behind the draperies, something moved. (Question: who/what is behind the draperies?)

Example 2:

“Great plan,” Cora said. “How exactly are we going to do that?”

Finally, a resolution is one where a thread of the story or a scene comes to a natural end. While the first three propel the story forward, this kind gives the reader a natural pause. To keep the overall tension high, I often infuse a sense of something being off into these when I’m not nearing the end of the book.

Example:

I crawled into bed and blew out the candle. But even as I drifted towards sleep, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something my sister was hiding.

Thoughts or questions? Feel free to discuss with me!

Book recommendation

This month I’m actually managing to narrow my recommendations down to just one: The Last to Drown by Lorraine Wilson. It’s a novella that comes out this month (tomorrow, I think!), and if gorgeous prose, meditations on grief, and Icelandic ghosts sound like your thing, you should absolutely check out this gem of a book—it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I’ve read.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned for very exciting things… seven or eight months from now, probably. Or maybe even longer, because what is the publishing industry if not a lack of certainty?

~Marina