Thar she blows!

News

Welcome back to the harbor! It’s been an exciting couple of months since my last newsletter! Much of it I can’t talk about yet (sorry; stay tuned), but here are some things I can share:

In June I fulfilled a lifetime goal of seeing whales! I drove to Rhode Island and Cape Cod and spent a couple of days with my mom visiting my alma mater, collecting shells on the beach, and taking a whale watching tour, where I saw humpbacks and fin whales from astonishingly close. What an amazing experience!

Shout out to White Lion Bakery, which made me almost cry with their amazing selection of entirely gluten free (and celiac friendly) goods. I’ve had so few experiences (fewer than five) where I can go into a store and actually be able to eat everything there, so it hit me right in the feels. Their vegetable quiche and lemon poppyseed muffins were amazing!

I also visited the Whydah Pirate Museum, which was fantastic and sparked two entirely new book ideas as well as bringing my obsession with pirates raging back…

In more publishing-adjacent news, I’m also delighted to announce that I’ve taken on three additional mentees with Round Table Mentor for their half year program—I’ll be working with these authors to polish their querying packages and opening pages!

Finally, I created The Querying Hub, a website that compiles many free resources on querying and agents into one place. If you’re a querying writer, I hope you’ll find it helpful! Feel free to tell all your friends about it—my goal was to help as many people as possible.

(Small personal plug: if you’re looking for professional feedback on your query materials I also have editorial services, which are not free but are very reasonably priced.)

Writing updates

As of writing this, I am in a bit of an odd lull between projects. I’ve turned in my second round of edits on [REDACTED], and my YA fantasy heist is currently with my agent waiting for her notes (send me good thoughts, please! I’m so nervous!). I know what my next official project is going to be (all I can say for now is that it’s sapphic and it has magic and whimsy and far too many fossils, and I’m super excited to write it). But… I’m not actually ready to draft that book yet.

Truth be told, after already revising four separate manuscripts (one of them several times) and drafting an entirely new book this year, I’m feeling a little too close to burnout for comfort. So while I probably should be starting to outline the next officially sanctioned book, since turning in my edits I’ve been taking a couple weeks to refill the well. I’m notoriously bad at taking breaks, so for me that means reading a lot, working on art (I treated myself to some new colored pencils), and doing research for a brand new side project that indulges my longstanding and recently rekindled obsession with pirates and maritime history.

Will I actually write this side project? Who knows. But I’ve been appreciating the value of having a “just for fun” book more and more as my work gets limited by the business side of publishing (this is not a bad thing by any means, just one of the realities of publishing; when you start to get publishing contracts, they come with limitations that mean you have to make business decisions about which projects to prioritize).

Crafty Corner

As I’m gearing up to draft a new project in the next few months, this seems like a great time to talk about one of my favorite writing “rules” I’ve made up for myself (quotation marks because writing rules are more like guidelines anyway—do what works for you, etc.).

I call it the Three Sentence Rule, and it works like this:

Every day I’m drafting, I have to write three sentences.

That’s it. They don’t have to be good sentences. They don’t even need to continue from where I left off—if I’m stuck on what to write next, sometimes I’ll add them in to a scene I already drafted (I am an underwriter, so there’s always room to expand on my first drafts). I can even decide to delete them the next day.

The trick of it is that three sentences is a really, really small goal, and often the difficulty of sitting down to write is just getting started. So if I tell myself I only have to write three sentences, that gets me over the hump of internal resistance. Chances are extremely high that once I start writing, I’m going to write a lot more than three sentences. But telling myself that I just need three is so much less intimidating than a word count goal, even a low one.

And when need be, if three sentences are really all my brain will allow me to write, I let myself stop there and come back to it tomorrow.

It’s completely a mental trick, but it works for me. Let me know if it works for you!

Book recommendation(s)

I have two recommendations this month that are out now and that I absolutely adored!

The first is The God and the Gumiho by Sophie Kim. It’s a delightful (although also slightly gory) romance between a pair of morally grey immortals with delightful banter—I can’t recommend it enough.

The second is Lord of the Empty Isles by Jules Arbeaux. It’s a beautiful science fantasy with an asexual main character, a crew of found family, and heartbreaking meditations on grief. Jules is an agent sibling, and it’s so cool to have the experience of reading other books my agent has shepherded into the world! (US readers, unfortunately it’s not available in the US yet, but you can order a copy from Blackwells, which ships for free!)

Thank you for reading! Here’s hoping that my next installment will be able to talk about the very exciting news I can’t wait to share!

~Marina