Author | Joseph L. Selby

Tag: writethink

  • QUERY: JEHOVAH’S HITLIST (a draft)

    Jehovah knows a secret. On Sundays when they parachute down the charity box, you can see where they open the sky to make the drop. The first one to the box gets the best charity: food rations, medicine, ammunition. Today all he needs is a new pair of shoes. He nabs himself a pair of…

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  • Pre-Ponderance

    This isn’t a fully formed story idea, but something I wanted to write down for later. Today is my birthday (and if I weren’t so tired, I had a completely different post I wanted to make but now I’m just going to go watch “Repo Men” instead). For my birthday, I went up to the…

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  • QUERY: THE TRIAD SOCIETY (a draft)

    Part of the webinar I posted about earlier is a query critique. I’ve already queried out BM&BBQ and WCO, so it’s time to bite the bullet on TTS. Below is a first draft query letter. Your constructive feedback is greatly appreciated. Otwald d’Kilrachen intervenes when Torvald d’Bluefire’s dissolution of an affair turns violent. Otwald delivers…

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  • The Impotence of Proofreading of Proofreading

    For those of you who do not know, my day job is in publishing as well. I commute to Boston (writing the majority of my manuscripts on the train in and out of the city) and toil away in a cube for a major publisher. This is not the first publisher I’ve worked for. The…

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  • Wash Your Pants

    My wife is inspired. This means: I don’t have to cook dinner (yay!), it will most likely be delicious (yay!), you get another post (yay!). Elizabeth Poole and I often discuss our differing writing styles. She’s a plotter. I’m a pantser. Once I get a solid grip on the plot and the characters, I can…

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  • In which I post a second time about semi- and/or unrelated topics

    My wife went to Philadelphia this summer to see a men’s regional Barbershop competition. (My wife is a competitive Barbershopper.) While there, she bought me some barbecue chicken seasoning. The odor was pretty strong and I was unsure if I would like it. DEAR LORD THIS STUFF IS GOOD! I only bring that up because…

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  • Description is Tricky

    Hannah Mosk commented recently that her first drafts are very short. They end up being mostly dialogue. She goes in during revision and fleshes the story out to its full potential. I’m getting better at this, but it used to be incredibly hard for me not to do anything but dialogue. That’s where the story…

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  • Struggling with Voice

    As I get older and make a more concerted effort to write professionally, I do not write with the abandon that I did when I was young. A younger me wrote phonetically and with dialects whenever I wanted to express an accent. An older me mentions the accent, but only touches a few key words…

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