critique partners

What I’ve Learned from Querying so Far- A Guest Post by Jessica Jade

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Pen Friends, welcome Jessica Jade, a fabulous addition to the Spinning Pen. She’ll be joining us for a few months, sharing her journey on becoming an author — tips on writing, querying, YA fantasy, rejection, success, book reviews, and more! You’ll want to connect with her on twitter (link below) and see her beautiful novel aesthetics on her YA fantasy that she’s querying at the moment!

~~Welcome Jessica~~

When I first started querying over two years ago, I thought I was ready—the manuscript, the query letter, everything.

Oh, I was wrong. Embarrassingly wrong.

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YA Author Interview: Kester ‘Kit’ Grant

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Pen Friends ~ If you haven’t heard of International Author, Kester ‘Kit’ Grant, you will soon. Her debut, A Court of Miracles, will come out in 2018 and has already received a lot of praise and anticipation! Kit’s a gem to know (we met after we both won PitchWars 2016) and her words get under your skin within the first page. If you love supporting debut authors, be sure to add her book to your Goodreads!

Kit GrantSP: Hi Kit! Thanks for joining us. First, can you please tell us a bit of who are you and how long have you have been writing? 

I’m Kester Grant but everyone calls me Kit, I am to quote my bio, a British-Mauritian author and nomad. I started writing seriously a few years ago, then put it on hold, and came back to it in 2016 when I drafted my Les Mis meets Jungle Book fantasy YA mash-up.   Continue reading →

What an English Major Learned at Writer’s Conference: A Guest Post by Hilary Bowen

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Recently I attended a writer’s conference in a foreign country. To all of you wondering, foreign in this context means not America.

There were twelve of us there and we were there together for one week. Everyone learned lots of things. Including me. Five years and two English departments at institutions of higher learning and—I still don’t know it all.
So in light of that illuminating statement allow me to share with you three things I learned in my week away.

1. It All Started Because of a Dream:

ross-errillyEvery blog post you’ve read, every lecture you’ve attended, every book you perused, and all of your own experience will tell you that you must buckle down and work. Write that book, edit those sentences, iron out that plot, blah blah blah blah blah. But sometimes you have to cut loose and live a little. The writer’s version of a wild party. Remember why you like to write.

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