The Magical World of Blogging

For the past few months, I’ve been obsessed with reading other author’s and agent’s blogs and I’ve discovered something I’m sure previous aspiring authors have discovered before me. There is an absolute treasure trove of instructive and wisdom filled blog posts concerning the writing world just waiting to be devoured by anyone willing to seek them out. If there is a particular issue that a writer wants to know about all they have to do is search for it and it’s pretty much waiting to be found.

Most recently, I’ve been scouring over the blog Literary Rambles, which is Casey McCormick’s brilliant blog that talks about anything and everything about writing and finding an agent. A lot of the agents that Stacey and I have been querying are thanks to that blog. Ms. McCormick does a particularly helpful blog every Thursday called Agent Spotlight, where some of the literary world’s most respected agent’s introductions, interviews, query requirements, and interests, are laid out for authors like us to get to read through and decide for ourselves which agents suit our books or our career goals the best. That’s not to say that separate research doesn’t need to be done for each agent, but the Literary Rambles blog gives writers a serious head start.

Another blog that I’ve found to be helpful is Janet Reid’s Query Shark blog. With this blog, Ms. Reid takes query letters that have been specifically submitted to the blog to be, well pretty much torn apart and analyzed, and she offers suggestions to help query writers write the best query they can. While, Ms. Reid is blunt and honest as heck, she is also brilliant at what she does. She breaks down the query writing process and gives writers an idea of what agents want in a query letter, when to stick to the rules of query writing, and when to break them. This is a definite help, especially as writers, like Stacey and I, get to the point where we’re ready to step out into the more professional waters of the literary world.

Of course Casey McCormick and Janet Reid are only two of the bloggers that I follow and let me tell you, they’re also only a couple of drops (significant drops, but drops none the less) in a massive pond of information just waiting to be discovered. I’m still finding new and helpful blogs everyday with some of the most informative posts I’ve ever read. It just reminds me that learning never stops. It doesn’t matter how successful you become as a writer, learning will never stop until you have no more life left to learn with.