Today's post will be an update (different from the newsletter) on my short story and novel progress.

This last week was incredibly busy, but productive. I made some progress on two short stories: One nerd romance (in honor of Comic Con) and one Sci-Fi story. Both stories, once completed, will make some rounds to different short story publishers for potential publication. If neither of the stories get published, I may consider posting them either to the website or create a free e-book. I find it important that stories are created and read by others. Stories are meant to do one of these three things:

• Inspire
• Entertain
• Educate

If it accomplishes one of those its good, but if it accomplishes all three its great! Would it be great to get paid for creating stories? Of course! However, I feel it is more important that stories are read and shared with others.

For my novel, I finished a rough draft in December of last year and I have progressed through several drafts and a few trusted beta readers to get the novel ready to pursue agent representation. What people won't tell you is that a polished draft is only the start! Another step in the adventure for publication is getting an agent and to get an agent's interest is through crafting a query letter.

A few months ago, I attended a webinar through Writer's Digest titled Focus on Young Adult Fiction: Writing a Strong Young Adult Novel and Crafting the Query Letter. The webinar, as the title spells out pretty well, focused on constructing query letters for Young Adult and Middle Grade novels. The presenter of the webinar was Marie Lamba. Marie Lamba is a literary agent at Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. The webinar was a great opportunity to learn about the Young Adult and Middle Grade industry and the insights on how the market is moving now was invaluable. As a part of the webinar, participants were able to send in their query letters for review and edits. I had been working on my query letter for a couple of months for my unpublished novel and I decided to get some professional advice.

Last Wednesday, I received some positive feedback and edits on my query letter. It was amazing to see some professional input on a query letter and how to create a tighter, more compelling query letter. I didn't have much time to look through the edits last week, but I plan to take a closer look this week and continue to sharpen the query letter for the next couple of weeks. 

So, that is my update on my writing projects and I hope to share some of my writing projects with everyone soon. On Friday, I will be posting a review of the movie Suicide Squad. I have been hearing word about some poor reviews by critics, but I would like to withhold judgement until I actually see it for myself.