Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Why I decided to blog.

I was inspired to write this blog by Nathan Bransford, a literary agent with the San Francisco office of Curtis Brown Ltd. and the author of JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE COSMIC SPACE KAPOW. IMHO (that's H for humble, though I consider it an honest opinion as well) his blog is the most informative of any literary agent out there - at least of the ones I've seen. Plus it's very funny at times, and incredibly human which helped endear it to me. He seems to love writing, agenting (is that a word?) and the entire publishing world. The fact that he is vastly knowledgable about the business, not to mention refreshingly free about sharing that wisdom, makes his blog an essential tool for any novice writer. Yes, I bought "The First Five Pages" by Noah Lukeman, "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott and "The Forest for the Trees" by Betsy Lerner and these are amazing, wonderful books on writing; but Nathan's blog offers much more practical advice ... and it's free (that being said any aspiring writer should be perfectly willing to spend money on books, diligently, especially debut novels - how else can we expect our books to sell someday?)

Nathan's blog can be found here. If it were up to me his THE ESSENTIALS posts would be required reading for every writer trying to kidnap an agent. No, I have not queried him yet but that is because I was fortunate enough to discover his blog after I realized that my novel wasn't ready and because I like him so much - or at least the idea of him as an agent - that I want to wait until my book is truly ready, or as ready as it can be before professional advice and copy editing.

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