How many of you are suffering from a (jelly bean) hangover?

This year, for once, I’m not.

Somehow, somewhere I found a pot of willpower.

Yay to anyone else who also found their pot of willpower.

Remember how this feels.

In addition to advancing my goal of eating less sugar, I also finished a major edit of a middle grade manuscript I’ve been working on for years.

One of its biggest problems was it was about 8,000 words too long.

To put that into perspective, that’s about thirty 8 ½ x 11 pages of text.

Thirty pages of words I thought were absolutely necessary to the story and, turns out, they were not.

Remember that, too, when you think all your words are precious.

Marketing guru Seth Godin wrote in a recent post, “in a hurried world with infinite content, it’s worth considering [that] you should pay for every extra word you use. Be as brief as is useful.”

Now that I’ve finished this draft, it’s time to prepare for querying. (Can you hear me scream?)

For that, I’ll need a hook, a pitch, a synopsis, and comp titles.

This part is more difficult than writing the book in the first place.

But I’ll find another pot of willpower and persevere.

Here’s the foundational story concept: Twelve-year-old April signs up for her town’s baking contest hoping to bring some joy to her and her father following the death of her mother—and he wants nothing to do with it. But April fears if she doesn’t take this chance, she risks losing him to his grief forever, so she enters anyway, stirring up chaos, heartbreak, and, quite possibly, magic.

How are you doing with advancing your projects?

Are you starting on your query journey?

Or if you’ve already gone through it successfully, do you have any tips to share?

Enjoy your week.

~Gail

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