Women's Fiction and Writing Blogs

So apparently blogger decided not to mail me my new "You have a comment to approve" emails for a few days, and I logged in for something and had 12 comments to approve. Apologies. Continue your conversations.

As to the whole "should writers keep a blog thing" I will make my own comment: I've been slow to update this blog in the last two weeks because I've just been insane with job stuff, graduation ceremony stuff, apartment lease stuff, and finally, writing stuff. The blog is really the last on the list behind "Did I get a chapter done tonight?" I feel that it's important to post regularly but I can't let it consume my writing energy, which foremost goes to my fiction and notes for my non-fiction stuff I'm working on. A lot of writers have blogs for similar reason to why anyone else does - because they want to - but since a blog requires writing, if you only have a certain number of words in you per day, don't spend them recounting the jazz festival you went to last night. Unless you want to.

I've been working on a query letter and having people in a writing forum critique it. One critic told me that chick lit was over, and to make my story look like more than just a romantic comedy. I think that women will always be interested in romance and funny stories. I planned on just calling my story "commercial fiction." What's your take on this?

"Women's fiction" is always a good way to go if the main character is a woman and it's not specifically another genre. A lot of agents like "women's fiction" because women in general are huge readers, in comparison to men and children who aren't being forced by some assignment (Not to insult the male literati here). Plus a lot of agents are women.

Sending Unrequested Fulls

We don't get unrequested fulls that often, and I would say we get them less often than we used to. The reason is obvious: the cost of mail, especially media mail, has gone up considerably. Yet some dorks remain who think sending their entire 600-page manuscript overnight (with return postage) is going to impress us somehow and not be a massive waste of money.

I don't know why this is, but unrequested manuscripts are almost universally awful. It doesn't make any statistical sense, but I can't think of one that I even considered putting in the maybe pile. One arrived today. To cut down on expenses, perhaps, the author printed out the manuscript single-space and in 8-point font, only to up the weight by putting it in a really big, nice binder (which we kept because there was no return postage and she said we could keep it). The writing was terrible - just terrible. You know it's bad when a chapter is 3 paragraphs long and two of those paragraphs are single lines of dialogue.

Maybe it's a jinx or something. I don't know.