ARCHIVE FOR Katrin Schumann

By Katrin Schumann

What should you expect from an agent? How will you know which is the best agent for you? What are warning signs that things are going wrong?

You can find excellent answers to these questions here and here and here.

Sharing new work is always agonizing. There's just no way around it. But here are some ideas so you survive the process:

1. Articulate your goal

Are you looking for deep revisions? Help with a particular issue? A pat on the back? Granular, sentence level work? Do you need someone gentle or can you handle someone who goes straight for the problem areas? It's important to articulate your goals clearly--your professional goals and your emotional needs

I used to wonder how it was possible that the first five pages of a manuscript could matter so much. Especially in fiction, when the story hasn’t yet been established, how could an editor form an intelligent opinion on the work — or the writer — without digging  deeper? It seemed unfair and shortsighted.

Then, I became a freelance editor. I realized that I was constantly making snap judgments. I had to — if I wasn’t going to end up taking on a project, it was stupid for me to spend an hour figuring that out.

by Katrin Schumann

I'm going to start with a confession: I hardly wrote any notes while attending the 15th annual Muse & the Marketplace conference this past weekend. I was so immersed in the experience, so enjoying the sessions, the eager crowd of attendees, the brilliant authors, that I allowed myself to absorb it without the pressure of trying to capture it in words. So when I looked over my conference packet to put together this insightful blogpost, I found a whole lot of nothing.

By Katrin Schumann

My husband never really got over it when my athletic, nimble oldest child, Peter, quit lacrosse. When my middle child failed to make varsity in either of her beloved sports, Kevin was shaken to the core. And even though he accepted with seeming equanimity that my youngest never once picked up a ball or a stick, I know that secretly he felt an enduring sense of loss.