Author Heather McCorkle

From book giveaways to industry advice, I've got a lot of great links for you today! They are tweets of a different flavor than you may be used to seeing so I hope you enjoy them and find them useful. This first one is a contest to win the bestselling YA novel Divergent! @HeatherMcCorkle Win a signed copy of DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth from the lovely Carolina Valdez Miller! http://tinyurl.com/436gc7m If you write non-fiction, YA, thrillers, or international fiction and are looking for an agent then don't miss this new agent feature by Chuck Sambuchino of Writer's Digest: @WritersDigest New Agent Alert: Jeff Ourvan of the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency http://ow.ly/1cBd6G Agent Mandy Hubbard brings us a few great publishing tips: @MandyHubbard #pubtrip scoop: almost universally, pubs are short on MG stuff. Some say only 10% of their subs are MG! @MandyHubbard #Pubtrip scoop cont: some eds still have not acq a dystopian and are looking, but feel it needs to happen...

Describing a scene, a person, or an object can make your novel shine or rust. There's a happy medium between describing something just enough to put the reader there and overdoing it to the point where you jolt them out of the novel. It's easy to tell too little and confuse the reader. I've been guilty of this myself. Sometimes when you're rushing too fast to finish the work this can happen. That's okay, as long as you take your edits nice and slow and catch it there. More than one scene in my manuscript will start out being anorexic and I know I'll have to spend extra time on it during one of my many edits. You can go the opposite direction and overwrite a description as well. As a reader I love good description. But if the author goes on for pages where they're just describing the scenery or the weather and nothing is happening, I'll probably close the book. There is the key, something has to be happening. You can describe a grassy meadow the charact...