The Girl who played with Awesomesauce

So I couldn't come up with anything to write about over the weekend and finally decided I would just wing it on Monday morning. Then I got to work this morning and I had another trainee waiting for me at my desk. At 6AM! Where do they get these people? Don't they realize I need my early morning hours for blogging? The nerve of some people.

Anyway she's gone now so I will go ahead and vomit out a post. I came up with this silly name for a post so that I could discuss two things: One is Elana Johnson. If you don't know who she is you probably stumbled across this blog accidentally and can feel free to leave now without hurting my feelings. If you ARE a writer, and you ARE here reading this blog on purpose and you DON'T know who Elana Johnson is, what's wrong with you?


Okay, let's assume there is nothing wrong with you and you're just new to this whole thing. Elana Johnson is one of the most prolific writer/bloggers on the interwebs and she is famous not only because she is brilliant but because she is so awesome and SO giving. She's shares her knowledge and advice quite freely and has probably helped literally hundreds of writers find agents. She's an expert on queries and even has a very useful little e-book called From the Query to the Call which is really, really useful for novice writers. You can also read more about her on her wonderful blog, the Query Tracker blog, or her website.

Why am I highlighting her today you ask? Well she is going to be sharing an actual query of hers that landed her an agent on this blog this Friday! Be sure to mark your calendars and come back because this is going to be query/submission gold folks! She is also going to add some of her own insightful analysis (I'll probably say a few stupid things too).

How does this all tie in with the title of this post? It doesn't really. The title is sort of a mash-up between Awesomesauce which is a fun word that though Elana did not invent, she certainly made cool, and the title of the sequel to the book I'm reading: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the sequel is called The Girl who Played with Fire).


The one I'm reading is quite good but it does beg a question about the current state of publishing. I keep reading about how if you want to get published your story cannot start out slow, cannot begin with much backstory, and must not wait very long to introduce the most important characters. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo breaks all these rules. I'm over 100 pages in and things have only barely started to happen. The MC is very cool and unique, but she has only actually occupied perhaps 10 pages and the majority of the content so far has been backstory. Sure it's pretty good, twisted backstory and it does set things up nicely but I suppose it just proves again that rules are meant to be broken.


Or maybe this book gets away with things that others couldn't because it was written in Swedish and translated later into English? Who knows?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

EDIT: Elana got a book deal! Apparently she posted about it this weekend and I didn't see the post. Well that's not entirely true, because I did "borrow" that picture up there from it, but I guess I didn't really read it all the way because I had to read Jen's blog before I saw the announcement. Sheesh!

Yay for Elana! Yay for Jen! Yay for writing! and ... yeah you get it.