Sheesh, I dunno. It’s so hard living in this world when we’re all so damn different, with completely different ideas about what is right and what is wrong. Seems dithering and accusing people of their views hasn’t really got any of us very far up to now

This is Sue, coming to visit your page two years later

I am a beginning freelancer. I’ve been a beginning freelancer for years for this reason – when I feel like I have an audience looking over my shoulder as I write, I clam up. My body tightens up, I can feel the glands on the side of my neck threatening to stand up of their own accord. This is the reason why I surfed into your blog in the first place – I’ve been searching the net to find the people who write first, query later. This is what I really really want to do, so I can skip that exposed feeling (it’s horrible being so bloody highly sensitive, grr) and go straight to the expansive place that I write from.

I’m beginning to suspect, though, that in the meantime, until I have a few things published and my confidence lifts, that I may need to buck the conventional trend that says “write first, query later” and turn it on its head.

I’d be interested to know if you ended up writing this piece, and whether you queried first or wrote it first?

Dear Todd,

I’m an award-winning author with a new book of fiction out this fall. Ugly To Start With is a series of thirteen interrelated stories about childhood published by West Virginia University Press.

Can I interest you in reviewing it?

If you write me back at johnmcummings@aol.com, I can email you a PDF of my book. If you require a bound copy, please ask, and I will forward your reply to my publisher. Or you can write directly to Abby Freeland at:

Abby.Freeland@mail.wvu.edu

My publisher, I should add, can also offer your readers a free excerpt of my book through a link from your blog to my publisher’s website:
http://wvupressonline.com/cummings_ugly_to_start_with_9781935978084

Here’s what Jacob Appel, celebrated author of
Dyads and The Vermin Episode, says about my new collection: “In Ugly to Start With, set in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, Cummings tackles the challenges of boyhood adventure and family conflict in a taut, crystalline style that captures the triumphs and tribulations of small-town life. He has a gift for transcending the particular experiences to his characters to capture the universal truths of human affection and suffering–emotional truths that the members of his audience will recognize from their own experiences of childhood and adolescence.”

My short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including North American Review, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. Twice I have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. My short story “The Scratchboard Project” received an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007.

I am also the author of the nationally acclaimed coming-of-age novel The Night I Freed John Brown (Philomel Books, Penguin Group, 2009), winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers (Grades 7-12) and one of ten books recommended by USA TODAY.

For more information about me, please visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Cummings

Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing back from you.

Kindly,

John Michael Cummings

Paula

Anyhow, thanks Richard.