annemarie’s blog
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querying
Me, working on my query letter: “Titles Are Stupid,” a 66,000 word novel, is about a girl who loves the winter even though it tries to kill her.— Annemarie Plenert (@amtastical) January 15, 2019 I’m doing it. I’m prepping my finished novel for the querying process. Querying is exciting and awful; there’s so much waiting,…
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goals, productivity, and achievements
When I am writing a draft of a novel, I aim to write one thousand words a day. Sometimes it is drudgery and I have to be very firm with myself to keep my eyes on my document and my ass in the chair, and some days the words come flying out of my mind.…
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am i a writer y/n
I have written two novels front to back, including revisions and edits. I sent the first one to around fifty agents and received approximately fifty rejections, so I cried for a month and then shelved it. I wrote my second novel, a novel I think is much stronger, and I am just waiting for my…
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books: january twenty nineteen
I’m going to start a new feature where I list the books I read, both by myself with my kids each month. I have two extreme readers who are well ahead of their grade levels (4 and 1), and one kindergartener who is just starting to learn, so it’s a range of novels to picture…
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soup time
It’s been unreasonably cold in Winnipeg this week. Polar Vortex Shenanigans. It was actually -50°C with the wind chill the other day! The schools weren’t closed or anything, of course, and thank goodness, but it is hard to do anything when it’s this cold. But there is one thing I can do: I can drink…
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suiting up
It’s fucking freezing outside. I know I said in yesterday’s post that it gets colder where I grew up, but that doesn’t negate that -30°C with an extra -10° of wind chill is bitter AF. Living in this climate requires a level of clothing that I have two feelings about: one is that it builds…
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cold
I live in Winnipeg. Lots of people call it Winterpeg because it’s accurate. And in the winter, there’s a lot of bitching and whining about the weather – too cold, too windy, too much snow, not enough snow, too sunny, too grey, too icy – no matter what the weather is, somebody hates it. That’s…
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sundays
This fall, the stars aligned and my partner and I were able to go to Ireland. It was as perfect as it was possible for a trip to be; we saw ruins, our bus got stuck in a sheep traffic jam, we stood in Trinity Library, we had Guinness, we traipsed around a forest that…
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finished, again
I finished another draft of my novel today. Finished is a funny word, because it’s not anywhere close to finished-for-real, but it’s completed another phase of the process of trying to get it into a real live book that someday a stranger will buy in a bookstore and read. And as much as I love…
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no pressure
At last, at last, I have writing time again. The kids are back in school and I have long, glorious mornings of time to use as I see fit, and I plan to use it to plow through the final edits of this novel. With luck, I’ll be finished by Christmas. This summer had a…
Got any book recommendations?