Wednesday links: Dreams and day jobs, questions for agents, and fiction and reality

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few.

Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. Of Dreams and Day Jobs, from Pub(lishing) Crawl: Usually, when a writer dreams of the day when they’re a successful author, a day job isn’t included in that dream. But, for many authors, quitting their day job isn’t necessarily an option — not until they’re absolutely sure their income from their writing is high enough to cover the costs of living. Excerpt: “My parents were always very careful in how they encouraged our dreams. I always say that they were ‘realistically supportive,’ meaning they were all for me writing and querying agents while I was in college, but they also wanted me to have a parachute to pull in case it took years for something to materialize.”

2. 5 Things Writers Should Ask Potential Agents, from Writer’s Digest: When you and an agent are having that all-important phone call, there’s quite a bit of important information that needs to be shared. While much of that will be passed from you to the agent, there is also certain information that you need to make sure you get from the agent. Excerpt: “There are hundreds of questions you could ask an agent, from the sensible ‘What attracted you to my book?’ to the slightly less sensible ‘When will you net me my first million?’ The key is to choose the ones that will get you the most important information you need to make an informed decision.”

3. The Thin Line Between Fiction & Reality, from Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire: Research is often an extremely important element of writing a novel. But, a writer also needs to remember that, if you’re writing fiction, you don’t have to stick to reality too strictly. Excerpt: “I’m working – hard – on my book for 2015. It’s a Gothic historical, and as I am the nit-picky research-loving librarian that I am, I refuse to leave any stone unturned.”