Genoveva Dimova's Blog

I recently got some happy news: in addition to English and Bulgarian, my book, FOUL DAYS, is also going to be available in Polish, Spanish and German. This is enormously exciting for me. Growing up, I had to rely on translations as English-language books were hard to find. This meant that the only books I had access to were the ones Bulgarian publishers had decided to buy and translate: those were usually the bigger, buzzier titles in every genre, though occasionally, a lesser known book would m...

I queried in the autumn of 2020, deep into the pandemic. Since some time has passed now, I thought I can share my query letter and try to parse out what worked, what I could have done better, and what I think ultimately made this letter successful. The reason I’m certain my query worked isn’t just that it ended up getting me an agent, but that it resulted in a great request rate from agents who saw only the query letter and no pages. I must have done something right!

(For the statistics n...

I love worldbuilding. This is why I read and write speculative fiction: strange food? Unusual flora and fauna? Fun festivals and sinister rituals? Yes, please.

But the reason why I’m particularly attracted to worldbuilding is the fact that constructing new cultures around familiar concepts allows us to create a distorted mirror of our own world. To examine our prejudices and biases in a space removed from the real world by several degrees.

Ever since I started writing, I’ve been buildi...

And how to nudge a novel more firmly into adult

Sometimes, it can be tricky to pinpoint the difference between YA and adult fantasy when you’re in the middle of writing, especially if you happen to read both. I hope this post helps you, whether you’re drafting (or revising) a novel you’d like to slot nicely into either YA or adult, or if you’re specifically aiming for that murky bur fun crossover category in between (which, by the way, is what I did with The Witch’s Compendium of Monsters...