Today my inbox is full of bloggers who are on the ball.

Like they all collaborated in some underground writer bloggy meeting and bounced ideas off each other

until they decided, Hey. Let’s all give practical advice today which shall inspire the words right out of our unsuspecting followers.

Today subscriptions are on target, people. Hitting straight to the writer heart.

(I was going to include a Boromir GIF, but it’s too soon.)

I link to three of them after the jump. Go read ’em.

Fellow MS Editor Kaleigh talks about writing inspiration in The Best Writing Advice on the MS Editors blog. What books inspire you? Whenever I need some inspiration, I crack open some Tolkien or Lewis. I don’t write like Tolkien at all, but he reminds me why I love fantasy. Shakespeare and Wilde remind me how I fell in love with words in the first place. And I’ve got a shelf of poetry and short fiction within reach if words won’t come to me.

Dan Koboldt’s Fact in Fantasy series had my favorite post yet today—Female Professions in Medieval Europe by Jerry Quinn. I remember having a Twitter conversation on the topic a while back. As you may or may not know (Hi new followers!), my first novel was a historical fantasy based on 12th-century Wales—one I spent 7 years researching. Can I just say, women are amazing? Our writing should reflect the diversity of women.

Don’t forget—Dan Koboldt hosts SFFpit, coming soon! Read more about June and July contests here. Last December, my Twitter pitches received the most SFFpit requests. Click here to read my advice about Twitter pitching.

Finally, Chuck Wendig gives his answers to YOUR MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED WRITING QUESTIONS on the Terrible Minds blog. Wendig’s posts are always astute, uncouth, and fantastic. Fair warning, though. While Write|Edit|Repeat is a family-friendly blog, Terrible Minds is written for mature audiences and contains some graphic language. It’s NSFW, especially if you work in a library or anywhere else where small children may be lurking or where milk spewing out of your nose is not acceptable on the clock. Anyway, Wendig gives 15 FAQs and answers them. I have a sick appreciation for his butchering metaphor regarding queries—

“And here you want to ask how you write a good query letter, don’t you? I can see the question forming on your desperate, quivering lips. That is, like with all these questions, both easy in mechanics and difficult in the quality of execution. Writing a query letter is always an act of talking a 100-lb. pig and getting it into a 5-lb. bucket. Necessary, but brutal. A bloody rendering of the work you wrote into a couple paragraphs. The rest of the work left on the floor in gory ribbons.”

Isn’t that exactly what writing a query letter feels like?