Last post I talked about the uncertainty of "that time" between an agent submitting a manuscript to a publisher and when a writer gets a response from the publisher in the form of a rejection or a contract. Thing the First: A Conversation on Time on Cusp I posed these questions to Marshall Ryan Maresca, [...]
Can’t Tell if I’m on the Cusp…
My agent's gotten ten query letters out to qualified publishers. Three of the five sent out around Thanksgiving asked for full manuscripts. This past Monday my agent sent another five. Two of those five asked, within a day or so of the query letter, for a complete manuscript. Don't have feedback on the other three. [...]
Censoring Gutenberg
While I'm sure that WordPress' new post editing mechanism is a cool, slick, thing, it's enough of a jump from the old way that I've heard several authors complain. Which is stupid. And that one needs to download (yet another) plugin to disable it is even sillier. I should NOT have to wrestle with my [...]
Goals done, gone, ahead… and a musing
Goals people make are frequently not SMART. And that makes them all fuzzy, and frustrating, frankly, when trying to assess progress. 2018 has been, for me, surprisingly good, exciting, and charges me with hope and excitement for 2019. Creativity It's been a year. I worked as a contractor for two months, and had the amazing, [...]
Trunk Novels & Research
By my count I blew five weeks and generated ~100k words on a novel I'm regretfully consigning to the metaphorical trunk. And what's funny is that I'm sure that if this novel was written forty years ago, it'd be on its way to my agent. The difference is research and realism. With a little research [...]
Quick Post-Prandial on Manuscript Maintenance
I did some time-and-motion monitoring in terms of getting changes to a manuscript fit from Scrivener to Word and cleaned and ready for The Agent to use. Fine-cleaning two scenes (~2.5k words). That means reading them aloud, copying the pieces to a word file, then reading that to ensure it's clean: 75 minutes. Compiling from [...]
A Writer’s Primer on Computer Care and Feeding
We're in the midst of National Novel Writing Month, and I'm reminded of several instances where the moan of "I just lost everything!" was heard over a coffee shop table. I've talked with writers who've lost entire manuscripts. Others that lost hours or days of work due to various issues. So, a quick technical primer [...]
WWI: A Century’s Past / Veterans Day
World War I was hideously expensive and wasteful in terms of talent. A generation of young people, of talent, of possibility--gone. The hope and potential of growing their lives and cultures mowed down, gassed, and slaughtered. And that lost of hope and potential kept the survivors from the social buoying that youth inevitably bring to [...]
POVs and Trunking
I've been wrestling with getting my next novel started before getting a full-time, paying gig. And score is trunk novels: 5, Shlomi manuscripts: 0. It kept coming across lifeless, a narration of facts and events that even extensive external and internal dialog didn't help. I'm a pantser, so I wasn't worried about "where the book [...]
Hopes, Dashed
I'm already several thousand words into my latest, but had to stop for some research. More research. Interviewing dancers research. (Okay, my daughter, but still...) And then I remembered Jeanne and Spider Robinson's book "Stardance." Well, I actually remember the original novella. It was a bit odd delving that far back into SF writings. Winced [...]