Can’t Tell if I’m on the Cusp…

shlomi on January 13, 2019

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. So now there’s five publishers looking at the novel, all of which imprints for the top publishers in the fiction biz. And while on one hand this sounds like “great progress” and is nice to hear, I don’t have any way to quantify this. Previous Armadillocon panels addressed the time to acceptance, but not the numbers part of publishers in waiting. While JK Rowling sugarplum auction fantasies dance in my head (but I harbor no delusions as to any comparisons between that and my novels), I don’t know what this “top five are reading” means in terms of getting closer to closing a deal.

Calling on wise women and men if they have ideas. Comment, or blog on your own and let me know.

Censoring Gutenberg

shlomi on January 8, 2019

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 blog editor to put pictures in-line with a list. Or have to manually decide to place a list when I’ve started a paragraph. It interrupts the flow of the writing and it makes for a rockier experience. Matt Mullenweg, I’m looking at you. Microsoft used to do these self-goal moves, and this is a big one.

I can’t speak for others, but as a tech professional I know that releases need to set expectations and listen to users. And if the user population isn’t asked, then expectations can’t be set. I’m not talking about avid beta testers and early adopters. I’m talking about folks that use the WordPress platform to facilitate their work, not be their work.

End result is that I’ve put off a number of posts simply because I got bogged down in the formatting and didn’t want to put out something that wasn’t to my liking. (Yeah, I know, the theme itself needs a wrecking ball, but that’s something else…)