Rejection

We only went into a day of injury time before the game came to an end. Our beloved hometown heroes have lost this one in a buzzer beater. While it's easy to feel torn up and brought down by rejection, you do that shit in the privacy of your own home, not on the internet. On the internet you tell everyone else the same thing you will eventually tell yourself. It's just one more step in the process. You have another story to tell and another opportunity to tell it. Stop whining and get to work.

So with that, I'm going to go work on THE 7TH SACRIFICE.

Enjoy your Sunday. (Go Patriots, beat the Jets.)

The Waiting Game

So you've written your novel, you've revised it, you've received feedback, you've revised it again, you've written a query, you've revised it, you've received feedback, you've revised it again, you've queried, you've paced madly worrying about rejection, you've been asked for a partial manuscript, you've revised the partial in fear of it not being good enough, you've submitted it, you've paced madly worrying about rejection, you've checked your email obsessively, you've paced madly worrying about rejection, you've been asked for a full manuscript, you've revised the full in fear of it not being good enough, and you've submitted it.

What happens now?

You wait. And wait. And wait and wait and wait and wait.

It's a common enough topic among writing blogs. Don't wait for a response on your current work. Move on to the next one. Publishing is a lot of hurry up and wait. You'll revise your entire book over the course of a weekend to make it as perfect as you can and then nothing.

It can be hard to deal with. The closer you get, the harder the rejection is, and the harder it is not to make it back to that level again. If you come close to touching the sky, nothing short of reaching your hand up into heaven will do. It's maddening to not achieve your goal no matter how hard you try.

But wait you must. Good things come to those that wait. ...crappy things too, I can attest, but nothing good comes from something rushed (just ask my previous girlfriends).

The first time I had a full manuscript (BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE), I was told to expect a twelve-week response time. I was mortified when twelve weeks passed, thirteen, fourteen. Were they JUST about to get to my manuscript? If I asked for an update when they hit delete and tell me to sod off? Was it all a test to see if I would be a low-maintenance client and not pester them a thousand times a day with inane questions?

Finally at fifteen weeks, I emailed to confirm the file had been received and asked if they needed any additional material. That's the polite way of asking, "Hey what the fuck?" They confirmed that they had received the manuscript and apologized for the delay. The assistant was super awesome and I like her a whole lot. She was never anything but professional with me.

In total I received an eventual pass 7 months after I sent the materials off. They offered feedback which was awesome. I never expect feedback on a query. I don't expect it on a partial (though it would be nice). While I don't expect it on a full, after waiting so long and having invested so much, it certainly would be nice for even a paragraph of feedback. But hey, we're not entitled and that's not a statement of how things should be. I got it on my first two manuscripts, though, and it was incredibly helpful.

I thanked the assistant and the agent for the pleasure of working with them and the feedback. I then said I had finished another novel while I was waiting and asked would they like to see it? Sure it was a dig, but only a little one. I really had finished a second novel (and not first draft, the thing was done and in the can). I queried the second one (HELP WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING) and we went round and round again.

They passed and I think it was for the best. This agent wants a manuscript ready to shop as soon as it's submitted. While I hope to be able to produce such a manuscript eventually, it doesn't seem like I'm producing them yet. I'd like an agent who not only points out what (s)he thought was weak but how that could be improved.

Which brings me to the current manuscript (THE TRIAD SOCIETY). This is with a different agent, one that I think is exactly the person I would want to work with. When they asked for my full, they said to expect a turn around time of two months. This is a third less than the previous agent but nothing says it won't be another seven months. Except for my experience with this agency. I queried (twice) my first two manuscripts (for a total of four queries) and they were prompt and always beat deadline. Two months is up Saturday. Of course, that two months covered Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the general winter holiday.

This brings us to what I'm calling Injury Time (watch soccer to get that joke). Given the number of holidays that occurred during that stretch of time, I really don't think the two-month mark hits until February 5th, three weeks later. If they replied to me within that time, I would still consider it at or less than two months.

Now like I said, that's just an estimate. Things come up, emergencies with existing clients, illness, family emergencies and the like. If it takes seven months it takes seven months. I have finished the second draft of JEHOVAH'S HITLIST and sent it to beta readers for feedback (could use a few more if you're in the mood for adult, dystopian, alternate-history science fiction). I'm also working on the first draft of THE 7TH SACRIFICE. I've got plenty to do. No resting on my laurels here.

BUT, like I said earlier, this folks have always come in before their deadline. The arrival of injury time means that it's likely I'll hear back from them soon.

OH MY GOD! *PACES MADLY WORRYING ABOUT REJECTION*

You can tell yourself not to obsess, not to worry, but really, I consider all this anxiety part and parcel to my ambition. I want this and have wanted it for decades. This is my life's goal and I've taken as many steps as I can take without an agent. That's the next step. That's the next step in my publishing plan. I could query publishers directly or self-publish, but there are other blogs for that kind of thing. Here in the Inkwell, we follow the traditional mode of publishing and we plan on ruling that bitch with an iron fist!



I won't even begin to tell you how many times I've checked my email just writing this post. Granted I have a smart phone so all I have to do is glance at it and see if it's blinking at me. That only enables the obsession.

I started actively tweeting and blogging about my writing before I was published not only to build platform but to document how hard it is to try and achieve your dreams when you can send off a completed manuscript and not hear anything for months and months and months. When I'm the flipping Clint Eastwood of fantasy, aspiring writers will read these early posts and see all this desire and anxiety and worry and think to themselves, Clint Eastwood? Really? I would have gone with John C. Reilly.


OH MY GOD! *PACES MADLY WORRYING ABOUT REJECTION*

Arcadia

When I was a young lad, only twelve, and had decided in earnest that I was going to be a novelist, I began tap tap tapping away on my Apple IIGS (Appleworks, baby!). There were a number of ideas bumping around in my head. I wrote stuff for Jim Henson's Storyteller (which in no way fit the program but what the hell did I know). I got into a lot of trouble when my mother (who spied on me to make sure I wasn't being amoral--that clearly didn't work) saw me title a story "Lucifer Jr." The work I put the most effort into was Arcadia--I don't remember the actual title.

Arcadia was a post-apocalyptic story. Between pollution and natural evaporation, there was so much moisture in the air that clouds could actually sustain weight. Humanity fired took what could survive and sent them up in rockets. Over times, they evolved so their bones were lighter and they had wings. They kept their prisoners down below but one of them escapes to the clouds above.

I'd print pages off on my dot matrix printer and send them to my sister to read. She thought they were interesting. She was upset when I stopped writing it. I thought it was crap. This says something about her taste. I never forgot that story, though. It was my first genuine attempt. It was my first real failure. And it was so BAD!

My sister still asks about it from time to time, when we talk (which granted is not often). A small part of me tries to write the absolute best story I can so I can send her the book and say, "See, this is why I quit writing that novel when I was 12. This is good. That was crap."

It's kind of odd how much influence a 21-year-old failure has over my effort today. (My writing is totally better though.)

When all is said and done and I'm bereft of new story ideas, I'll totally resurrect this thing and shell it out there. :D

Measuring Progress

On my website, I have a page named the Queue where I list all the ideas I plan on pursuing to completion. This includes novels, short stories, plays, etc. My current wip will have a general word count (I don't update it every day) and those works I've finished will be struck through with a final word count (usually of the first draft).

I modified it today and removed the word count on everything except my current work in progress. I only work on one story at a time and with the exception of HOSNR, all of them would be restarted when I get to them. So having a word count there--especially a word count that hasn't changed in years--makes me look like I'm scatterbrained and/or unable to finish work I start on.

So it's all gone. Now, only 7Sac has a word count. I think the page looks much better, cleaner, more focused. It's a laser! bzzzzrrrzzzzzzzz!!!!!

Knowledge = (the battle)/2

I was watching a movie the other day and character A says of character B that he is a marksman. He can strike a man square in the chest at 50 meters. This was a modern piece with modern weaponry. There are different levels of writing what you know. The soul of some things can only be realized through experience. Others simply need research. In either case, you need to address a first-hand account of the subject and not just lend your interpretation to someone else's interpretation. That just becomes the operator/telephone game.

In this case, I immediately knew the writer had no idea what (s)he was talking about. 50 meters? Good god, not fifty meters! That's so hard!

...no, wait, no it's not. On a standard marksmanship target range, the SHORTEST target is placed at 50 meters. The longest is set at 300 meters.

Rather than paying attention to the movie, I began to wonder if the writer had even fired a gun before or just thought a dramatically delivered line would go unquestioned.

Now I'm not a hunter. I've never killed anything larger than an insect. ...except for a bird that done under my tire when I was a teenager. I was, at one time, a certified marksman (my preferred range being between 175 and 250--though I ALWAYS missed 300. I never got the arc right). If you're going to write a book that includes modern weaponry, I recommend finding a local sportsman's club and renting a pistol, a shotgun, a rifle, and if they have one, an M-16. Each of them has different uses, different feels, and different results. A little research will dramatically improve your weapon choice and description. You'll also avoid throwing your reader out of your story when they realize you have no idea what you're talking about.

The Rhythm of My H--Fingers

I wrote today. By itself this is not a big deal. I write a minimum of five days a week. Near the end of JH, I was writing seven days a week¹. But I had a powerful flu that caused me to do not much of anything but sit on the couch under a blanket and watch TV².

I went back to work yesterday, but just didn't have the energy on the train to write. Hell, I barely stayed awake. I read on the way in and the way home. This morning, though, I made myself take up the keyboard and give things a try. I was in the middle of a chapter and was worried I'd struggle to find the rhythm, so the sooner I started, the sooner I'd figure things out.

The good thing is that I was able to remember where I had been headed and finish the chapter. I even wrote a few things I hadn't expected. But it reminds me how important rhythm is to the way I write. There was a team building exercise we did in my fraternity called a rock pull. Take an 800-1200 pound rock from the local quarry. Drop it off 1.7 miles away from the house. Drill three holes and install ribar. Tie off ropes that lead to three logs. Each log is wide enough for four people. This was the pledges' rock. They'd stay on the logs the entire time. The other spots (we were a small house) were filled by active members. Everyone was on the rock. Look at the things you could accomplish as a team that you couldn't accomplish on your own.

Now at some point during the pull, you'd want to take a break, but you couldn't take a break. It was a thousand times more difficult to pull the rock from a stopped position than while you were moving. As long as the rock was moving, you could keep going³.

It's the same with writing. It's so much easier to keep going than to stop and start. The rhythm propels you forward. In those instances where you have an extended stop, I recommend skipping back a few chapters (never start over, that's just a whole mess of trouble that violates the rules!) and read. Read your own work until you find the rhythm and can press forward. If you just start back up where you stopped, that break may become noticeable.

Few of us have the luxury of writing a book from start to finish without interruption. The key is to make it look as seamless as possible.


¹ I'm actually trying to tone that down. My wife was starting to get annoyed with me going out weekend mornings so we never had breakfast with one another. I'd like to start using my weekends for hobbies that have fallen to the wayside. Problem is, I love writing so much that it always feels like more fun.

² A streamed a few new movies on Netflix that I had never seen before. "Bottle Shock" was a great movie with Alan Rickman and Chris Pine. We also watched seasons 1 and 2 of Angel and season 1 of Psych on DVD (which we own and have seen repeatedly). Like I said, it was a powerful flu. Lots of time in front of the TV.

³ There was a scheduled break half way there. To my pride and pleasure, no pledge ever fell off the rock in the years I was there. Only one member ever refused to pull and his dickitude has already been illustrated in a previous post here.

At the End of All Things

More and more often, one of the arguments against ebooks I'm hearing is: When society collapses and there is no more power to charge the ebook or run the servers or what have you, I'll be happy with my paper books.

It's a hyperbolic example, but not for the reasons I think they're intending. I think they're going with the "if the world ended" as an extreme example, but I think the extremity is to believe you'd have time for leisure writing once a power grid collapsed.

Without electricity, your entire day just got dedicated to survival. You'll need to learn how to make candles or lantern oil. You'll need to learn how to farm. You'll need to learn how to stockpile necessities for the winter.

When you have a finite number of candles and your daylight is spent staying alive, when exactly does all this reading happen?

(This all assumes you survived the initial riots that decimate the population and you don't use book pages for kindling on your first sub-freezing night.)

(A little binger to brighten your day. ;)

Timing is Everything

Like the classic joke goes, "In comedy, timing is...

...

...everything."

I'm reading the last in the Shadowmarch tetralogy by Tad Williams, SHADOWHEART. It's a less than stellar name and most people don't know that a four-book series is a tetralogy¹, but Tad Williams is the reason I write fantasy--the reason². So we're going to give him a pass on that.

I have to admit, though, between Williams and Martin, I'm starting to get worn out on epic fantasy. Their stories are the epitome of epic, but frankly, there are characters whose chapters are fundamental to the resolution of the entire thing and I could care less. There are just too many people. As I wade through this lofty tome, after having consumed the three before it, I find myself impatient for the end. I want that long-awaited climax and resolution of the various characters I've come to care about. And having to read through yet another chapter of a character I don't care about where content that I know well is repeated (and repeated) in internal dialogue is getting frustrating.

That is not so much the focus on today's writing, just an observance. Perhaps that's why my word counts have been shrinking. Not so much an intent to cowtow to the industry and its word limits, but the desire to tell a more compact and immediate tale. I will ponder this in the future and see if that's the case.

No, the focus of today's telling is timing. This is crucial in any work, and the more characters you introduce, the more difficult it can be to align character actions to further the plot but to remain consistent with the story's own chronology.

Specifically, there are two characters who will influence other characters who will influence other characters. They finally make their trip to Southmarch and I am enthused becomes here comes the domino that will set the whole chain a falling! Woo hoo! Here it comes.

...but it doesn't come. Now granted, this is an epic fantasy, so while characters A and B swim across the bay to the nearby island, the author can focus on characters C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J without losing any time in the total advancement of the story. It can maintain the preferred pacing of this rumbling epic without losing track of the domino that is about to set the chain falling.

But then Character E gets another chapter. And then Character H gets two more chapters. Too many things are happening. Why haven't we gone back to characters A and B?

Well, the obvious thing is that when next we see them they won't still be swimming across the bay. They will have done other, irrelevant things necessary for their trip but unnecessary for the enjoyment of the reader.

That doesn't happen. In fact, when we finally return to characters A and B, they are finishing their swim across the bay. This is offensive to anyone paying attention. Some stories may play loosely with the passage of time, but most don't. So unless you're slip-streaming back and forth, be mindful of your timeline. When characters begin moving at different speeds, the reader can see the hand of the author in the story. You're this giant distracting thing like a boom mic that falls into frame. You're holding onto the characters while their legs turn so you can have the plot play out how you want.

And that's a funny thing. While you're the author, when a reader invests, the story becomes theirs. They don't want to see your hands in their stories mucking everything up. You need to be invisible. You are the mirror in which your readers see your story. There may be glass and silver there, but all they see is themselves.

Timing...

...is everything.


¹ Instead of a tetralogy, people try to call it a quadrology.

² I can tell you plenty of influences, but I know when the light bulb turned on. I was thirteen or so reading the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy and knew this is what I wanted to do. No hemming or hawing. Tad Williams showed me the path.

Germ Warfare

So here's my suggestion: Write a guest post on a popular blog and then get sick when it runs, causing you to miss the brief exposure it provides you.

Yay my immune system!

I hate being sick. Mostly, I hate it because I'm sick. I doubt anyone sits at their computer writing a blog post about how they love being sick.

I also hate being sick because when I take off from work, I have so much free time for writing! But all I do is sit around feeling miserable.


Moooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooan

I haven't been this sick in over a year. I don't like it. If someone would like to take over being sick for me, that would be much appreciated.

...yeah, that's all I got. This seemed funny when I thought it in my head. Now that I've written it, I'm not so sure. Then again, I've been breathing through my mouth for two days and everything tastes like mucus. So...

Hope you're all doing well. Hello to the new readers. Aren't you glad you stopped by? It's not always this lame, I promise.

...well, at least I hope not.

Guest Blog at Pimp My Novel

Eric is on vacation this week, so I wrote a guest post at Pimp My Novel. You should go check it out.

Arbitrary Milestones

I passed 10,000 words on THE 7TH SACRIFICE this morning. This pleases me. I don't know why it pleases me more than passing 9,000 words or 11,000 words. 11,000 is more than 10,000 so why doesn't that please me more?

And it can't be some ridiculous "if I pass 10,000 then I know I'll finish it" because this very novel was abandoned at 27,000 words when last I attempted it (though this time around it's a bajillion times better--I have yet to describe the main character climbing down off his wagon and then climbing back up again).

For all that, I like passing 10,000 words. Perhaps it was all those times in my youth that I said, "I'm going to write a novel" only to fizzle out at 2500 words or some pathetic total that barely qualifies as a short story. 10,000 is progress. It says, you're working toward your goal.

I also like 50,000 words. 50,000 is the big number for me. I've never written a manuscript pass 50,000 words and not finished it. 50k, 100k, 150k are all obvious yet arbitrary milestones we assign because of our decimal-based learning structure. You can rope 10k in there too, as it is the essence of decimal.

It feels good, though. Especially to have done so so quickly. I had a lonely little intro chapter. Then I brainstormed with Liz. Now I have 10,000 words and a week hasn't even passed yet. That's pleasing. That's invigorating. This baby is on its way.

Writing is good.

(I'm coming down with something, though. You should see the stuff coming out of my nose. Not sure how much progress I'll make on the way home.)

Waning Fanaticism

I follow George Martin on LiveJournal. I thrilled to see the amazing actors that will perform in "A Game of Thrones." (Peter Dinklage!!!!) I have watched the trailers and am anxious to see the finished product in hopes that it will be as great as it appears. I even follow A Game of Thrones on twitter.

Sometimes I see responses to that twitter account by other followers and it reminds me, I'm just not into the story as I once was.

Friends introduced me to the series when A FEAST FOR CROWS first came out, and I bounced on it. I read all four books in a row and was just as enthralled as they were. But now? By the time A DANCE WITH DRAGONS releases, it will have been a minimum of six years since CROWS came out. I say minimum because there's no guarantee the book will actually release in 2011. It was supposed to release every September for the last three years.

There's a lot of "don't judge until you've been there" about this whole thing. How could anyone understand what it takes to...blah blah blah. It's an invitation for fate to smote me with their lightning bolt of humility, but at the moment, I really don't care. Six years for a novel that doesn't even advance the plot from where the previous book ended. It simply parallels it.

I fully expect this series to go unfinished or to follow THE WHEEL OF TIME and require a different author to finish it. This also influences my interest in the TV show. If it's a rave success and they cover a book per season, and (assuming DANCE comes out this year), the next book won't be released by the time the series has run its course.

Two years used to be a standard for fantasy. When I was growing up, an author had two years to put out the next installment of a series. Somewhere in the nineties that started to balloon. In the aughts, turn around time for the major names has become ridiculous. Of the major best sellers, only Williams and Sanderson seem capable of producing content on any type of schedule.

As a fan, this is incredibly frustrating. As an aspiring author, I cannot fathom how a person is managing their time if they write full time and cannot produce a finished book in over half a decade.

I list Martin and his series on my website as a favorite. And he is and it is, but the more time goes by the more this changes. I can't really call myself a fan of a series if the series no longer exists, can I?

What about you? What are your thoughts?

A Good and Happy Life

Occasionally I'll rant in my head¹. Something touched me off yesterday. I think it was a webcomic or a response to a webcomic. I don't know. The jist of it was that an author uses his medium as a pulpit for his own opinions.

At face value, this can be true. The context of the statement was saying that an author always uses his medium as a pulpit for his own opinions and this is just crap. It's an opinion that comes up more frequently than I think it should. In short, it says an author is incapable of envisioning or writing a world or action that deviates from his own perceptions of said world. What? If that's the case, Jennifer Hiller is a serial killer². Of course authors can create characters that have opinions, desires, and motives different from their own.

That was a short rant because I've had it before and with real people. I then began to examine my own work and realized I've never actually written a work (to date) where the characters or events are representative of my opinions or beliefs. Some might fall in line, but none of them are a megaphone. None of them are a purposeful allegory.

So I pondered about writing a story that represents my biases and opinions and frustrations and proclivities. And as I pondered the happenings of this treatise, A Prairie Home Companion uttered the phrase "A Good and Happy Life" and I found my title.

SPOILER

Summation: The disparity in wealth widens and leads to its inevitable conclusion. The have nots rise up, the economy collapses, and in the anarchy before a new regime brings order, we set our stage. A wealthy teen away from home returns to find her parents murdered, her sister taken, and her house being ransacked. She pairs up with a street urchin who was looting the house at the time. After yelling and haggling and an offer of payment, the urchin says she knows where the sister is being held and will take the girl there. They brave the mean streets of [New York/Boston/St. Louis/not sure] in an effort to get the girl back. They voice their opinions on what's happening, extol the virtues of the young girl taken to be sold into who knows what kind of depraved service, and what they dislike about the other group.

In the end, the older sister makes a mistake, continuing to act from her station. With her life threatened, she begs the urchin to save her. To which she does not, as the mistake was a sign of her selfishness and disregard for others. If she truly had loved her sister, she would have endured. The girl is killed. The urchin then goes and rescues the little girl [maybe] as she was worth saving.

Not sure when I'll write it, but I like it enough that I've added the title to my queue.


¹ This is not surprising.

² She's made a similar such comment on her blog or on Killer Chicks. I can't remember which.