Accept the Crapitude

So, invoking rule 2a didn't have an immediate impact. I chose to finished Bujold's CRYOBURN¹ before getting back to work for a few reasons which I may or may not enumerate below². Anyway, this morning was technically a writing day, but I quickly realized that rule 2a was unnecessary. The writing was crap, but it was a level of crapness that seemed appropriate for a first draft. To stop and revise 40,000 words would reestablish neither voice nor rhythm in a fashion conducive to continuing the work. It was a time sink, a trap. It is the very reason rule 2 exists to begin with.

So instead, I began spot checking. Spot checking being reading while correcting errors I might happen upon. Mostly I refamiliarized myself with the Nation's bad grammar, Jehovah's obsession with family, Sid's foul-mouthed excitability, and Three's lovable innocence. It reminds me how excited I was writing JH before I stopped to revise TTS. It makes me want to write the work again. This is what I needed. I needed to warm up the engine so I could drive in the snow.

It doesn't fix my immediate concern that there's something wrong near where I stopped. I hope that it will come to me soon and I can correct it. Otherwise I'll have to soldier on. And I won't say that I just needed to be inspired again. That's just crap. What I needed was to love JEHOVAH'S HITLIST more than THE TRIAD SOCIETY. That has proved much more difficult than normal (see footnote³ too for hypotheses). While my word count won't be going up today, it may start going up tomorrow, definitely by Friday. Absolutely by Monday or the warning sirens go off.

Either way, it's time for Jehovah to discover the ruins of the Nation's government, meet with racist Rori Schapp (that will eventually lead to the story's thesis statement later in the book when he's talking to Dominic Texas), confront the deputy that follows him, and move the plot along. I want to have this first draft finished by the new year.

The killer? When I get beta feedback for TTS, I'll have to stop again. While I think TTS was served wonderfully for taking a longer break to begin JH before revision, JH seems to be suffering now because of the repeated breaks.

¹ The end of this book would have been crushing to a series fan if Bujold hadn't spoiled it a year ago on her MySpace blog. It's almost enough to cause an AYFKM moment. It's a half-AYFKM, which is why this is only a footnote and not its own post like it almost was yesterday when I read it. It would have been delicious heartache, the kind of thing that Liz would chide me about for months after reading it if I had written it. But I knew it was coming.

² The hardest part of starting JH again was that I didn't want to stop revising TTS. Receiving beta feedback on the first three chapters so soon after finishing my own revision, and seeing how much the novel improved because of that feedback, I wanted to keep going. There are 30 more chapters that need this kind of polish. Let's get to it! But I have to actually let people read the manuscript. ...dammit.

I also think there's a problem somewhere. Maybe Jehovah accepted the Hanged Man's threats too readily. Perhaps he needed to know he was being followed sooner. Even though I understand how dangerous the Hanged Man is and that Jehovah with his obsession with family would absolutely kill five strangers to keep them all safe, I'm not sure if I've properly communicated all of that.

³ I've totally stolen Nate Wilson's footnote gimmick. I commented that it really freed up my writing from those pesky asides. This is proving much more true than I realized at the time. This makes blogging so much easier. Why doesn't everyone have footnotes? Look at how easily I can communicate side-information without obstructing the flow of the main thought. Genius! Pure genius!

⁴ You just went back and looked because you didn't remember there being a fourth footnote. Didn't you? ...I think the footnotes might have just jumped the shark. Shit.

The Satisfaction of Success

I am a success!

What? Did I get an agent? No. Did I get an offer of publication from a major publishing house? No. Did I get a date with Rosario Dawson? No.

Yet I am still a success. I have not accomplished any of the above professional goals (and if I never accomplish that third one, it'll probably go a lot smoother with my wife), but I have done the thing I perhaps love the most. I finished a novel.

This feeling right here, the mix of excitement and euphoria, is the big pay off for me. It's not the completion of the first draft. That's just a step in the road. It's finishing the revision where I feel confident enough in the manuscript that I can send it to other people to read. Of all the works that I have finished (and even JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, which isn't complete), I felt THE TRIAD SOCIETY was my weakest offering. One of the reasons I continued on to JH instead of TTS was because I was unenthusiastic about he ms. That extra time helped a lot, though, and I realized a lot of my mistakes. I tweaked here and fixed there and made one massive change (Herman to Annelie) that made all the difference in the world.

I just took something mediocre and made it great. ...or at least better. Good enough that I'm happy with it, feel it's representative of my talent. I have accomplished my main goal. That is a great feeling.

So whether my current partial leads to a full and (fingers crossed) leads to representation, it's not as important as what I've done write now. I wrote a novel from start to end, and I think it's good. I hope you get the chance to read it, and that you enjoy it too.

The Importance of a Name

THE TRIAD SOCIETY is a pre-steam punk fantasy. What does that mean? That means steam technology is in its early advances. I don't have airships or the like. I have steam-infused water and other similar "inventions!" Reliarach is the first kingdom on the Crescent Sea to develop such technology, the other six kingdoms being in the technological dark ages (a pun!). The king of Reliarach is Urban.

Urban.

The entire story is set in a city where this new technology and its resultant socio-economic impact is tearing everything apart. And I named the king Urban. I wanted to name the king Urban as soon as I decided that I would include a king in the story. Only after the fact did I think it was a cute nod toward the atmosphere I was developing. And after that, I never thought on it again.

Not until now. A beta reader commented that the name was like beating him over the head with the message. OH NO! I hate that. I do not like to be beat about the head or have my ears boxed or any other physical violence from messages. That leads to AYFKM moments!

So now I have to ponder and ponder hard. Is this one person's reaction or should I change the name. I really like King Urban, but at the same time, I will not beat my readers about the head with a name. Twould be akin to beating them with a fish, and no one likes that.

Trading at $1,365.00 an ounce

A good beta reader is worth his or her weight in gold. As of closing October 13, 2010, gold traded at $1,365 an ounce. An ounce is equal to 1/16 of a pound. (2.2 pounds equals 1 kilogram for you metric folks.) Assuming Elizabeth Poole weighs about 110 pounds (when she's soaking wet maybe), that means she's worth $2,204, 400.

Yesterday's exciting news is that an agent that appeared on the infamous List asked for sample pages from THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I wore myself out yesterday doing the Dance of Joy. But when I came to my senses, I realized I was unprepared! The thing is still in revision. It hasn't even gone to beta readers! I should email her and say sample pages will have to wait (this request came outside of the normal querying process as a result of the sample pitch paragraph submitted as part of the webinar I mentioned previously).

NO WAY!

I'm not waiting. This thing says I have seven days to submit the first 30-35 pages. They'll then take two months to review those pages. I can revise the first 30-35 pages in seven days (already finished first pass) and the remainder in two months. No problem. There's no reason to delay here. The thing will be done and polished before they (undoubtedly) ask for the full manuscript. I've revised 29/33 chapters already. Pretty much all I need is the beta read/revision. So if my beta readers can review the first 30 pages right now, this balls a rolling!

Sara Megibow has expressed her frustration at fantasy authors glutting the early chapters with world building. The reason I'm doing a second pass before beta? I'm worried I did the same thing. There are a few paragraphs in chapter one and a section in chapter two in particular that I think need to be moved or cut all together. Without saying any of this, I send the ms to Liz and she pings the EXACT chapters I was worried about AND the EXACT section I was worried about.

That's not just skill. That's peace of mind. Now I can skip worrying whether I was being overly strict with myself or risking this great opportunity by submitting something I was on the fence about (I liked the world building, but it mucked up the pacing a bit). Now I know. It wasn't me being hard on myself. It was me seeing a problem (not a glaring one, those are easy to pick out. The subtle ones are harder). I need to tool this stuff for the betterment of the story. I have confirmation. I have peace of mind. And that is invaluable.

But this is what I do!

I went to lunch across the street, diligently working on the revision of TTS (Otwald is about to meet Crown Princess Klara, which will require some serious scrubbing). The owner's wife brings out my food and sees me tapping away on my laptop.

"No more work," she says. "It's time to enjoy ourselves!"

I smiled and nodded, but really just wanted to reply, "This is how I enjoy myself."

This is what I do, lady.

Frenetic

I have stopped revising so I can read BLUE FIRE. I haven't opened my computer since Monday evening. This isn't too bad because I should finish the book by tomorrow. It's not a long-term delay or anything. And reading a good book is a great way to recharge one's batteries. Keep the juices flowing and the ideas fresh. Flowing juice can be difficult to handle, though. Fresh ideas just pop out of your head and demand to be put to paper (or in my case, screen). I've had some new ideas for THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE (and I still want to get to the end because I love it so much. I had a HUGE breakthrough for JEHOVAH'S HITLIST that requires I write another 30,000 words before I even get to it. I have some corrections I need to make to THE TRIAD SOCIETY once I start revising again--of course those come at the end as well, so I need to get that back in gear. I've even been having ideas for WINE AND VINEGAR, which I had forgotten about until I found the manuscript file the other day.

I feel absolutely frenetic inside. I'm really enjoying the book, and I want to finish it. But all these ideas! They demand attention! They demand appeasement! And the worst of it is, once I finish the book, I will still only work on one of them at a time. I'll need to finish revising TTS so I can send it out to beta readers so I can go back to JH and finish that first draft. Then when I set that aside, I can start back on T7S, which I'm effectively starting from scratch and aborting my previous attempt. So IF (and that's an all caps IF) I write WINE AND VINEGAR directly after T7S, that won't be until this time next year at the earliest.

GAH! Too much juice! Too much juice!!!

REVISIOOOOON! REVISION.

I love revision. My love for revision is inversely equivalent to my love for writing queries. When I get into a groove on revising, the words to "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof change to "Revision," and I hear the chorus shouting it over and over in my head.

I'm 1/3 of the way through TTS, and I am in such a good mood. Why? Well for one, if I'm revising, that means I have a finished manuscript. It always feels good to finish a novel. But more importantly, I'm taking what is most assuredly a crappy draft and making it awesome. I'm still concerned there might be too much world building in the first two chapters, but I just finished chapter 11 and am totally jazzed. I've really tightened a lot of stuff that was loose before and the whole progression of events is solid. I'm enjoying this story as a reader not just a writer, and that's always a good sign. Really, I think it's the best sign. If you would sit down and read your work for the sake of reading it, then you've written something you truly enjoy for its own merits and not just the obligatory sense of accomplishment.

And not to toot my own horn, but that first chapter I wrote where Otwald first goes to the Triad Society? Holy hell, that was some good world building. I'm mean, damn fine. Sometimes I really do feel like I have the skill to not only succeed at all this, but to be awesome at it.

Fingers crossed that holds true for when this goes out to beta readers. LurkerWithout didn't like WANTED, and I value his opinion as a reader. He reads a billion books a month, so if he likes it, that carries weight with me.

Hobo Writing

So I live in New Hampshire (Nashua). I work in Massachusetts (Boston). While this may seem extreme to drive from one state to another for someone living in the middle of a huge state (read any state not in New England, Delaware, Maryland, or Hawaii), it's not that far. I drive 20-30 minutes to the train station, take an hour long train ride, then a twenty minute subway ride and I'm just down the street from where I work. Sure, this is longer than any commute I've ever had in my life, but I love the company I work for, and it beats being unemployed.

The best part is the hour-long train ride. When people see me cranking 2000-4000 words five days a week every week, they say, "Wow you write so fast!" I don't think so. I just write two hours a day every day and that's what comes of it. (I also write on weekends, but usually only accomplish 1000 words a day or so.)

I always joke that if I am successful enough that I can write full-time, I would have to continue buying my rail pass and ride the trains all day while I write. Well, I have vacation all this week, and I decided to ride the rails like a hobo--a well dressed, showered, shaved, and equipped hobo.

So here's how it works. Take the train down to North Station, skip down to South Station, and the grab whatever train leaves next. Get off at the last destination my card gets me (not the destination station, which has an impact I discuss later), eat lunch, get back on the train, go back to South Station, and repeat until I get a full day's worth of work. Hobo Writing!

Now, I had another epiphany over the weekend so I have officially stopped work on JEHOVAH'S HITLIST and begun revising THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I forgot how flipping large the first two chapters are. I'll have to go over those again before I send them out and make sure I'm not world building too much too early. (And where the hell did all this passive voice come from?)

Here is what I learned:

• When going off on adventure, be sure to fully charge your smart phone so you can take advantage of the miracle of modern technology, like GPs mapping and the Googles. Mistake #1
• When I have consecutive days off, I always stay up late. I feel like I'm not maximizing my vacation time if I'm not staying up late. Don't ask me why this is, but this prevents me from getting an early and effective start. Mistake #2
• Non-destination locations are commuter waypoints. They are oases of parking lots an factory buildings with little by way of food or even neighborhoods I feel comfortable walking around without a loaded pistol...okay, not even then.
• Destination locations are much the same unless they are an Amtrak stop or a state capital (...which are Amtrak stops). I should have waited 15 more minutes and gone down to Providence. Mistake #3
• Much like flying, riding a train all day is dehydrating. I don't know why, exactly, but it is. Certainly walking around Bridgewater State College (which is one big ass building and nothing by way of food) and then sitting for thirty minutes in the humidity didn't help. Mistake #4
• When trekking to an unknown subway stop--say Kendall Square--three hours after lunch time, be sure to look in both directions before wandering off in search for food. There may have been a bar and grill right to your left. Mistake #5
• When beholding manna from heaven that is food trucks, do not break down crying when you find the only ones still selling offer only soy burgers and fellafel.
• Do not presume to understand Boston regardless of the years you've worked there or the frequency in which you've gotten lost in Southie. You have not seen Boston in its entirety until you've been to MIT (yes, pedagogues, it's not technically Boston. All of Eastern Massachusetts is Boston, so stuff it! :p).
• Do not ask the woman carrying the bucket of ice-like substance and baster whether she's a good scientist or an evil scientist. You may not like her answer.
• Watch all available seasons of Eureka before going to MIT. It will help prepare you.
• The crazy lady having a meltdown on the platform to the Red Line should be sad, but given she's standing outside Mass General, it's okay to laugh. Medical treatment is within her grasp...and they can hear her, so they're probably already on the way.
• When you finally get food and your hands are shaking because you're so hungry, do not gorge yourself on onion rings. The increased fat in your bloodstream will make you lethargic and your writing productivity will plummet. Mistake #6
• Treat your return train ride home during rush hour like any other rush hour train. Get there in a reasonable amount of time else you won't get to write at all. Mistake #7
• When driving home in the rain, do not leave adequate stopping distance between you and the car in front of you. That kind of thing is to assholes what shit is to flies.

Total revision work for today was 10,000 words. Not bad, but I think I could have done better if I had left during my normal time of 7am rather than 9. And if I had gone to Providence rather than Bridgewater. If I try again tomorrow, we'll see how far I get.

QUERY: THE TRIAD SOCIETY (a draft)

Part of the webinar I posted about earlier is a query critique. I've already queried out BM&BBQ and WCO, so it's time to bite the bullet on TTS. Below is a first draft query letter. Your constructive feedback is greatly appreciated.


Otwald d'Kilrachen intervenes when Torvald d'Bluefire's dissolution of an affair turns violent. Otwald delivers Torvald to the authorities and sends the injured woman to the hospital. But when she never arrives, Torvald accuses him of kidnapping her, the Princess Annelie. On the run, Otwald searches a city fractured into rival societies. He must find Princess Annelie and exonerate his name, but in so doing, may spark a revolution.

THE TRIAD SOCIETY is a 95,000-word light-steampunk/fantasy. This will be my first novel publication.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Otwald wants nothing more than to live his life as a count's son should, with honor, duty, and service. He sees the kingdom crumbling under the weight of its own bureaucracy, the capital breaking into rival factions, and wonders if his family is to blame. They control the garrison. His brother lead the soldiers during the massacre at Kester Square. And they murdered him for it.

Mourning the death of his brother, Otwald intervenes when he sees three nobles attacking a young woman. A nobleman should know better. A nobleman should act better. He defeats them all, turns them into the authorities, and sends the woman off to the hospital. The legal bureaucracy is turned against him. He must find the woman to exonerate himself, but she never made it to the hospital. To find her, he may strike the spark that finally ignites revolution.

THE TRIAD SOCIETY is an 85,000-word light-steampunk fantasy with series potential. This would be my first novel publication.

Query Doldrums

I've pretty much known what was wrong with THE TRIAD SOCIETY since I finished the first draft of the manuscript. It's taken all this time to articulate what's wrong with it, but there is a reason I did not launch immediately back into revision. There was something seriously wrong. I knew it. And I needed to be able to say what it was before I started revising.

The setting sucks. You would think this to be a hard thing to have happen given I'm writing TTS in the same setting as WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING. I've already built the setting, how could it suck? Well, for starters, that book isn't published. It's written but there's nothing to say it'll ever see the light of day. So here I am writing another story assuming that WCONH has already been read? Ridiculous. Not that I did that too much because TTS is set on the opposite side of the Crescent Sea. It's a pre-steampunk society. Very different from Andaria in the east.

But that wasn't all. There were scenes from my original concept of the story that never made it into the finished draft but should have. Perhaps not where I thought they'd go, but they need to be in there. The pacing is too fast and too many things happen in convenient successive order and all these things could happen anywhere because I haven't given any consideration to the setting and how it would affect people's decisions.

In summation? It's pale. It's a pale representation of a story that should be flush with depth and description.

I've started noting specific instances that I made a mistake and how to correct them. I'm getting exciting about the story again because I think I can fix it and make it awesome and people will love it and that would be awesome. WHEEEE! When I get excited, I start thinking of what comes next in the process. I thought it would be fun (and helpful) if I wrote a query for THE TRIAD SOCIETY and through it up here for criticism. Certainly it would be good to get a few drafts under my belt before I start the process in earnest. (And yes, I'm aware of the query forums on Nathan Bransford's boards but have had mixed results with the comments posted in response.)

So I began to craft my query. I've already done one (terrible) query for this manuscript, so perhaps I could build off that failure. ...god I hate querying. All that excitement over getting back to this ms has totally evaporated. I hate writing queries. I am so ridiculously bad at it. The male hero rescues the princess? Really? That's the trite you want to send in buster? Well no, that's not really story. Sure sounds like the story. It's more nuanced than that. Nuanced my ass, you just wrote a rescue the princess damsel in distress story. Get out of here hack.

Sigh. Another reason I want an agent who I will work with for a long time? As soon as I get one, I never want to query again. Ever.

So no, no query for TTS today. It's for the best. I would not want to violate rule number 1 (only work on one ms at a time and don't switch until the first draft is complete). Still, I was excited for a little bit.

Filling in the Middle

I still haven't started revision on THE TRIAD SOCIETY. Things keep cruising along with JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. One of my original reasons for getting TTS squared away was because I wanted to go to World Fantasy Con in Columbus. I've gone over the con website a dozen times. As con websites go, nothing on it has sold me on going there. What did sell me was the presence of Sara Megibow from the Nelson Literary Agency. NLA is at the top of my list of agencies I want to work with and has been for some time. The opportunity to meet Sara in person and perhaps overcome the suckitude that is my queries was appealing.

Of course, I just started a new job and rather than being busy in the summer, it's busy in the winter. I also took a slight pay cut. All this combined to have me withdraw from attending my wife's competition at Harmony, Inc's international barbershop competition in New Brunswick. Now, World Fantasy Con is a month earlier, so a case can be made that I could go to it and not IC&C. Of course, when the one is supporting myself and one the other is supporting my wife, I think it's a little selfish to withdraw from the one only to do the other.

Depending on my workload, I may not be able to do either regardless. So, the time crunch created by having a finished and finalized manuscript of THE TRIAD SOCIETY is gone if I don't go to WFC (and no, I would not pitch anything to Sara it wasn't in a state that I could hand it to her on the spot and feel confident it was an adequate representation of my skills.

This is good because I have not stopped working on JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. I'm coming to the end of the edges. Writing a novel by the seat of your pants (vs plotting, pantsing vs plotting, I'm a pantser) is like putting together a puzzle. You have a scattered mess of ideas that you need to arrange and put together to form a coherent picture. Like any puzzle you start with the easiest pieces, placing the corners and then the edges. Eventually you have to fill in the middle. That's when you reach that point in the story where you can't skirt around the plot any more. You need to decide on protagonist and antagonist motivations, decisions, and outcomes.

In JH, the main character (aptly named Jehovah) is forced to kill five people or the Hanged Man will kill him and his entire family. Of those five people, I only know the name of one. I know the profession of two others. I need to figure out how these five people are connected (I have a loose understanding, like edge pieces with very distinctive holes that allow you to connect a middle piece) and how Jehovah is going to navigate his interaction with these five people to reach the climax of the story.

This is much harder (like the middle of a puzzle). So, once I get to that grind, maybe I'll switch back to TTS. But you know, right now, it doesn't feel like I will. This is really rolling. I have a good vision of this setting. I'll need to revise to make a lot of the character dialect consistent, but I knew that from the beginning. For a first draft, this is coming along swimmingly.

Straight Lines

I'm hanging out at Midas while my windows are fixed so my car can pass inspection. I'm posting from my phone, so please pardon the typos. The Pre has a small keyboard and I have fat thumbs.

I tried to begin revision on THE TRIAD SOCIETY today, but I felt compelled to continue with JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. The story is ripe and needs picking. Regardless, I'm still thinking on TTS, trying to find all my errors. Something I knew I was doing as I went (something I hate), I was writing in a straight line. Adventure stories are often like that. A happens, B happens, C happens, the end. Done poorly, you get a movie like Jurrasic Park 3 where one dangerous situation follows the next but never overlaps or spreads out. The entire movie keeps a predictable tempo. Done well and you get Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is similarly linear, but who cares! We're having fun.

TTS falls somewhere in the middle. I have been writing adventure stories so far. I actually prefer intrigue, bit that's much easier to write in a series of D&D adventures, I've found, than in a novel. I really need to get back to that kind of writing. It didn't work in TTS and it's not right for JH (which is definitely an adventure story). I'm hoping to bust oit the intrigue in a major way in THE RED SOCK SOCIETY, but that story's a ways off yet.

Sometimes (like JP3), an adventure is too linear. It eliminates the sense of risk. It suggests that the character's decisions have no impact because he's being swept along with the wave of the plot. The way to break this up is to zigzag, to bend the line without completely turning away from your stort. I call them speedbumps, the interference that happens when going from A to B.

Now it's just as easy to overuse speedbumps. If something always goes wrong along the way, the pattern becomes obvious and the reader questions the protagonist's decision-making process. If things keep going wrong, why do you keep doing what you're doing? We only accept that from Malcolm Feynolds.

For example, in the current ms, Otwald goes home, climbs into his window, meets Princess Klara, chats, climbs out, and sees his father. Too straight. It's like a video game where he went to a quest giver. Quest givers are for video games. Keep them out of your novels.

The obvious speedbump is the guards. A princess is unguarded. That's a bad speedbump. What self-respecting guard wouldn't check on the princess? And what princess would send them away because some stranger just climbed into her window. Hello cliche. Nice to see you again. Instead, don't have the window go into her room. Have the entry elsewhere. Maybe split up what he learns when he sees his father, a little here, a little there. You get to reinforce the setting by showing what life is like there (guards, servants, tc) while avoiding the drive-thru quest giving

Querying is Scary Shit

I like writing fast. I like producing a lot of stories in a short amount of time. I have a lot of stories crammed into this brain, and I'm starting later than I should have in my life (whole different therapy session about why that is). Regardless, I have somewhere between 10 and 30 years left and a crap load of stories to tell. So I write two novels a year. Two a year will get me 20 to 60 novels by the time I'm done, a respectable number that will have demonstrated my storytelling adequately.

Now, I would not write two novels a year if those novels were poor. This isn't some NaNoWriMo deluge of fecal matter with a title on it. I write complete and revised stories that I think others will enjoy. Plenty of authors have that level of output Jim Butcher, Hannah Mosk, etc.) so I don't feel like I'm cheating my story or the writer from finishing the first draft in three months.

Most agent blogs recognize that people write at different speeds, but sometimes still say if you haven't spent X number of months doing revision/letting it sit/critiquing/whathaveyou, you're not ready. Usually X equals a value higher than I will spend on a draft (or sometimes on the entire damn thing). And while I'm normally happy to ignore their comments as something for those authors that spend a year or more writing their novels, I'm starting to wonder if I was wrong.

BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE is weak on protagonist emotional evolution. The reason he does what he does in the end is more gut reaction or spiteful middle finger than any growth. And while that is perfectly possible, I think it shorts him on being a genuine good guy and not just the main character. WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING has a weak subplot with Podome and Nashau's discovery of the truth. If I had let these novels sit, would I have better realized their flaws and been able to affect a revision to correct them before I queried? (Note, neither of these things had any impact on the success of my querying, but you want to present the best possible manuscript when you start the query process.)

So now we come to THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I finished the draft 11 days ago. With the previous two, I think I took a week off (or less) before starting revision. By the time you get to the end of a 150,000-word manuscript, let me tell you, you want to go back and fix everything that no longer works at the beginning. The story evolves. And once you start doing that, you just roll through the whole thing. An 88,000-word manuscript is considerably smaller. The end is much like the beginning. So why am I taking so much time off?

First, TTS's length bothers me. It puts me in a GREAT position in terms of querying agents and appealing to publishers. Paper is a mitigating factor and word-count restrictions have become tight. There are people who wouldn't even consider WCONH because of its length. So this is a good thing. But if feels like I told an incomplete story. Certainly a number of things I had plotted at the beginning never materialized because the story went a different direction. It was originally going to be an intrigue story that turned into an adventure story. 88k feels too short to me. I write fantasy, dammit. Fantasy is long. At least, the fantasy I've always loved is long.

Did I do this subconsciously? Did I write a short manuscript to better my chances for consideration? And in so doing, did I tell a poorer story? I'll tell you write now, I don't think TTS is as good as WCONH. The latter is one of the best stories I've ever told and with a good copyeditor (*cough*DeannaHoak*cough*) would be even more amazing. TTS is a 1-2-3 adventure with its own damsel in distress (yes, I disdain the trope that much that I'd include it in multiple posts).

So, now it's time to revise, but I'm not. Is it because it's a lesser script? If WANTED didn't hack it and that's amazing fiction, how could this make it? Or worse, what if this did make it? What if a bunch of agents asked to read it and offered representation? It would erode my confidence in my own writing and my belief that there's an agent out there that likes the things I like and will see the value in my work regardless of the word count. Maybe I can get some luck with Joshua Blimes. He reps Brandon Sanderson and that guy's word counts are through the flipping roof. I look like a YA book in comparison.

But what if that's not it? What if I'm delaying revising because I want to delay querying. I posted this as a rhetorical question on Twitter and IoMTolly decided to answer. (IoMTolly is a gag account from a blog I follow, Ideology of Madness, which was okay when I thought it was my friend Andrew--you can be an asshat when you've known me for 15 years, but it's not him, so now I'm annoyed). He says that yes, I'm scared. I am, but that's not why I'm delaying. I'm delaying because the ms isn't good enough. Obviously, revision will make it good enough. A first draft is never good enough. Never. Understand that now. Your first draft is shit. Second drafts are where novels are born. But it's only 88k and if someone tells me what a great fantasy it is, I'll have to smack them because great fantasy is longer than 88k. (That is all bias, THE BLACK COMPANY was short, but I think there were some definite weaknesses in the story that might have been fixed with a higher word count.)

But I'm scared? Yes, at least somewhat. No one in his or her right might looks forward to rejection. And if you're querying properly, there will be lots of rejection (don't get me started on the 3/4 of your queries should yield results for more work, bullshit; that's a tirade for a post of its own). Now what IoMTolly has never experienced is querying multiple novels in a year and getting rejected. I didn't query BMBBQ until late 2009, so if I queried by October, I would actually have three novels worth of rejection in a single year.

Rejection is hard. It's cumulatively hard. The first round felt validating. I'm in the process! I'm working the system. The second was much harder. I had written a much better story but got the same results. Worse, other people were mumbling along and getting offers. This is the first time I've written anything, tee hee. I'm fourteen and I'm ashamed I didn't start at twelve, tee hee. These are people you grow to hate not because you know them or they need hating (well, maybe the fourteen year old), but because you hate being rejected. You hate that your work doesn't grab them and say, wow, I want more! You hate being told, you're not good enough.

And let's get one thing straight, publishing is subjective, and a rejection (especially a form rejection which is what you get most frequently) is not a statement on the quality of your work. But when you've run the list of agents to query and they've all rejected you, that feels like a statement of the quality of your work. It still may not be, but that's how it feels. And going through that repeatedly is hard.

Will I stop? Of course not. That's not even a question worth entertaining. It will happen sooner or later (sooner is preferable to later). But I won't lie. Each time I get to this point in the process, it's harder than it was the time before.