Results of Ruminations

I've been sitting on completed manuscripts for too long now, and they're starting to burn in me a little. I feel like I need to step up my agent query list, but every time I send out and get rejected, I feel burned and disheartened. It's been a long while since I tried to query (months at the minimum) and I need to put my work out more fully. Every time I'm rejected, though, I figure that it's because I haven't put enough polish/work on my book. That is true, though that may not be the reason I didn't hook an agent before. No, I think that there are a lot of factors that are connected to my failure to get anything accomplished on the publishing front and I can't control most of them. Those that I can, however, mostly involve the amount of work I can do in my revisions. But I keep landing on my perennial problem: I don't like doing revisions. I don't like revisiting stories I've told, I'm tired of the characters, plot, and words. I wish...

I am part of a writers' group. We've been meeting, fairly regularly, for over nine years. The members have shifted, unsurprisingly, as friends have moved away. Three of the original members are still around, with one who joined really early in the process sticking around, too. We've rotated from an apartment close to the mutual workplace (back when we knew each other just because of the place where we worked) to another house to another then another, and continuing onward for the better part of a decade. We've counted before: I think we've hit almost thirty novels, in one form or another. Some are complete; most are drafts that were abandoned via those aforementioned moves and/or lack of interest on the part of the writer. We meet Thursday nights for a couple of hours, using the group time as group therapy and forging friendships while also improving our writing. It's cathartic and enjoyable and one of the supports in my life that helps beat back my depression...

Writing NaNoWriMo  was exhausting this year. Based upon the fact that I felt pretty exhausted by it last  year, I'm guessing that's one of the features of the experience. I don't regret it, especially as it gave me a chance to write a story for my wife (I don't usually get writing requests, after all). The training I'd been putting into spending thirty to forty minutes in my blog every day helped make me advance my writing output, so NaNoWriMo didn't end up being a massive change for me. Indeed, participating in the challenge taught me some things about writing. First of all, my recently adapted style of outlining on note cards and then transferring that effort into the book itself is a luxury I shouldn't avoid in the future. Last year, I wrote a reimagining of Dante's Inferno  as a sci-fi story. I used the note cards as a pacing guide--in fact, I plotted out much of both potential sequels on the cards--and as an indication of what I would be doing eve...

A few years ago, I operated under the delusion that people would be interested in my process of writing one of my novels. Consequently, on this blog, I published a bunch of posts (which you can read, in reverse order, here ) documenting the first draft--and some of the editing--of a mostly-abandoned novel called Writ in Blood . I learned a lot from my time in Coratha (the world in which the novel takes place). One is that my procedure for editing is not particularly effective. I also learned that, as much as I enjoyed writing a "magnum opus" style novel, it's more satisfying to finish many, smaller novels in a similar amount of time. (If I had to guess, I first got the idea for Writ in Blood  sometime in 2009 or 2010; by 2016, I'm still poking at it, off and on, without any full sense of having "finished" it.) Additionally, despite earlier desires  to try to learn to love editing, I still don't particularly appreciate it. Lastly, I learned how to outli...

I haven't blogged about my book, Writ in Blood , since I proclaimed that I was done with it and wouldn't pick it up again until it was published. Embarrassingly, I'm now going to blog about it, even though I'm not any closer to my publishing goals now than I was in 2013. What happened was this: Twitter. While shopping around my manuscript, I followed some of the agents whom I'd queried. Not too much after sending off to one particular agent (I won't say who, mostly because I can't remember), I saw a mini Twitter-rant among two or three agents about the size of queried stories. Mine came in at 289,000+ words, and the tweet specifically raged about 290,000 word submissions. A little later--once the sting of knowing I'd ticked off some agents had faded--I mentioned to a different agent the size of my manuscript. She'd replied with a glance askance. (Looked like this, if I remember right: 0.o) She then recommended that I try splitting it up. For ...