Posted by nightphoenix on May 18, 2012 in
Novels,
Output,
Process So I’ve been struggling for…sheesh, years probably…trying to come up with a system to keep myself productive when it comes to writing. I will sometimes have entire weeks and occasionally months in which I get very little to nothing done, and that’s time I can’t get back. Well, I think I’ve come up with a solution, and it’s so ridiculously simple that I’m kicking myself.
The only way my brain is able to treat writing like a day job is if I actually “go to work” every day…meaning I get in my car, drive to my “workplace”, do work, and then go home when “time” is up. It’s not like I’ve never thought of doing my writing elsewhere; I’ve written in fast food places, coffee shops, bookstores, libraries. But I think in my mind I was still treating these excursions as get-aways or mini-vacations instead of a job, so it wasn’t something that I would think of doing every day. And the problem with choosing a restaurant or coffee shop as a writing office is that you’re morally (and sometimes actually) obligated to purchase something every couple of hours. That gets expensive real fast.
The other issue is hours. I’m free from 8 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, most places don’t open until 9 or 10, sometimes even 11. Technically I’d have more hours to work if I stayed home and started working at 8…but if I stay home, I often don’t get anything done at all. It’s a lot like abstinence-only sex education: looks great in theory, but in practice, I’d be better off trying a “less effective” method that actually works.
Last week I began experimenting with “going to work” at the library. I even give myself an official lunch break and everything. So far this has been working so well that I’m really, really annoyed at myself for not trying this before. If I work for 3 or 4 hours, with a break between, I can average about 2,000 words. (Mind, this is on days when the writing is actually a bit slow and difficult…I could probably do more on days when I can merrily plug along.) I’ve gone from hopefully being able to finish the rough draft of Promises, Like Tears by November to thinking I might be able to finish the draft by the end of next week. (This is my current goal, since my son’s last day of school is next Friday and after that my productivity will drop dramatically.)
My other nod to being more productive is on days when I just simply cannot work on the current story, I’m making myself outline other stuff in the queue. I have finished a fairly detailed outline for Dog Prince and Free (formerly Voiceless), and am working onputting Windwaker together. I’m discovering that a lot of my stories are much less “put together” on paper than they are in my head, but hey, that’s part of the fun…right?
Still agent hunting. Got another request for a partial, which was encouraging although they ultimately passed. I seem to vacillate between really hopeful and downright discouraged. Last night I finally broke down and did a little research on how to query the publishing houses themselves. Most don’t take un-agented stuff but I was surprised to discover that a few do, especially in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. However, that process is a lot slower: most houses require an exclusive look (which means you can’t send the manuscript to anyone else while they have it), and they can take anywhere from a few months to a year to make a decision. I’ve decided that if I haven’t found an agent for Seven Shades by the time I’ve finished This Chosen Fate, I’m going to dump Hands on the editor circuit and start hawking This Chosen Fate to the agents.
I’m going to try and do NaNoWriMo this year and hopefully finish This Chosen Fate, since it’s already started and I have a very good idea of where it’s going. It will be nice to have another finished story under my belt that isn’t part of a series.
Tags: agents and editors, business of writing, Shades, This Chosen Fate, Windwaker
Posted by nightphoenix on Jan 31, 2012 in
News,
Novels Well, yesterday I sent out a new batch of queries.
I think that both my query letter and story are much stronger than they were at this time last year, but I suppose I’ll have to wait and see what sort of response I get.
The issue that’s going to work against me the worst, I believe, is length. Hands, Like Secrets is bloody long, both for a debut and especially for the YA market. And there’s only so far I can knock it back without compromising the story. At best…at the very, very best I can do on my own…I might could knock it back to 118,000 or so. That’s how long Twilight is. Twilight was a debut, and a YA to boot. It’s not impossible.
It just makes an already difficult job harder.
I try to tell myself that Eragon was somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 words, and it took off nonetheless. However, Eragon was originally self-published, and had something like a year to gain momentum before a publisher ever picked it up. I will self-publish Hands if I absolutely have to, but I want to exhaust all my other options first.
I’m about to get back to work on Promises, Like Tears, which has become a bit bogged down. I think there’s a lot in there that I need to go back and cut, or rearrange, and I can’t quite decide if I should do that first or just push on to the end and THEN come back. The latter is probably the better option.
Changed Shades to Seven Shades. I really have no reason other than it sounds more interesting. And the characters occasionally swear by it. The only fact I’ve established is that there are seven “shades” in shayol, and I haven’t really worked out why that’s important. Might become relevant in the last book, when Saeli is briefly taken to shayol by the Keeper of the Oath. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
I’ve also decided to attempt NaNoWriMo this year, and see if I can’t get This Chosen Fate written. It’s all plotted out; all I have to do is sit down and write it. That’s something I really need to practice: writing straight through something without going into editing mode. And this way I’ll have something besides Shades to shop around…something that isn’t as long 
Tags: agents and editors, business of writing, Shades, This Chosen Fate
Posted by nightphoenix on Sep 29, 2011 in
News,
Novels,
Output Hey look, a post!
Apparently one of my plugins was actually hiding all of my posts except the top one, but only if you weren’t logged in. So of course because I was logged in, I didn’t notice. Anywho, I have fixed that problem, and I’ve also gotten the audio player back up and running, so music should work now. Troubleshooting is a laborious process, involving a lot of logging in, turning features on and off, logging out, refreshing the page, checking the page, logging back in, and well, you get the idea. I posted two new posts since the Great Fatal Error and Two Week Shutdown, but because of the above problem, I don’t know if anyone has actually seen them. Was kind of wondering why they never showed up on Facebook. Read more…
Tags: agents and editors, Shades, the blog
Posted by nightphoenix on May 10, 2011 in
Novels,
Output Yesterday I had the interesting and depressing experience of having two rejections land in my inbox on the same day. The second, naturally, appearing having gotten up from the brief nap I’d taken having been down about the first. Both were typical form letter rejections, the kind that give no insight whatsoever into why the agent passed up your work. What was especially depressing was that I’d mentally tagged one of those agents as a particularly good fit for Shades, given their online description for the sort of story they are looking for.
It’s so easy to take it personally. It’s easy to start thinking things like, “Man, my work must really suck if an agent who wants that exact kind of story doesn’t even want it.”
But I know that’s not true.
One’s taste in books is a highly subjective matter. I know this, because I know how picky I am about what I like to read. For example, I just finished the last book in Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series…and I found myself mildly disappointed.
***Spoilers below***
Read more…
Tags: agents and editors, business of writing
Posted by nightphoenix on May 5, 2011 in
Input,
Life,
News Yes, it has been too long. April was a month full of surprises and changes.
My car died. Like, permanently. Poor old Pontiac. The only thing worse than driving an overheating car across Melbourne was then having nightmares about driving said overheating car across Melbourne that night. Which, I now know, was not a wise thing to do…but alas. Thankfully, I have the most wonderful dad in the world, who funded the Hyundai Sonata I’m driving now.
We now have a cat. The hubby heard him crying outside one night after those two huge April storms we had. I, of course, had headphones on and didn’t have a clue. So we’re sitting there working on our computers, when the hubby suddenly gets up and walks out the front door with no explanation. He then calls my phone and asks if we have anything we could feed to a cat. I cut up some hot dogs and take them outside, where I find him with a very skittish orange kitty in the downstairs breezeway. We debated what to do with the cat, as it was raining and we didn’t want to just leave him outside. As it was around 11 in the evening, our options were limited. We ended up bringing the cat up to the apartment for the night and made plans to call animal control in the morning.
We got some basic supplies and discovered that the kitty was housebroken (litter trained and everything). Also, this cat really, really liked my husband. I mean, he couldn’t even leave the room without the cat trying to follow and put its paws up on his ankles. I stayed home with the cat the next day until animal control came, and that part was absolutely horrible. My son was home on spring break, which made it even worse (how do you explain to a five-year-old why someone is taking kitty to the pound, when every single child’s movie that features a pound portrays it as a BAD PLACE??)
Well, we debated, and debated, and finally decided that we couldn’t bear the thought of this cat getting possibly euthanized if no one claimed him. After a week, we went back to the animal shelter and officially adopted him. His name is now Kansuke, and he is settling in very nicely (after he got rid of the cold he caught at the shelter).
I have been writing, despite all this; working on Promises, Like Tears and This Chosen Fate kind of in tandem. When I hit a block in one story, I switch to the other. By the time I hit a hard place in the other, I’m ready to continue the first one. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time on Amphiptere’s Vision, tweaking the skillsets. “Sandboxing” them, I call it; where instead of coming up with a straightforward list of abilities, I create a set of “tools”, skills that can be combined to create the individual abilities. It gives the player the opportunity to create their own “style” of fighting, hunting, building, etc. It also forces the player to think about what the various tools do, and to anticipate what might happen if one tool is combined with another. I want the player to “know” his skillsets nearly as well as the character does, and to be creative in how he employs them. Breaks the bash-bash-bash-loot monotony of grinding that most MMO’s seem to have.
I’ve heard back on a few submissions, mostly the standard not-right-for-us-at-this-time letters. The few more personal notes I’ve gotten have been encouraging, however (as is the fact that I’ve even gotten personal notes at this stage in the game). I’ve sent out a few more and hope to hear back in the next few weeks. The agent hunt continues.
That’s about it on the real life front. More to come later.
Tags: agents and editors, business of writing, the real world
Posted by nightphoenix on Dec 18, 2009 in
News,
Output Well, Shades isn’t going to be done by January. Maybe if I had like a month on a deserted island with food, my computer and a power plug…but even then, it’d be rushed. I don’t want to rush just to get it done; it’s a good story and I want to do it justice. I’ve paid for an agent appointment anyway, because I think it will be good practice, and I’ll get to ask questions. I started making a list of agents I will want to target once I get done…even going as far as picking out some to pitch Mask of Eldarmarch, Dragon Singer, and even Briar Rose to (if nobody is interested in Shades at first).
I decided a while ago that I’m going to need an agent if I want to make a career of writing. One: more and more of the big publishers are no longer accepting un-agented stuff. Two, and possibly more important for me: I am absolutely terrible with legalese. I don’t want to screw up with a first contract and have it come back to bite me later…I’d rather just leave it in the hands of someone whose job is to handle that stuff. But I’ve realized that I’ll need to be particularly selective in my choice of agent, because I have such a broad range of projects I’d like to do. I did some research and discovered that most agents who handle YA and MG (middle grade) fantasy do not handle adult books and don’t know the adult market, and likewise, agents who handle adult fantasy don’t want YA. My first few novels definitely fall somewhere between YA and MG, but my Tindaari epic, for example, was always going to be an adult fantasy. Will I have to get a different agent for that one?
Also, I did not find a single agent that I thought I could pitch multiple ideas to and have them be interested in all of them. Obviously I have more looking to do, and there were a few that I could probably pitch most of my ideas to. But for example, some want gritty urban fantasy, but no regular fantasy…or more specifically, they want fantasy but no vampires (Briar Rose?), or fantasy but no sci-fi (134340?). I mean once you’re in, I guess an agent will represent anything if it’s good enough, but still, I don’t want to get stuck having to find a different agent every two or three books.
Shades is going to be a hard story to sell anyway, for three reasons. It’s YA, it’s long, and it’s my debut. Most publishers won’t take a chance on a super long YA novel from an unknown. Right now I’m probably in the neighborhood of 200,000 words. I can pare that down, and I will, but not in half. Certainly not down to the 80,000 mark (which is about the max for YA, typically). At that point, I’d be sacrificing story for length, and I refuse to do that. I’ll hang onto it and finish Mask of Eldarmarch and sell that first, if I have to. If it was an adult fantasy I could probably get away with long…but I think the voice is too young, and the people that will really be interested in it will be mostly teenaged girls.
But long YA debuts are not unheard of. Stephanie Meyer was relatively unknown, and Twilight came in at 118,501 words. Christopher Paolini was a complete unknown, and Eragon has 157,220 words (though he self-published it first…it existed for a whole year before a major publisher discovered it). Both fantasy, like Shades…even in YA, if it’s fantasy, it can be a little longer than average. I’ve actually revised my word count goal based on these two books…first I will shoot for 150,000 (comparable to Eragon), and if I can manage that, I can shoot for 118,000 (comparable to Twilight). That way, when I pitch it, I can point to the bestseller and be like, hey, this other book was long too, but it did well because it had a great story, etc. I think Shades has a good shot of succeeding on its own merit…as long as I can somehow prevent a prospective agent from having apoplexy over a 150,000 word manuscript.
I’ve also been thinking about the title of the book. “Shades” is an okay one, but it was really more of a working title in my head because I had to call it something. I had several permutations going, having to do with black and white, and shades, and gray, but none of them really seemed right. But one day last week I was scanning back through my first draft chapters (which are all titled based on a phrase from within the chapter), and I happened upon Chapter 24: Like softly breaking glass. And I thought to myself, “You know, that’s a nice poetic line. That could almost be the name of the whole book.” Especially since the essence of the story is not the abstract notion of good verses evil (though the story does cover that, obviously)…it’s about Saeli’s tragic relationship with Raphel. “Like softly breaking glass” conveys that in a way that’s interesting, and eye-catching, and poetic. (Not to mention glass seems to be a common prop in the story).
So, Shades may become Like Softly Breaking Glass when it’s done.
In other news, I have not been able to write at all this week, due to holiday preparations. However, my gingerbread cookies were a success both at our small group and at MOPS today, and I think I have everything bought that needs to be bought. I have some things to finish making, and things to wrap, and probably things to bag, and cards to sign…and the hubby and I’s anniversary is this Sunday, which will be a pleasant reprieve, but still. *sigh* Yeah, I’m beginning to understand why people dread Christmas.
Tags: agents and editors, editing and revisions, Shades
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