Getting a critique

As I think I mentioned earlier this month, I am in two critique groups __ one online and the other as part of my local chapter of Sisters in Crime. But I am having trouble getting the material to Sisters.

The manuscript is formatted and everything __ double-spaced, paragraph indents, etc. But since the organizer of the Sisters group can't read my word processing program, I am forced to send it to her after pasting it into the body of an e-mail. But then all the formats seem to get lost.

I think the only remedy to that is to add all the formatting after I paste the work into the e-mail. But that means I have to go line by line to add everything. And that is a real pain in the butt.

However, I need the critique and certainly I want it from writers I know, as opposed to getting it from writers I don't know from the online writing community.

I plan to explore the possibilities once more before send the manuscript to Kit.

And just like you, I will keep writing.

How do agents know a book won't sell

I was reading an agent's blog earlier this week and she posted a long message about how an agent knows a book won't sell. It was interesting but, as it now turns out, it is a subject I will have to cover later.

My beautiful wife says we need to get to bed now and rest before our trip to Philly tomorrow.

But in the meantime, keep writing.

Editing

I haven't written anything on the novel in the last five days and am only now beginning to formulate the scenes in my head that will come next. I am at the point where I have to think of the exact scenes that lead to the end of the book.

But on another front, I am critiquing a chapter of a fellow writer. It is a good story and I look forward to what comes next. But the draft I have is only a first draft and I'm not certain of how much I should point out. She drops in commas a lot, like I do, but that is something that can be clearly up in a later draft or in the editing process.

I think her main character is interesting but perhaps not strong enough to sustain the entire novel. I mentioned that she will need to beef the character up.

But the most interesting thing is that it is written in first-person. That is a bold choice and something I don't think I will ever be comfortable doing.

Anyway, another fellow writer said my writing would probably improve once I was in a wirter's group. I am looking forward to that. I am about to post a couple of chapters of Jungle-bunny Journal and submit it to the group. We will see.

Gotta run. Happy Birthday to me tomorrow.

Thanks for reading and keep writing.

Feeling hopeful

I have been feeling unusually hopeful for the last couple of days. Nothing in particular has changed. I still have tons of work to do before I head to vacation. I still haven't sold "Fighting Chaos" but I believe that time will come. I still don't have a lot of cash. That's a bummer.

But I am feeling great. I am preparing the first two chapters of "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal" to post on tNBW and for another writer in Sisters in Crime to critique. I use 12-point type in Times New Roman and each page is about 300 words. tNBW allows a maximum of 5,000 words to be posted and last night I edited the first and second chapters down to under 5,000 words, meaning I cut more than 12 percent. And it still reads well.

I always figure when I'm finished with a first draft it will be 15 percent to 20 percent too long. So, I am close to being on target with the novel, at least so far.

My short story is nearly done, but it is only 1,600 words. I want it perfect because it is for a contest.

I am reading a YA book that my oldest daughter suggested and I am enjoying it. It's not my cup of tea but it is an interesting book and it is well-written.

So, things are progressing and looking up.

Have a good week. Thanks for reading and keep writing.

Random thoughts

I am a little tired at the moment. I had several freelance writing assignments last week, have several more next week, and wrote at least a little everyday on my murder mystery. Plus I am now at what I consider the writing mid-point in "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal." I have 40,160 words of the 80,000-word novel in the can. So I may take a few days off from Jungle-bunny.

I joined a critique group today that meets just before the local chapter meeting of Sisters in Crime. Though I didn't have anything to contribute today, I got something out of the gathering. I will submit the first chapter (and perhaps the second chapter, if the combined number of pages is less than 20) of Jungle-bunny for the next meeting. Plus I will probably post those on tNBW website next week.

The publication date for the next racing anthology that our Sisters chapter is planning has not been set. It will be in July 2009 or July 2010. The problem is that enough copies of the current book have not been sold. So I am going to help with promoting the current book although I don't have a story in it.

Although a date has not been established for the next book, it was decided today that individual writers should submit their stories on the deadline schedule originally established, which means I need to get cracking on finishing my story. I read over it today, trying to get a sense of where I was when I stopped writing it more than a month ago.

I think I will work on it Monday and try to finish the first draft by Friday, the day before we head on vacation. I am going to write short story while I am on vacation to submit to the annual Writer's Digest writing competition. The deadline for that is May 15.

I got an honorable mention for "Loss of Consortium" last year.

So let's recap . . .

Jungle-bunny is half done and I will break for a few days from working on it. (During that time I think I will re-read everything I currently have.)
I will finish my racing short story for the anthology in the next week.
While I am on vacation, I will write my short story for a contest.

That should do it. (Oh, I almost forgot. Michelle is going to work on my blog site to make it more appealing.)

Thanks for reading and keep writing.

To post or not to post, that is the question

Not an original title for this posting, I guess, but it fits my thinking.

I think I will post the first and second chapters of "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal" on a website called tNBW (the Next Big Writer). It is a writing community and after I post I should get comments on my writing and the story. To make further posts, I will need to build up credits by doing critiques of other writers.

I am conflicted for two reasons, however.

First, I am extremely sensitive to criticism, paerticularly of my writing. (But obviously not of my spelling.) I know I will have to get over that. And if I don't take it personally, then it should be easier. But I do take it personally. Gotta work on that!

The second reason is more practical. I'm afraid it will slow down my writing.

Writing "Fighting Chaos" took forever and part of working so hard on J-B-J is to get it all down on paper, so to speak, in a more timely way. In my head, I set a three-month deadline for finishing, although on paper I gave myself five months. At this point, I am somewhere in the middle. (But it could have gotten done in three.) I try to eliminate all the reasons and obstacles (sp, again) to getting it done in a timely manner and just plow ahead.

I fear that posting chapters while I am still working on the first draft and then getting comments, although undoubtedy useful ones, will make me go back and re-write earlier material and never get around to finishing the entire work. As it is now, I try to avoid going back and reading and then touching up earlier parts of the book. I try to make note of changes I intend to make when completing the second, third or fourth drafts. That way I won't get hung up on the past and never finish what will be in the future.

But if I finish the entire novel and then start posting for comments on tNBW, I will have invested so much time and energy on the book to that point that I won't want to make wholesale changes that may be offered. That is certainly why I opted to post chapters of J-B-J instead of Chaos.

So, in the end, I will try posting chapters while I am writing. And I may just keep all the comments and work them into my later drafts when I get to them. We should see.

Also, at the suggestion of the writer in South Carolina whom I mentioned yesterday, I looked into another online agent search website. It is called it is litmatch.net and it is great. I have and will continue to use agentquery.com but will combine it with litmatch.

In litmatch, I can also track my submissions online and view data on how agents have responded to queries. It sounds good.

I have a Sisters in Crime meeting on Saturday and I always look forward to that. I always get good advice from other members of the chapter.

As for the title above, I decided to steal from the great bard and try a little iambic verse. Oddly enough, I still can't read or understand poetry. It just zips over my head.

Oh well . . .

Thanks for reading and keep writing.

Another writer got through

Today is a good day. Yes, it's cloudy and rainy outside. A bit gloomy. But I heard from a writer today who lives in the South who found an agent. And I am thrilled for her.

Yesterday, I signed up on a website called Next Big Writer, thanks to a suggestion from a friend named Carolyn. Once at the site, I happened to stumble across a forum where this southern writer, who had finished a YA book, was looking for an agent and sought some advice on her query letter. She posted on the forum in late December.

Now I have become an expert on query letter rejections and it was nearly three months ago that she was seeking the advice, but I wrote her and offered my two-cents worth.

She e-mailed me back today to say she had already sent out eight queries and got back several positive responses and signed with an agent. And the agent thinks they may have a publisher for her book.

Now I admitted to her in an e-mail today that I am green with envy but I am also extremely happy for her. Another new writer is breaking through. And that gives hope to all the rest of us.

So that's it for today.

Thanks for reading and don't give up on writing.

Writing a sentence I love

I am not a brilliant writer and since you are reading this blog, you already know that. But every once in a while I will write something __ a sentence or perhaps as much as a paragraph __ that I love.

I will read it over and over again. Long after I have moved on in whatever I am writing, I will go back and read it again just for the enjoyment it brings. It doesn't have to be monumental or insightful. But it will have the right words in the right way. It will express exactly the idea, thought, feeling or emotion I had in mind.

But unfortunately, I only do that in about 1 in 10,000 sentences I write. In other words, it's rare.
It's not that I don't like what I write. I do very much like what I write. It's just that I rarely achieve a sentence that I love.

However, I did it about a week ago. There is a sentence I love. Really love. Again, it is not monumental or particularly insightful. But I love it all the same. I am not going into the comtext but here is the sentence . . .

Life was no easier for the modern-day inhabitants of the houses than it had been for those generations earlier, except now they could watch their betters on stolen large screen TVs hooked up to illegal cable.

There you have it. It may not seem like much to you but it is exactly how I viewed the people in the houses from inside my head.

Thanks for reading and keep writing.

Death of the Fat Man

I was writing today and realized I was going to have to kill off a character in my mystery novel. I felt sorry but I can't see another way around it.

I am some time away from doing the deed, probably a week or more. But this character's death will add to the confusion surrounding the primary murder in the story. He is a suspect in the first death and his death will leave the main characters scratching their heads.

While I enjoy the character, he is a dangerous man and has been for his whole life. It is amazing that something hasn't happened to him earlier.

This character's death is one of the things I like about doing very little in the way of outlining the story. In that way, I get surprised. And I think if I can keep the story on track and yet can be surprised as the story develops, then perhaps so will the reader.

Anyway, I will try to step up my blog posting again next week. Perhaps later in the year I will explain why I needed to take a little rest from blogging three times a week.

As for now, thanks for reading and keep writing.

Writers conference

There is a writers conference going on this week in Louisville, which is a mere two hours away by car, and I was considering last week about attending for one day this coming Saturday. On the day I thought of attending, there will be a panel discussion by a group of agents and book publishers on the industry, and pitch sessions are also planned. Both interested me.

But I was unsure __ fearful, really __ about attending. So I called a local bookseller whom I know and truly trust and asked his opinion, particularly about attending a pitch session.

He said first, I must be sure that there is an agent attending who is interested in the type of novel I have written. Check to that.

Then he asked had I ever been to a pitch session and I said no. He hesitated but it was clear he thought this was problematic. Eventually, he said if I have never been and have never practiced or prepared for a pitch sessio, there probablyisn't enough time for me to prepare for it between now and Saturday.

So I decided not to go.

There is so much I don't know about publishing but I am learning a bit at a time. This guy said I shouldn't worry about missing this conference. There are tons of conferences, including some close by. Another will come and probably sooner than I'd think.

Thanks for reading and keep writing.

Computer woes

I hadn't planned to post this evening but I just had to write an update on my computer woes.

I took my laptop to a very nice man who owned a computer repair company and, though he took a couple of weeks to do the work, he fixed my laptop. The problem was that he assumed I knew a little about computers and that I wasn't a complete idiot. Unfortunately, he was wrong on both counts.

After he backed up all my data and repaired my hard driver, he gave me back the computer. But after that I couldn't figure out how to get on the Internet. I tried to reach him and couldn't. I called my brother and there wasn't a lot he could do over the phone.

So I took it upon myself to load a recovery disc on the computer, which erased everything I had paid Kevin to do.

But my brother was able to undo all the screwed up stuff I did, and I spent the greater portion of today reloading stuff from the backup disc back on the computer.

I hate that the only thing I know to do on a computer is type __ and I don't even do that that well.

But I have all the versions of "Fighting Chaos" and Jungle-bunny Journal. I didn't have much time this evening to work on Jungle-bunny and will have to make up for it tomorrow.

That's it. Thanks for reading and don't give up on writing.

Hiatus

Dear Friends,

I am probably going to take a brief hiatus or at least do fewer than my usual three postings a week. I still have lots to say but for the moment I have my hands full with something. I will explain later.

So stay tuned. I am not abandoning you. And, like I said, I will explain later.

The Management (that's a joke)