Opinions are like...

Assholes. Everybody has one and they all stink.

Or so the saying goes.

Normally these agent rejections wouldn't "get to" me so much, but last night I got one that really ruffled my feathers. Form rejection letters I can deal with; they're too busy, etc., whatever is fine. In fact, I prefer a "form" letter to some kind of cryptic reply or damning advice.

I really battled with myself whether I should blog about the aforementioned rejection but I decided to put it out there, just because I couldn't bottle it up. Someday, while I'm sipping celebratory Merlot, I can hopefully laugh about this, but not right now.

Right now I'm just pissed off.

Earlier this week I decided that I needed to take a "shotgun" approach to contacting agents because doing it peacemeal, one or two per week, was not getting me anywhere. So, I perused a few websites as well as my library's copy of Writer's Market (2009) and found 10 or 12 to send query emails to. I received a few rejections the same day then a few trickled in yesterday, and I'm still waiting on the rest.

I know I'm taking a long time to build this up, so I'll just get to it. The rejection I got yesterday said, in very simple and concise terms, that I would need to cut my 155,000 word novel by 50,000 words (1/3rd) to be able to sell it.

Yes, I almost choked on my Cabernet. What the hell? Cut it by 1/3rd? Especially when the general market routinely sells longer genre Fantasy with ease? Has everything I've read about "perceived value" totally wrong? Or is it just generally "not applicable" to first-time authors?

Well, after my head stopped spinning from wondering just how I would chop my novel by an incredible amount, I came back to my senses. I may be wrong, as I'm new to the business, but this is just one agent's opinion, and I can choose to take it or leave it.

So, here's me saluting, thanks but no thanks, Miss Agent. Someone else will [hopefully] think differently about the length, and I'm not going to give up selling the novel as-is.

Lightning in a bottle?

I'm struggling a little bit with the Thomas Redpool book, and I don't mean the usual struggles of writer's block or idea backlog. I realized quite some time ago that deciding to write a novel is different than deciding to finish one. What I'm really having issues with is making sure the book is funny and satyrical without seeming like I'm "trying too hard."

In an effort to capture this "lightning in a bottle" concept, I have been searching for inspiration from sources that, I feel, "did it right." I checked out For Love of Evil (Piers Anthony) from the Library, read through it, and then got Dogma (Kevin Smith) via Netflix and watched it (in HIGH DEFINITION).

While I'm not totally sure I got what I was looking for from the "inspiration," I did find Piers Anthony's website and emailed him about the concept. Both his Incarnations of Immortality and Xanth series' books have that humor about them - they don't take themselves too seriously while still telling an impacting and interesting story. Or so I feel; some of the critics disagree.

Regardless, the response back (surprisingly prompt) was that I shouldn't worry about it. I can't please everyone, and I know that, so I should basically pursue whatever angle I think will work and thereby do it my own way. Sage advice is not always the easiest to take, though. Just like "a word to the wise is sufficient," sometimes it takes a few blows to the head for things to finally become clear.

Hopefully I'll catch on. Things are progressing, though, I will say that. I'm up to about 33,000 words and considering adding some "filler" chapters because I don't quite know how I'm going to make my word count with the projected outline I have. These won't be useless chapters, I'm not THAT much of a novice, but rather tellings of events that I had previously planned to gloss over and summarize. I guess that's the test of a good story: knowing what is important enough to show and what can just be told.

I'm still excited to see how things will play out. Since I'm still getting nothing but rejection and silence from submissions on The Ninth Avatar, I have a lot of time to work on the next project. Industry take note - I'm not giving up.

Stupid Day Job

Every time I feel like writing at work, my inbox practically explodes with stuff that I have to do. It's so frustrating and it keeps me from doing as much writing as I want. These past few months have been so busy that it's become a little hard to handle even without attempting to write but I've been surviving through the frustration.

Over my lunch hour yesterday I wrote the first draft of Interlude 3, completing the initial draft of everything prior to Chapter 4. This is a good sign in itself, but I've hit 20,000 words with the book 1/3rd done so I may have to adjust my estimate of word count for the whole thing. At least for the first draft, anyway. We'll see what happens.

Still need that day at Starbucks...

NaNoWriMo, on the horizon

It is just about mid-October which means the time for NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us. I got an email from About.com Fiction Writing this morning mentioning it (I'm subscribed to the About.com Fiction Writing mailing list, not that it helps much) and a couple of other writers have asked me whether I was going to participate.

I think, a few years ago, I halfheartedly tried to participate in National Novel Writing Month, where you try to write a 50,000 word "novel" during the month of November. This is, of course, followed by National Novel Editing Month, in December, where you make your hurriedly put together "novel" into a masterpiece, supposedly. As I recall, my attempt didn't go well, and the friend who was also trying eventually faltered in his word count and gave up.

Honestly, I like the idea of nanowrimo and I've read the book No Plot, No Problem just for general helpful advice on how to plow forward writing your first draft without looking back (which is about the only sound piece of advice I took away), but I don't think it's for me. Not this year, anyway. I'm already deeply embroiled in a project that I really want to finish because A) I really enjoy the characters and the story of the Thomas Redpool novel and B) I think it has a much better chance of being published than The Ninth Avatar at the moment.

Not that my first novel is "bad" or merely "standard," but the Thomas Redpool story has received so many positive reactions from so many different types of people that I can't help but be curious to see how far it goes. I don't want to toot my own horn [often] but I really have confidence in the uniqueness and quality of this particular novel... I just have to finish it to call it that word. I'd say I'm somewhere between 20-30% finished with the initial draft (ha ha, self plug) but I seriously doubt that I will be able to finish it before the end of 2008, particularly if I take a month off to galivant with nanowrimo.

Frankly, I have too many ideas that are begging to be written already. Believe it or not, I actually have a queue of book ideas since coming up with a premise is a hell of a lot easier than writing 100,000 words around that premise. At any rate, I just wanted to put to bed any rumors and questions about nanowrimo at this point --- maybe next year.

Hits from every continent

Just had to share this image of my last 100 hits, geographically.


Thanks for the support and the views!

Thomas Redpool, status

I just passed 17,000 words on the Thomas Redpool book (I still haven't figured out a catchy title for it) which covers chapters 1-3 and two "interludes." I am going to try to put an "interlude" section between each chapter but they may nor may not fit chronologically there, or may be separate from the chronology entirely. My goal is to have this book hit 100,000 words but that's definitely not going to happen on this first draft. There's still a lot left to work out, of course, but we'll see where it ends up when I finish writing it.

I actually got quite excited writing a scene today - it was one I just came up with off the top of my head and had to tell Micah about it to brighten her day (she loves this story, for some reason). She definitely laughed at my idea, which was what I wanted, so I knew it was a good one and wrote the entire scene during my lunch hour.

The funny thing is that while I'm writing this story I get more and more excited about where it is going. The more time I spend away from it, the more scared I get that somehow I'm going in the wrong direction or I start to doubt my ability to actually write a "story" rather than merely a series of unfortunate events. I have it all planned out in an outline this time and that helps, a bit, but I think the best thing for me is to write down questions, thoughts and ideas in my Book Journal when they come to me. And they tend to come to me when I really try to think of them rather than trying to just "write". So, you can say I work on this novel more than I actually write on it, and that's a good thing.

That's the status for now. More updates as the novel progresses.

I don't want to say it...

...but I think I might have the dreaded Writer's Block.

No, it's not that. I actually have a "motivation problem."

I've been conceptualizing the Thomas Redpool book and I have absolutely no shortage of ideas. But, when the time comes to bring up MS Word and clicky-type in the white space to transpose those numerous ideas to sentences and paragraphs that will shock, satisfy and amaze, I tend to pause and do something else.

I'm still pretty much at the "beginning" of this novel but what I really run into are thoughts of whether I'm going to take it in the right direction. Am I afraid I'm going to do it wrong? I don't know what the exact problem is. I know I had moments like this writing The Ninth Avatar, but they're hard to deal with on a project that I love just as much (if not more).

I think I need some time at Starbucks to sort this out and exercise my fingers a bit.