So, I sent out a ridiculous amount of queries the other night. This is a screenshot of my sent items folder. So yeah.
The day after I had a bunch of nos. Like four or five. Today I had one no. But I also had this:
"Thanks for your query. Mind sending along the first five pages of your manuscript double-spaced in the body of an e-mail? I'd be happy to take a look and let you know whether the style is the best fit for me.
Thanks, Andrea "
I spent several minutes at least flailing and FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because OH MY GOD INTEREST! Just this request is really affirming. I can't be complete shit if someone was interested, right?
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Sydney Poitier Is A Mutant
I tend to have real people in mind for physical appearance for my book characters. This is how I get away with Malia being 38 and looking about 22.
Because seriously, how the fuck is this woman thirty-eight?
Because seriously, how the fuck is this woman thirty-eight?
Word Counts Are The Goddamn Bane of My Existence
Well, expanding exposition is proving to not be that hard, but it's still probably not gonna get me there. Unless I invent a lot of fun shit to happen in the few years Brenna spends in college offscreen, I'll probably top out again at 60,000 words. I fear even that is optimistic.
I really am torn. The only way to sell a 60,000 word novel to a publisher as a standalone tome is as a young adult novel and I really don't want to go that route. 70,000 is passable as a novel but they still get squinchy up to 80,000. Which is why 80,000 was the goal. I've been told that trying to hit a word count seems like a waste of time but everything I've read indicates that word count really is of serious importance. Apparently there's a trend toward shorter novels but how far do I really want to push that? And yet is it worth it to make the book suck just to make it longer?
I don't know. These are the issues plaguing me today. Now granted, none of this applies to someone like Stephen King. Stephen King can write whatever the fuck he wants and someone will publish it. He's an established author with a loyal, established readership who will automatically buy anything he puts out. But for a frame of reference, I remember Cather in the Rye seeming short, and it's 73,404 words. Slaughterhouse Five is less than 50,000, as is Fahrenheit 451, so I guess I have that, but both of those authors were established when they wrote these books and they're less novels-for-the-sake-of-a-story and more novels-for-the-sake-of-a-statement (at least that's my understanding -- I've never read Slaughterhouse Five. Although I want to).
One trick I can pull is to calculate my word count by the page number formula: 250p = w where p is the number of pages and w is the word count. Using that right now, I'm at 58,250 words. I find this much more comfortable. And, from what I see, both methods (the formula and just using the word count tool) are equally accepted and no one will criticize you for being even 10,000 words off your actual count because you used the formula. The logic goes that the formula is accepted because a 300 page novel with a lot of snappy dialogue is going to have a lot fewer words than a 300 page books with long, descriptive paragraphs. It's used to calculate spacing, which is a valid concern, and indeed the reason why word count is such a big deal. Plenty of readers will avoid a book solely because it looks too long or too short.
I think I'm gonna carry through and expand all the exposition that can be easily expanded, write "THE END" at the bottom, save it, then delete "THE END" and click Save As and put "brennaWIP" (the current file name is "brenna"). I'll send out queries on the short version, and keep working to extend it for when everyone says no. I might be the exception and my story and writing will break through my puny word count and someone will pick it up. However, as He's Just Not That Into You tells us, we can't count on being the exception. We have to count on being the rule.
I really am torn. The only way to sell a 60,000 word novel to a publisher as a standalone tome is as a young adult novel and I really don't want to go that route. 70,000 is passable as a novel but they still get squinchy up to 80,000. Which is why 80,000 was the goal. I've been told that trying to hit a word count seems like a waste of time but everything I've read indicates that word count really is of serious importance. Apparently there's a trend toward shorter novels but how far do I really want to push that? And yet is it worth it to make the book suck just to make it longer?
I don't know. These are the issues plaguing me today. Now granted, none of this applies to someone like Stephen King. Stephen King can write whatever the fuck he wants and someone will publish it. He's an established author with a loyal, established readership who will automatically buy anything he puts out. But for a frame of reference, I remember Cather in the Rye seeming short, and it's 73,404 words. Slaughterhouse Five is less than 50,000, as is Fahrenheit 451, so I guess I have that, but both of those authors were established when they wrote these books and they're less novels-for-the-sake-of-a-story and more novels-for-the-sake-of-a-statement (at least that's my understanding -- I've never read Slaughterhouse Five. Although I want to).
One trick I can pull is to calculate my word count by the page number formula: 250p = w where p is the number of pages and w is the word count. Using that right now, I'm at 58,250 words. I find this much more comfortable. And, from what I see, both methods (the formula and just using the word count tool) are equally accepted and no one will criticize you for being even 10,000 words off your actual count because you used the formula. The logic goes that the formula is accepted because a 300 page novel with a lot of snappy dialogue is going to have a lot fewer words than a 300 page books with long, descriptive paragraphs. It's used to calculate spacing, which is a valid concern, and indeed the reason why word count is such a big deal. Plenty of readers will avoid a book solely because it looks too long or too short.
I think I'm gonna carry through and expand all the exposition that can be easily expanded, write "THE END" at the bottom, save it, then delete "THE END" and click Save As and put "brennaWIP" (the current file name is "brenna"). I'll send out queries on the short version, and keep working to extend it for when everyone says no. I might be the exception and my story and writing will break through my puny word count and someone will pick it up. However, as He's Just Not That Into You tells us, we can't count on being the exception. We have to count on being the rule.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Houston, We Have a Problem
So remember the fear that I wasn't gonna make my goal word count and would fall horribly short? It turns out to be founded, and much more drastically than I even feared.
My current word count is 50,374. I have...maybe half of one chapter left to write, and then there is no more book left. Unless there are entire half-finished chapters I've overlooked somewhere (which is not out of the realm of possibility...223 pages is a lot to keep track of), I'm probably not going to break 52,000. And suddenly all those solutions I've placated myself with seem to suck really badly. There's a lot of exposition in the book, but if I used exposition, there was a reason -- usually because the scene of it would be boring, I needed to pass a very large chunk of time, or I didn't think I could write it effectively (frequently a combination of these reasons). I am not going to find a better transition point to end the book and start the next one than I have, and if I try, too much is going on. I already have three different settings and moods in the book. As is these sortof organize themselves into a rough three acts, so I get away with it, but if I add a fourth, it just won't work. I could go back and add more descriptions to things, but there's a limited amount I can do for that before I'm defeating the purpose of the book, which is to be a simple, bare bones, biographical style. Finishing the chapter I have and adding such descriptions could...maybe get me to 60,000, but that's still not enough.
I guess the only thing to do at this point is start expanding exposition. Ugh, I should have known the whole thing wouldn't be this easy. This last third-or-so is gonna fight me like a rabid pomeranian for my insolence.
My current word count is 50,374. I have...maybe half of one chapter left to write, and then there is no more book left. Unless there are entire half-finished chapters I've overlooked somewhere (which is not out of the realm of possibility...223 pages is a lot to keep track of), I'm probably not going to break 52,000. And suddenly all those solutions I've placated myself with seem to suck really badly. There's a lot of exposition in the book, but if I used exposition, there was a reason -- usually because the scene of it would be boring, I needed to pass a very large chunk of time, or I didn't think I could write it effectively (frequently a combination of these reasons). I am not going to find a better transition point to end the book and start the next one than I have, and if I try, too much is going on. I already have three different settings and moods in the book. As is these sortof organize themselves into a rough three acts, so I get away with it, but if I add a fourth, it just won't work. I could go back and add more descriptions to things, but there's a limited amount I can do for that before I'm defeating the purpose of the book, which is to be a simple, bare bones, biographical style. Finishing the chapter I have and adding such descriptions could...maybe get me to 60,000, but that's still not enough.
I guess the only thing to do at this point is start expanding exposition. Ugh, I should have known the whole thing wouldn't be this easy. This last third-or-so is gonna fight me like a rabid pomeranian for my insolence.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
To Be Fair, He Had Just Hit Her In the Face
My protagonist just kneed her father in the balls.
Sometimes it's good to be God.
Sometimes it's good to be God.
Life Really Blows
Well, my fiancee just broke up with me. So, there's that. People keep asking if I'm okay and I find myself answering that I don't know. I feel...unbalanced. Like you know how in Jenga when the tower is about to fall and even though it's not visibly wobbling or leaning and at a glance it looks just fine but you can just tell it's about to fall? That's how I feel. I don't know what the falling action is in that metaphor. People seem to expect it to be wallow and cry but I don't think I'm the wallow type. I've only ever really done one breakup with someone I cared about and I was barely fifteen at the time. I'm 21 now so I seem to have lost the frame of reference.
Breakups fucking suck, I'd forgotten about that.
I also kinda forgot how much I truly fucking hate being single. I don't even know why. It's not like I think I need a relationship. I do just fine without a relationship and I fully know this. I just don't like it. Maybe there's some deep psychological thing behind this but I suspect there's a lot of people who just do not enjoy singleness and usually don't say so because apparently not wanting to be single makes you a loser.
I'm not very funny today. Sorry about that. My motivation seems to have died off a little. For everything. I don't even have the motivation to cry. I cried last night. I did still make my word count goal last night, and beat it by a thousand. I don't find myself particularly more creative when I'm sad, but maybe I just haven't been sad enough recently. Ever since I was thirteen, I've thought myself so self-aware, but pretty much every time I look back a year or so, I find myself going "wow, I did not know what I was doing at all." Based on my other friends I suspect there is no magical age at which this will cease but that at some point I'll start being responsible and maybe that's when I'll become a Real Adult Forever And Ever.
Which brings me to kids. I know my mother is going to dislike it when she reads this. My mother has some very solid, unwavering opinions about certain things. Perhaps this is an artifact of age, or perhaps we are simply very different people, but my opinions are more fluid, and they differ wildly from hers on some things. Anyway, I've always wanted kids young. Like, 25 but preferably earlier. 28 seems quite late to me. 30 would be terrible. And with Patrick (her arbitrary codename) I felt like that was well within reach. She wanted babies as much as I did and she was okay with letting me carry at least the first one. She was also okay with my names. I have names picked out for my baby girls I don't have yet: Morgan Gaia Isis, Magdalene Bredaia Eurydice, and Moria Elizabeth...something. It was going to be Caroline but honestly I agreed to that to placate Patrick, because I hate the name Caroline and she loves it so I agreed for the third name of our third daughter. Maybe my grandmother's name or my mom's name. Moria Elizabeth Catherine works (my mom's name is not Catherine, but it's close).
Anyway, while I have no doubt I'll find someone who's okay with my names, I doubt I'll find them in time to have kids early, and having kids on my own at 25 seems drastic. Maybe I should try dating dudes again. And this is where a chorus of friends who have seen this cycle before go "no, Carley, you really are a lesbian, and you're not going to find a stable, functioning relationship with someone you're not attracted to at the start. This is an abnormal, unhealthy relationship." I don't know if you guys can tell but those words are individually italicized. This seems much different from not being individually italicized, I don't know.
Well, there are words to write. I promised my friend I'd got to 50,000 words before she woke up, and I'm at 49,100 right now. Also, NaNoWriMo has officially eaten my dust. Sorry about all the emo...I'll try to be funny again soon.
Breakups fucking suck, I'd forgotten about that.
I also kinda forgot how much I truly fucking hate being single. I don't even know why. It's not like I think I need a relationship. I do just fine without a relationship and I fully know this. I just don't like it. Maybe there's some deep psychological thing behind this but I suspect there's a lot of people who just do not enjoy singleness and usually don't say so because apparently not wanting to be single makes you a loser.
I'm not very funny today. Sorry about that. My motivation seems to have died off a little. For everything. I don't even have the motivation to cry. I cried last night. I did still make my word count goal last night, and beat it by a thousand. I don't find myself particularly more creative when I'm sad, but maybe I just haven't been sad enough recently. Ever since I was thirteen, I've thought myself so self-aware, but pretty much every time I look back a year or so, I find myself going "wow, I did not know what I was doing at all." Based on my other friends I suspect there is no magical age at which this will cease but that at some point I'll start being responsible and maybe that's when I'll become a Real Adult Forever And Ever.
Which brings me to kids. I know my mother is going to dislike it when she reads this. My mother has some very solid, unwavering opinions about certain things. Perhaps this is an artifact of age, or perhaps we are simply very different people, but my opinions are more fluid, and they differ wildly from hers on some things. Anyway, I've always wanted kids young. Like, 25 but preferably earlier. 28 seems quite late to me. 30 would be terrible. And with Patrick (her arbitrary codename) I felt like that was well within reach. She wanted babies as much as I did and she was okay with letting me carry at least the first one. She was also okay with my names. I have names picked out for my baby girls I don't have yet: Morgan Gaia Isis, Magdalene Bredaia Eurydice, and Moria Elizabeth...something. It was going to be Caroline but honestly I agreed to that to placate Patrick, because I hate the name Caroline and she loves it so I agreed for the third name of our third daughter. Maybe my grandmother's name or my mom's name. Moria Elizabeth Catherine works (my mom's name is not Catherine, but it's close).
Anyway, while I have no doubt I'll find someone who's okay with my names, I doubt I'll find them in time to have kids early, and having kids on my own at 25 seems drastic. Maybe I should try dating dudes again. And this is where a chorus of friends who have seen this cycle before go "no, Carley, you really are a lesbian, and you're not going to find a stable, functioning relationship with someone you're not attracted to at the start. This is an abnormal, unhealthy relationship." I don't know if you guys can tell but those words are individually italicized. This seems much different from not being individually italicized, I don't know.
Well, there are words to write. I promised my friend I'd got to 50,000 words before she woke up, and I'm at 49,100 right now. Also, NaNoWriMo has officially eaten my dust. Sorry about all the emo...I'll try to be funny again soon.
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Title. Also, Spiders.
I guess this would be an appropriate juncture at which to explain the title of this blog. It's pretty much because the way I'm writing, I'm deliberately avoiding symbolism and What It All Means as much as I can. But it's a fantasy novel, so those things will be expected to be there. Now, this is not high fantasy. And there are some things -- characters, races, scenes -- that are really fucking weird. Because I know human nature, I suspect that these will be the most vigorously combed for symbolism, when in reality the answer, the vast majority of the time, is going to be something like "it seemed like a good idea" or "I needed a filler scene" or "it was funny." Art shouldn't take itself too seriously.
And now for something completely different...
FUCK HUNTSMAN SPIDERS.
Seriously. Fuck them. I am deathly terrified of spiders. Like, the sight of a spider has the power to send me running in the other direction. RUNNING. This is also true of wasps, bees, and fire ants, but especially spiders. Anyone who gives me that bullshit about "they're more afraid of you than you are of them" is wrong, because my capacity for fear greatly exceeds that of an insect. Are arachnids insects? Fuck it, I don't care. Fuck spiders.
Some of you may not know what a huntsman spider is.
This is a huntsman spider.
Yes, that's a fucking pack of cigarettes next to it. No, this is not photoshop.
Fuck that thing. Seriously.
These things are found mostly in South Africa and Australia, and they're only found like three places in the states: Florida, Hawaii, and extreme southern California. LUCKY ME :| They don't apparently bite that often, but this is not a comfort since they've shown up in my bedroom, and any spider will bite when pressed against skin, like in bedding, clothing, or towels. Huntsman spider bites are also usually not that dangerous to humans (at least not healthy adults such as I) but apparently they really fucking hurt so again, I am not comforted. They move really fucking quick. One time I saw one and I jumped and it was about a foot away from shelter...it was like the thing fucking apparated. If you had been filming that shit you'd have maybe two frames of spider movement, maybe more like one.
As mentioned previously, I work ("work" here meaning write and play on the computer) in a basement. This basement has a lot of spiders, usually wolf spiders, which average out at a little over an inch. Freaky, but I can handle. A huntsman will drive me upstairs for an hour. CAN YOU FUCKING BLAME ME.
In South Africa, they're frequently called rain spiders, because they'll come inside houses to get out of the rain. Every time I've seen a huntsman has been during or after rain.
Almost enough to make me hate rain. And I fucking love rain.
Edit: I should note that that picture isn't mine, and it's not at my house. I found it on google and it was posted on a random message board. Google image search "florida huntsman spider" and you'll see it within the first couple of pages.
And now for something completely different...
FUCK HUNTSMAN SPIDERS.
Seriously. Fuck them. I am deathly terrified of spiders. Like, the sight of a spider has the power to send me running in the other direction. RUNNING. This is also true of wasps, bees, and fire ants, but especially spiders. Anyone who gives me that bullshit about "they're more afraid of you than you are of them" is wrong, because my capacity for fear greatly exceeds that of an insect. Are arachnids insects? Fuck it, I don't care. Fuck spiders.
Some of you may not know what a huntsman spider is.
This is a huntsman spider.
Yes, that's a fucking pack of cigarettes next to it. No, this is not photoshop.
Fuck that thing. Seriously.
These things are found mostly in South Africa and Australia, and they're only found like three places in the states: Florida, Hawaii, and extreme southern California. LUCKY ME :| They don't apparently bite that often, but this is not a comfort since they've shown up in my bedroom, and any spider will bite when pressed against skin, like in bedding, clothing, or towels. Huntsman spider bites are also usually not that dangerous to humans (at least not healthy adults such as I) but apparently they really fucking hurt so again, I am not comforted. They move really fucking quick. One time I saw one and I jumped and it was about a foot away from shelter...it was like the thing fucking apparated. If you had been filming that shit you'd have maybe two frames of spider movement, maybe more like one.
As mentioned previously, I work ("work" here meaning write and play on the computer) in a basement. This basement has a lot of spiders, usually wolf spiders, which average out at a little over an inch. Freaky, but I can handle. A huntsman will drive me upstairs for an hour. CAN YOU FUCKING BLAME ME.
In South Africa, they're frequently called rain spiders, because they'll come inside houses to get out of the rain. Every time I've seen a huntsman has been during or after rain.
Almost enough to make me hate rain. And I fucking love rain.
Edit: I should note that that picture isn't mine, and it's not at my house. I found it on google and it was posted on a random message board. Google image search "florida huntsman spider" and you'll see it within the first couple of pages.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Literal Blood, Sweat, and Tears
This book has taken literal blood, literal sweat, and literal tears from me. Seriously. I have this cut on the back of my leg I keep reopening on the chair I sit in, because it's leather and sticky and even when the cut doesn't reopen it gets really irritated. It's really hot in this basement (for other floridians -- yes, I do have the only basement in Florida) as well as humid and the AC doesn't work that well, so I sweat a lot and it never dries. Especially right now, because I'm wearing boots and jeans because there was a wasp down here earlier so I'm geared up for battle. I haven't heard it in awhile and don't know where it went, but I'm not taking chances just yet.
And, there's several scenes I have written where I've cried a lot writing them. Usually scenes with the protagonist and her family, or with her boyfriend (specifically where she breaks up with him). Blood, sweat, tears.
This brings up varying issues for me. Probably the most salient is the emotion of the book and whether it will come across well enough. Also prominent is how hard am I really pushing myself, and thus how self-congratulatory can I safely get? I guess we'll start with the emotion.
The book I'm writing is very emotional. It's a woman's life, and she has a lot of really shitty things happen in it. There are at least eight scenes where she cries, which makes me nervous because that seems like a lot especially when I'm only halfway done. These scenes are very emotional to me, obviously, but the characters all live in my head. I know everything that is going on in everyone's mind, and yet my writing style is pretty minimalist. I feel like less is more, you can say a lot with a little, etc, but I frequently find myself wondering just how much the reader is going to fill in. Is it enough to show a character putting a hand over their face and taking a deep breath, or do I need to go more into detail? Can I trust it to be obvious why they're about to cry? Is the simple writing going to hold a lot of power, or fall flat?
These are the questions I torture myself with, and that I can only really answer by showing the writing to people. So far it's only really been shown to a couple of friends who already like my writing and who report that the story draws them in pretty powerfully, but who are probably at least a little biased. What I need is a professional opinion, but I am not going to pay for that and I can't get it without paying for it until I've finished the manuscript. So there's really nothing to do but keep on plugging.
Which brings me neatly around to the other point. I've never gotten past 10,000 words on a story in my life. I've been writing prose (not always well...) since I was thirteen, although my dad would put it at since I was six, because I wrote a thing that was bound into a little book to be kept in the classroom. I do not know if they would have been as impressed if I told them that roughly half of my story was directly ripped off from a second grader's story (my first and second grade class was a mixed-age class with kids of both grades). I'm actually shocked they didn't notice at the time, given the similarities I remember. Maybe I was more creative about it than I gave myself credit for.
Anyway, I'm writing at a pace of around 3000-4500 words a day. Every day. This pace, as far as I can tell, is fucking insane. The usual good pace I hear is around 1000 words three or four days a week. And yet I still feel like I'm not pushing hard enough and guilt myself into writing just to the next thousand and the next and the next. While this is certainly a good way to get a manuscript written, I'm not so sure you can get a good manuscript written. I have this thing where if I'm not exhausted when I finish, I don't feel productive. I don't know where I got this from -- possibly the fact that most things people have to do on a regular basis, I'm not good at, and most things I'm not good at exhaust me.
I don't feel physically exhausted at the end of a night of writing. Tired and sleepy, sure, but that's different from exhaustion. Thus, I always think I didn't write enough. I'm not very good at gauging mental exhaustion so I don't really know if I'm mentally exhausted, but "yes" seems like the safe bet there. It can be draining to cry for half an hour because I keep having to stop to get coherent again before I can keep writing, continuing to work myself up into emotion. So even though I've written one twentieth of the entire book in one day, a book that most people would take a year to write, I feel inadequate and unproductive. And so I say "I write 4000 words today" and people say "that's amazing" and I go they're just trying to make me feel better because they think I'm still 6. So it's impossible for anyone to encourage me, and any kind of self-reward feels like a fraud.
I guess I don't really have an ending for this post either. Except that now I can hear buzzing and I don't know where it's coming from so I think the wasp is about to murder me.
And, there's several scenes I have written where I've cried a lot writing them. Usually scenes with the protagonist and her family, or with her boyfriend (specifically where she breaks up with him). Blood, sweat, tears.
This brings up varying issues for me. Probably the most salient is the emotion of the book and whether it will come across well enough. Also prominent is how hard am I really pushing myself, and thus how self-congratulatory can I safely get? I guess we'll start with the emotion.
The book I'm writing is very emotional. It's a woman's life, and she has a lot of really shitty things happen in it. There are at least eight scenes where she cries, which makes me nervous because that seems like a lot especially when I'm only halfway done. These scenes are very emotional to me, obviously, but the characters all live in my head. I know everything that is going on in everyone's mind, and yet my writing style is pretty minimalist. I feel like less is more, you can say a lot with a little, etc, but I frequently find myself wondering just how much the reader is going to fill in. Is it enough to show a character putting a hand over their face and taking a deep breath, or do I need to go more into detail? Can I trust it to be obvious why they're about to cry? Is the simple writing going to hold a lot of power, or fall flat?
These are the questions I torture myself with, and that I can only really answer by showing the writing to people. So far it's only really been shown to a couple of friends who already like my writing and who report that the story draws them in pretty powerfully, but who are probably at least a little biased. What I need is a professional opinion, but I am not going to pay for that and I can't get it without paying for it until I've finished the manuscript. So there's really nothing to do but keep on plugging.
Which brings me neatly around to the other point. I've never gotten past 10,000 words on a story in my life. I've been writing prose (not always well...) since I was thirteen, although my dad would put it at since I was six, because I wrote a thing that was bound into a little book to be kept in the classroom. I do not know if they would have been as impressed if I told them that roughly half of my story was directly ripped off from a second grader's story (my first and second grade class was a mixed-age class with kids of both grades). I'm actually shocked they didn't notice at the time, given the similarities I remember. Maybe I was more creative about it than I gave myself credit for.
Anyway, I'm writing at a pace of around 3000-4500 words a day. Every day. This pace, as far as I can tell, is fucking insane. The usual good pace I hear is around 1000 words three or four days a week. And yet I still feel like I'm not pushing hard enough and guilt myself into writing just to the next thousand and the next and the next. While this is certainly a good way to get a manuscript written, I'm not so sure you can get a good manuscript written. I have this thing where if I'm not exhausted when I finish, I don't feel productive. I don't know where I got this from -- possibly the fact that most things people have to do on a regular basis, I'm not good at, and most things I'm not good at exhaust me.
I don't feel physically exhausted at the end of a night of writing. Tired and sleepy, sure, but that's different from exhaustion. Thus, I always think I didn't write enough. I'm not very good at gauging mental exhaustion so I don't really know if I'm mentally exhausted, but "yes" seems like the safe bet there. It can be draining to cry for half an hour because I keep having to stop to get coherent again before I can keep writing, continuing to work myself up into emotion. So even though I've written one twentieth of the entire book in one day, a book that most people would take a year to write, I feel inadequate and unproductive. And so I say "I write 4000 words today" and people say "that's amazing" and I go they're just trying to make me feel better because they think I'm still 6. So it's impossible for anyone to encourage me, and any kind of self-reward feels like a fraud.
I guess I don't really have an ending for this post either. Except that now I can hear buzzing and I don't know where it's coming from so I think the wasp is about to murder me.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
First post party!
So. Blog. Whoa.
I'm writing a book. This book will be a novel, when it grows up. Hopefully a published one. That will depend probably almost entirely on how good of a query letter I can write. You don't just send a manuscript to a publisher or agent, most of the time. Some publishers take unsolicited manuscripts. Most of the time, though, you send a query letter. There's a specific format for this, although apparently it is hotly contested what, exactly, the correct format is. Generally, though, you're selling your book, selling yourself, and not going over one page. This is very important as most agents who have contact info anywhere I can find it, receive over 100 queries a day. So if they see something overly long they're gonna be like LOL DELETE.
Probably not literally, but still. You are essentially begging this person to make you money. Pissing them off first thing is a Bad Idea.
So anyway, for a reason that I'm sure existed but I cannot remember now, I decided last night I should have a blog about this process. I'll probably talk mostly about word count and agents and plot holes and directly book-related stuff, but I'll probably also talk about music, youtube (fuck you Firefox that is too a word), fire, the internet, my fiancee, fonts, the random-ass thoughts I have, joblessness, and frequently things more peripheral to writing.
Like, right now, it is pissing. Me. Off. That a lot of people seem to think that there is one right way to write and because I'm not dumping every metaphor I can think of into my writing that I am for some reason Doing It Wrong. Just today someone told me "you create tension by doing x." Because there is only one way ever on the planet to create tension and any tension that's been created in other ways is just a phantom, I guess. The same person also said "this wouldn't be comforting" about something that was seriously bothering the character and she was trying to block out so clearly they don't know anything. Or they didn't really read the scene at all, just skimmed or stopped partway, which is probably much more likely. If they didn't know anything, they wouldn't be able to type and breathe at the same time. Or type at all, likely.
But it's probably not a good idea to start this blog off with a ragefest. Except that now I've gotten myself started on that and can't think of anything else. Er.
Well, I'm about halfway through the book. My current word count is 41,711, and the word count goal is 80,000, which is a standard novel length. I cannot go over 100,000 words because most agents will not even look at a first novel over that word count. It's considered too ambitious. Now, when you consider that Twilight, which was a first novel, is about 118,000 words, this seems like a bit of an unwise restriction. But most manuscripts that literary agents see are not Twilight (thank god, or they would all kill themselves for what their lives have become. At least the fiction ones would. The nonfiction ones are probably safe). I make the comparison not because I like Twilight -- quite the opposite. But Twilight, it cannot be denied, has been a gigantic commercial success and has made a lot of god damn money for Stephenie Meyer and, if she has one, for her agent. Her agent could probably retire at this point. Agents make about fifteen percent of an author's earnings. Fifteen percent of infinity is infinity.
so, the bottom line is, 80,000-100,000 words, you're sweet. More or less and it gets sketchy. Some days I feel completely sure I will get to 60,000 words and stop and it will be done and there will be absolutely nothing else to add. This is fine for a young adult novel, but this book is decidedly Not For Kids, in my opinion, so I'm not going to write a young adult novel length, I'm going to write a normal novel length. I know logically that there is absolutely no way this will happen. The book covers 22 years of a woman's life, and a lot of time is passed with transitions like "A few years passed. *paragraph about what happened in the intervening time*" or "A few months later,..." et cetera. I'm sure there is a wealth of scenes in those transitions that I can write if I find myself coming up short. You don't go a few years without something happening. This point has been refuted by friends, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about Big Significant Events. The first scene in the book is a five year old pushing a four year old and the four year old being put down for a nap by an eleven year old. So it doesn't exactly have to be Big Significant Shit. In fact, the book will probably benefit from more commonplace scenes, since there are few.
Alternately, I know what happens in at least the first half of the second book, and while where I'm planning to end now is a much neater transition than anywhere in the middle of the second book, a couple of years pass between them and there's probably plenty in there, and there's a couple of places in the middle of the second book that make reasonable transition points, if not great ones.
Side note before I forget: I'm pretty sure you can't say a guy just gave you an orgasm, say no homo, and have it count. Just saying.
Other days, I feel equally certain that I will not get it all in. I will hit 100,000 words and realize I have 30,000 words' worth of scenes that really seriously need to be in the book. While also unlikely, this would post much more of a problem. For plot reasons, the book cannot start any later than her early childhood (the protagonist is the four-year-old in the previously mentioned scene) and it cannot end any earlier than age 19 or so. As is, it ends at age 22 (probably. I haven't done the math but I think she's 22, because she's graduating college. I figure it's not a huge deal because when I turned 21 I felt a kind of audible thump telling me that every birthday after this would be a lot less important because I'd hit all the major ones, and hopefully that sentence made sense to someone other than me), but for stylistic and things-making-sense reasons, it can't end much earlier than that. For stylistic reasons, there are very few scenes I can take out. For plot reasons, there are several that might be obvious removal choices, but that absolutely cannot be taken out. Ditto that on the things-making-sense reasons. Like, I probably could take out the scene where the character very nearly gets caught for murder, but that's probably a bad idea because I'm already kinda stretching it by having no one get in trouble really at all. A close call will make it at least a little easier to swallow.
Most of the time, I feel confident that I'll hit the appropriate word count, and that I'll be able to beef up or trim down slightly if I go a little over or under.
This has always been my problem, I'm very, very bad at endings. So I'll just say that Step Up 3D looks like it's really gonna be not worth what people pay to see it, and are we really so out of ideas with 3D already that we have to apply it to dance movies now? Like really? Did the aliens go on strike?
I'm writing a book. This book will be a novel, when it grows up. Hopefully a published one. That will depend probably almost entirely on how good of a query letter I can write. You don't just send a manuscript to a publisher or agent, most of the time. Some publishers take unsolicited manuscripts. Most of the time, though, you send a query letter. There's a specific format for this, although apparently it is hotly contested what, exactly, the correct format is. Generally, though, you're selling your book, selling yourself, and not going over one page. This is very important as most agents who have contact info anywhere I can find it, receive over 100 queries a day. So if they see something overly long they're gonna be like LOL DELETE.
Probably not literally, but still. You are essentially begging this person to make you money. Pissing them off first thing is a Bad Idea.
So anyway, for a reason that I'm sure existed but I cannot remember now, I decided last night I should have a blog about this process. I'll probably talk mostly about word count and agents and plot holes and directly book-related stuff, but I'll probably also talk about music, youtube (fuck you Firefox that is too a word), fire, the internet, my fiancee, fonts, the random-ass thoughts I have, joblessness, and frequently things more peripheral to writing.
Like, right now, it is pissing. Me. Off. That a lot of people seem to think that there is one right way to write and because I'm not dumping every metaphor I can think of into my writing that I am for some reason Doing It Wrong. Just today someone told me "you create tension by doing x." Because there is only one way ever on the planet to create tension and any tension that's been created in other ways is just a phantom, I guess. The same person also said "this wouldn't be comforting" about something that was seriously bothering the character and she was trying to block out so clearly they don't know anything. Or they didn't really read the scene at all, just skimmed or stopped partway, which is probably much more likely. If they didn't know anything, they wouldn't be able to type and breathe at the same time. Or type at all, likely.
But it's probably not a good idea to start this blog off with a ragefest. Except that now I've gotten myself started on that and can't think of anything else. Er.
Well, I'm about halfway through the book. My current word count is 41,711, and the word count goal is 80,000, which is a standard novel length. I cannot go over 100,000 words because most agents will not even look at a first novel over that word count. It's considered too ambitious. Now, when you consider that Twilight, which was a first novel, is about 118,000 words, this seems like a bit of an unwise restriction. But most manuscripts that literary agents see are not Twilight (thank god, or they would all kill themselves for what their lives have become. At least the fiction ones would. The nonfiction ones are probably safe). I make the comparison not because I like Twilight -- quite the opposite. But Twilight, it cannot be denied, has been a gigantic commercial success and has made a lot of god damn money for Stephenie Meyer and, if she has one, for her agent. Her agent could probably retire at this point. Agents make about fifteen percent of an author's earnings. Fifteen percent of infinity is infinity.
so, the bottom line is, 80,000-100,000 words, you're sweet. More or less and it gets sketchy. Some days I feel completely sure I will get to 60,000 words and stop and it will be done and there will be absolutely nothing else to add. This is fine for a young adult novel, but this book is decidedly Not For Kids, in my opinion, so I'm not going to write a young adult novel length, I'm going to write a normal novel length. I know logically that there is absolutely no way this will happen. The book covers 22 years of a woman's life, and a lot of time is passed with transitions like "A few years passed. *paragraph about what happened in the intervening time*" or "A few months later,..." et cetera. I'm sure there is a wealth of scenes in those transitions that I can write if I find myself coming up short. You don't go a few years without something happening. This point has been refuted by friends, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about Big Significant Events. The first scene in the book is a five year old pushing a four year old and the four year old being put down for a nap by an eleven year old. So it doesn't exactly have to be Big Significant Shit. In fact, the book will probably benefit from more commonplace scenes, since there are few.
Alternately, I know what happens in at least the first half of the second book, and while where I'm planning to end now is a much neater transition than anywhere in the middle of the second book, a couple of years pass between them and there's probably plenty in there, and there's a couple of places in the middle of the second book that make reasonable transition points, if not great ones.
Side note before I forget: I'm pretty sure you can't say a guy just gave you an orgasm, say no homo, and have it count. Just saying.
Other days, I feel equally certain that I will not get it all in. I will hit 100,000 words and realize I have 30,000 words' worth of scenes that really seriously need to be in the book. While also unlikely, this would post much more of a problem. For plot reasons, the book cannot start any later than her early childhood (the protagonist is the four-year-old in the previously mentioned scene) and it cannot end any earlier than age 19 or so. As is, it ends at age 22 (probably. I haven't done the math but I think she's 22, because she's graduating college. I figure it's not a huge deal because when I turned 21 I felt a kind of audible thump telling me that every birthday after this would be a lot less important because I'd hit all the major ones, and hopefully that sentence made sense to someone other than me), but for stylistic and things-making-sense reasons, it can't end much earlier than that. For stylistic reasons, there are very few scenes I can take out. For plot reasons, there are several that might be obvious removal choices, but that absolutely cannot be taken out. Ditto that on the things-making-sense reasons. Like, I probably could take out the scene where the character very nearly gets caught for murder, but that's probably a bad idea because I'm already kinda stretching it by having no one get in trouble really at all. A close call will make it at least a little easier to swallow.
Most of the time, I feel confident that I'll hit the appropriate word count, and that I'll be able to beef up or trim down slightly if I go a little over or under.
This has always been my problem, I'm very, very bad at endings. So I'll just say that Step Up 3D looks like it's really gonna be not worth what people pay to see it, and are we really so out of ideas with 3D already that we have to apply it to dance movies now? Like really? Did the aliens go on strike?
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