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?