Again with the Rejections! Sheesh!

I'm in no way the type of person that should be allowed to... well, do stuff.

Last weekend, for reasons that are far beyond me, I just up and decided it was time to submit my novel to a smaller publisher that I felt might be willing to consider my would-be epic first contact novel (ahem... a little something called, The Blutonian Death Egg) that I've been working on in fits and starts for the better part of a decade.

So, I decided to do it. Right then.

But I have no query. No problem. I just whipped one up there in the body of my email and fired it off with the first few chapters. It took something like, I dunno, 10 minutes to do... as I watched an episode of the Walking Dead... and had nachos, and hung out with the family.

Wait, I did what?

I went back and reread my synopsis a few minutes after I sent it and I realized what I'd just done. I spotted a typo, and another, yep, there was another one too. In all, it ran about one typo every other sentence. Missed letters, missed words, additional words. Crazy, nonsensical things that don't make any sense at all. Yeah, all that kind of stuff.

I looked long and hard for an 'unsend' button, I thought google installed a drunk detector a few years ago. It was supposed to warn me when I was about to do something stupid. It didn't work.

Then I got a polite rejection a day later. Nothing fancy, nothing big, just a nice little note encouraging me to keep trying.

So I wrote back.

I know, a bigger sin than sending off a drunken, typo-riddled query that makes no sense.

I only said, basically, that I'm sorry I sent him such a crappy query.

And then he wrote me back. Nothing earth shattering, but this one had a few nice things to say about the sample chapters I sent and included one additional line that I choose to believe means... revise it and send it back.

So, I will.

And I'm clearly a moron.

How Not to Write a Novel

MISHA GERICKE IS HOLDING her first 'Word Master Challenge’ blogfest and I am all over this one. I totally know how not to start a novel, any of my half-dozen or so actual attempts could be held up as an example. But instead of using one of them I decided for some original prose instead.

Without further adieu:

To say the winters in Minnesota are cold is to say that the summers in the Sahara are hot. Hot like the heat from a oven turned to broil – except the cold version of that. That’s what winters in Minnesota are like: Sahara summer cold.

Of course, Beatrice Jenkins doesn’t live in Minnesota, or the Sahara. She just wished she did, then disposing of the body jammed into her trunk would be easier.

Not that she knew how snow would make it easier to get rid of a body, but it felt like it would help. And in the desert, well, it’s a desert, nobody even goes there. Except for people who live there already, and those people are pretty weird.

Wait, where is the Sahara? Beatrice thought for a few moments. Is that the one in California? If the one in California isn’t the Sahara then nevermind. Because she meant one in America. She doubted she could get her unemployment checks if she lived in a foreign desert.

Thinking of all that cold in Minnesota made her want some coffee, which made her want some smokes. Definitely not moving to Minnesota, she’d be back to three packs a day within month.

There was a light touch on her arm. Lenny, the man that got her into this mess, was staring at her.

“Don’t do that,” he said, tapping the side of his nose with his finger. “I don’t like the smell of mentholated cigarettes.”

She looked down, sure enough, she held a lit cigarette. Didn’t recall lighting one up. “I’m not overly fond of the smell of rotting corpses either,” she said, “but I’ve learned to live with it.”

He looked out the window and let out a deep breath. “It might be you in the trunk next time.”

I worked hard on that one. The rules said it had to be 300 words or less… that’s 300 words ON THE NOSE! I should get bonus points for that. If words are missing then that’s on purpose, it’s supposed to be bad.

Actually, I started out trying to make it as corny as I could and in the end I kinda liked it. I’m not sure what that says about my taste in prose.

AND DON'T FORGET Andrew Leon’s short story competition where the prize for winning is the greatest chocolate on the planet earth. The talent that is lining up for this one is pretty daunting, but hey, you can always accuse the judges of unethical behavior if you lose… that’s my plan anyway.

A Late IWSG Post... AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The great Alex J Cavanaugh has given us a noble task of venting all our writerly neurosis onto the world on the first Wednesday of each month. I, as part of my new year’s resolution, decided to be more awesome this year, actually that was my only resolution. I’m already on pace to brush my teeth more often and I parted my hair for work today. Oh, I also did ALL the dirty laundry yesterday. So, I can pretty much mark off my resolution as mission accomplished for 2013.

 

Where was I? Oh, well, we’ll just call the fact that this post did not go up this morning as my first big oopsie of the year. See, I got my days a bit mixed up. I thought internet-wise that today was Tuesday (in the real world, I knew it was Wednesday – there is a downside to the ability to compartmentalize, leads to contradictory beliefs).

 

So anyway, all that aside, today is my day to vent. Ready?

 

I haven’t written a word of fiction since October.

 

Nothing. Nada. What have I been doing. Well, outlining, breaking down my WIP into small chunks and carefully reviewing each scene. Nominally, I hope to make it better. Really, I’m stalling. I have to change my ‘about me’ page to reflect my self-published novella coming out later than I said it would. I’ve just not done a thing.

 

And that’s weird to me, I was on quite a roll I think for a lot of the year. My actual wordcount may not have been ridiculously high for the year, but I did write something in the neighborhood of a dozen stories – I’d say on average about 5k words per. I liked them all, more or less. I did leave a few unfinished, but for the most part, I didn’t leave many things undone.  

 

Then it all came to a screeching halt. Not just writing, but everything related to it. I didn’t think of it at the time, but if I were get all analytical with myself, I think I had a crisis around the time I hit 40. I realized that I’m getting older, I’ve got a family that I’ve been neglecting, and job that is getting more and more demanding with each passing day, and quite honestly, I’m not sure my level of craft is good enough to warrant continuing to spend so much time dedicating towards it.

 

So, I don’t decide anything, I just flounder about and hope I’m hit with a flash of inspiration that allows me to be better at everything, and have more time to do everything. I’m hoping that talking about it gets it all out of my system and I can move forward.

 

Wish me luck on that.

I'm a Moron... The Proof (part II)

Remember when I blathered on about all these podcasts I listened to the other day? Well, here’s the thing, I'm still blathering.

See, I was on one of them. And here’s the other thing: I sucked. I sounded like a moron. 

Sigh, really.

Now, for the first time ever, you can hear my perfectly acceptable reason why I came across so poorly.

Way back in the early days of the 2012, I found this brand new podcast called the Roundtable Podcast. I mentioned before (in part 1 of this post) that it invites writers to come on and pitch a story while they, and a guest pro-author, go over the story in some detail and talk about what story points might be a bad idea and what might need to be added in order to make the story stronger.

Funny, I’ve been struggling with my epic fantasy novel now for some time. I’ve been stuck on it and have been looking for someone to bounce my story around with and see if I can hammer  out some things.

So I sent them an email and said I could use some help. The ball was in motion. I was put in the queue and I felt the freedom to work on some other things and wait until we could set a date. Which we eventually did.

Meanwhile, I was told to work on my pitch. My 5-8 minute synopsis of my novel that lays out all the major plot points that we need to discuss. I had something, like, 5 months to get that down.

No problem.  I got to work. I worked, worked, and worked on it. I recorded myself, timed myself, tried it out on people and asked how well they understood. I went back and tried it again, and again. Whittling it down to the perfect segment. I became the master of the synopsis.

The week finally came. I had a Skype call with the regular hosts to go over my synopsis and make sure things were okay. The call went fine, the time and date with the guest pro was verified and we were all set.

Then, through one of those quirks that happens when you have to coordinate the schedules of several people, someone had an emergency at the last minute and we had to reschedule.

I was given a few possible dates for the make-up date. I chose the one I thought would be best. No big deal.

Then my dad came to town.

My father lives on the west coast and comes in when he can. It happens once or maybe twice a year. He has a busy schedule when he comes, as he is responsible for much of the financial decisions regarding his mother (my awesome grandmother, which I wrote a fictionalized story about in an anthology that came out a few years ago…. which is also going up on the Kindle this week), and his week was pretty booked.

I was pretty booked too. I had to go out of town for this work-thing. I Spent a couple of days away for that, I worked some very long hours during my time in town, I only had a few moments to even acknowledge my father during his stay… except for his last night, which happened to be a Friday… the day before my recording session.

We went to my son’s football game, his team won in a blowout under perfect weather. Afterwards, we decided to go to my sister’s house in the next town over to hang out.

So we went, we hung, we had beers and pizza and we talked, it was a great night/morning.

I awoke on my sister’s comfy couch and was a bit fuzzy about what was going on. I know my dad was about to walk out the door to fly back to Cali and I had a recording session coming up in about 2 hours. Then I found out I had to take my step-son somewhere (I forget now, but it was important). So I hugged everyone and grabbed my kids and took off.

I arrived home a few minutes before our scheduled recording session only to find that my wife had brought someone in to help with our never-ending kitchen remodel. Great, I could use the help. Lots of noise and banging though.

I sequestered myself in a room and connected. Just in time.

Part of the format of the show is that the guest pro has an interview before the writer-in-trouble spills all their story telling woes. That interview gets put up as its own podcast a few days before the story discussion happens, but it all gets recorded together. It was about 30 seconds into the interview before I realized that I’d not really slept the previous night - I’d just dropped at some point when I was too tired to continue. I was really sleepy.

So sleepy, in fact, that I fell asleep during the interview – the interview with Hugo award winning author Tim Pratt, who was about to critique my story. Zonked. Then, as Skype is wont to do, it disconnected me. The sudden silence woke me. I frantically fiddled with things until I was reconnected to the call… once on, I immediately went into that synopsis I spent the last 5 months slaving over.

… and forgot every damn thing about it.

Every. Damn. Thing.

I said something about having already written 50,000 pages of text for the story, then went on to start describing unimportant details and stuttering until, mercifully, I just stopped talking.

At that point it became a bit more conversational, and wasn’t as bad.

Sigh. After it was over, the wonderful moderator/host told me that he’s a masterful editor and that he’d do his best to make me sound less than stupid.

That podcast is up by the way… go listen – then tell me how well you think the host did in fixing me.