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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

A Little Ray Of Sunshine

Well, after the tiny flood of rejection last week (and another one this morning), I’ve got a tiny ray of hope.  A couple months ago I sent out five submission packages of my first novel.  Today, I got the first response to one of those packages.  An editor has requested the full.  It isn’t a sale, but at least it means that my query package isn’t sinking me in the slush pile.  And it means my race score goes up to 33.

I probably won’t hear another peep about this submission for anywhere from 6 months to a year, but that’s okay.  The process is working.  Last week was tough, I started spiraling into the feeling that I’ll never be any better than I am now, that all of this was going to just be rejection after rejection.  So this little injection of hope came at just the right time and is a great reminder to me of the rules I just need to keep following.

Write. Finish. Submit.  It works!

Full of Fail

So between real life fun like car accidents, new car shopping, and illness (mmm colds are so much fun, really), I’ve gotten just about nothing done writing-wise.  I think I’m going to just write November off as a lost month, though I suppose two short stories isn’t the worst outcome.  I’m working on another one, but the science part of it is tripping me up.  I’m not a hard sci/fi writer, but this story really wants to be a hard sci/fi story.  I solved one problem, theoretically, now I have to figure out how to solve one other sciencey issue and then maybe I can write the damn story.

I’m looking ahead at workshops and WoTF submissions.  I have a novella planned that is supposed to be my first quarter submission, but if I don’t get it written in the next couple weeks, I’ll have to do something else, since I need a week or two break between writing and editing things.

The bad news is that with the car stuff, I might not be applying to any of the big three workshops this year.  We had to clean out our funds to replace the car about a year sooner than we were planning to (it was a very old car, so we were going to replace it, but not for a year when our savings had been built up for it).  So the money that was getting put away for the workshops has been used on a car.  That’s life though, sometimes it doesn’t go according to plan.

I might sign up for one of Dean Wesley Smith’s weekend workshops instead.  They’d be easy enough to get to and I’ve heard good things about them.  Mostly I’m looking around for ways to really take my writing to the next level.  I’m getting plenty of “positive” rejections, which tells me that while my writing is good, something might be missing.  I want to figure out how to push past the “good but no thanks” stage and get to the “here’s your check” stage.  I know it’s not a perfect science and that even famous writers get rejections, but I want to get at least my first sale someday.  I need a little push, I think.  Something.

For now I’ve been reading books on fiction editing and selling a novel.  Gearing up to revise my novel and get my submission package ready to go to my chosen agents.  I’ve got a top 5 list put together, so hopefully by January I’ll be ready to go on that.  First though comes the hard part, the actual revising of something that is many thousands of words long.  I’ll just tackle it the same way I wrote it; one page at a time.  One page at a time.

Slog Slog Slog (rant ahead)

I think this is one of the parts of kick-starting a writing career that *isn’t* fun.  The novel is grinding along, and the rejections are pouring in for my short work.  Everywhere I turn it seems I hear “this was good but…”  which as all the how-to books and advice out there will tell you is a very good thing ™ and a sign of progress ™.

What they don’t tell you is that almost good enough starts to get really really depressing after the first couple of near-misses.  Yay, my writing is improving.  Yay editors are clearly reading the entirety of my stories before they dash off the rejection note.  Yay, progress!  Head down, keep going.  Right?  Well, sure. Not much else I can do.  But it’s frustrating (and I doubt  any established writer would tell me that it wasn’t frustrating for them in the beginning either, or even still is on occasion).  And who knows how many years of near-missing I’ll have to muddle through?  At Worldcon I met a woman who’s been getting those nice rejections for 11 years without a single sale.  Now, I suppose she could have been lying about the nature of the rejections, and to be fair she only sends out five or six stories a year, but still.  11 years.  Frankly, I just don’t know if I have that kind of fortitude.  I joke about 500 rejections, but can I really hang on without a single sale through 479 more of these?  My spreadsheet that tracks what is out where is starting to look like a mess of black and the word Rejected covers the screen.

On the somewhat plus side, I’m nearly done with the novel.  It’s slow going, my normal cruising speed has been down  to a third because I’m having to carefully pull together two storylines and three POV characters.  And here I thought the ending would be a cakewalk to write.  Nothing is predictable about this process, is it?  Technically I gave myself the deadline of the end of the month, but I’ve got about 15k words left I think.  So it’s not going to be done tomorrow.  By the weekend though, hopefully.  Then I can put it aside and worry about something else for a while.  (And maybe, by the time I’m done I’ll know about my WotF entry? Maybe… though I suppose at this stage no news could be good news.)

Don’t worry. I haven’t been rejected to death yet.  I promised myself ten novels and ten years.  Will I be a ranting crazy person or a catatonic ball by the end? Perhaps.  Or I might be a selling writer.

Only one way to be the latter: Finish this damn novel.

On Series

Today over at John Scalzi’s blog there was a reader post about diminishing returns in series. The part of Scalzi’s answer that I’m going to talk about is specifically the world-building.

I’ve always enjoyed series. I thought it was mainly due to the characters. Once you get to know someone, even in a book, you want more of them. You want to know what happens to them, you want to hear their jokes and fight through their issues with them. I think that familiarity and interest in a character or set of characters has something to do with why people love series and why authors like to write them.

It wasn’t until I wrote my first novel that I understood the point that Scalzi brings up about worldbuilding. Now, as an avid roleplayer and sometime GM, I understand the difficulties of building worlds. I’d never understood it from a writing perspective, however, because until a couple years ago, I only wrote short stories.  Each story is a tiny world, and I didn’t have to worry too much about over-arching consistencies or taking things out of the small perspective.

Novels have no such protection.  For my first book I built a city, then a world.  I started small, thinking only about the characters and the immediate world around them.  But in order to bring length, richness, and consistency into things, I had to form a history and from there a whole bunch of layers, rules, reasons, and description took shape by necessity .  I’m still working on it.  Every time I sit down to edit I find things I haven’t completely thought out that need tuning and details that I either need to explain further or change to something more in line with the world as a whole.

I wrote this first novel as a dare.  It was sort of a joke novel.  Now I’ve got about 15 pages of the sequel (the first chapter basically) also on my computer.  I didn’t mean to do a sequel.  I have other novel ideas, other worlds I want to build and explore.  But since I’m spending so much time building the world of the first novel, it almost seems a waste not to explore the world further.  There is much left unsaid, undone.  The second book will have barely any of the main characters from the first, though as I outline and plan it they speak up more and more.   I’ve spent so many hours inside their heads, so many hours imagining their planet, their cities.  I want to do more in that universe.  I feel like if I’m putting in all the effort, I want to reap a little of the fun too.

I think series jump the shark when the Author stops caring about the characters or starts just following a formula to churn things out.  As with anything, there is a time to let a world go.  To relate it back to gaming, would you run the same dungeon ten times in a row just with slightly different monsters?  No, of course not (hopefully anyway, cause damn that is lazy!).  Your players are going to get bored since they’ve already fought through the same corridors.  Returning to the dungeon once or twice could be interesting to them.  Familiarity can leave room for surprises if you change things a little and upset expectations in good, reasonable ways.  Too much familiarity (haven’t we fought this dire rat before in this room? Or… yeah, we know the grick is about to pop out from behind that suspicious black shrubbery) just breeds contempt.  The key is not to let things get stale.  The key is to care.  Care about your players (or readers), care about your world, your characters.  If the Author has something invested in the work (besides the money…), it shows.

I don’t think there is a “law of diminishing returns” so to speak in writing.  I believe it is fully possible to just get better and better as one goes.  Keep caring, keep writing, keep exploring the crazy ideas or the areas of a world that are still shrouded in darkness.  It’s a lot of work to build a world.  Might as well enjoy the bounding about inside it finding problems to solve and dusty corners to explore.  As for my writing personally, well, frankly this is the first novel I’ve ever written.  Because I’m learning and growing my craft, if I’m doing it right any other books I write in the series will be better than the first.  And that’s just as it should be.  If everything went according to some law, thereby, I would say it would be a law of compounding returns. (Invest early and often kids).  The more you write, the more you explore and grow and evolve as both a writer and a person, the better your writing should be.  So it follows that the final book in any series should be worlds better than the first.

If it isn’t, maybe, in the words of the internets:  Writing, UR Doin’ it Rong.