Filed under: General Musings
Well, I’ve ordered the latest copies of the Guide to Literary Agents and Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market, in preparation for going through another round of formal submissions to find an agent and/or a publisher. Now that I have a completely revised manuscript for people to ignore, I should send it out. Right? Of course.
If you’ve tried this, you know how insane-making it is. Just going through the listings in order to find a reputable agent or suitable publisher will turn your brain into mush. You try to read the listings to get a sense of what sounds promising, then go to the website for that person/company and decide whether they’re worth the trouble..knowing all along that ‘blind’ submissions have like 0.05% chance of getting past a minimum-wage-earning reader (which made my experience with Bantam Dell both encouraging and maddening – making past several ‘cuts’ to the desk of the Senior Editor, who said she really liked the book and thought it was well written, but that it just didn’t fit with the direction they were going), and that most people in the field recommend that you find a contact who will get you a foot in the door. In the Science Fiction community, the advice is to usually start attending Cons, taking writing workshops, getting to know someone that way – with luck, you’ll cross paths with someone who might deign to take an interest in you or your work.
Which is probably what I should do. Except for the fact that I dislike crowds, am 20 years too old for that scene, have responsibilities as a care-giver which greatly limit the amount of time I can be gone from home, and don’t need a workshop on how to put together a paragraph or create a plot. I’m not saying that I couldn’t learn something – that is always a possibility. It’s just that this would be more of an exercise in spending money for simple access to meet someone.
Gah.
Jim Downey
Well, promotion so far has been rather lack-luster. Or perhaps just no one is bothering to give me any feedback.
That’s one of the big fears that any author has – being ignored. I know from countless essays/diaries/posts/columns that I have written for newspapers and the web that my anxiety about this is useless, and usually unwarranted. Unwarranted, because my writing is usually fairly widely read, even if that isn’t obvious to me at first. Useless, because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.
As I mentioned previously, I know that it takes a while for this sort of thing to pick up momentum. My Paint the Moon project (which came from Communion – you’ll find it in chapter 9) just sort of stumbled along for two months before hitting the big time. And I am constantly getting comments from people about a column I wrote for the newspaper weeks after the fact. My ego lives in the immediate now – everyone else seems to exist in the distant past. Ah well.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings
Well, the novel is now complete. In all honesty, it took me a lot less time than I expected to get it done – I suppose that my thinking about the book for the last couple of years, and the changes that I would like to make, paid off. And a somewhat interesting note…before the revisions, the text was about 132,500 words in length. Now it is just 300 words shorter. It wasn’t my intent to either lengthen or shorten the book, just change material as I saw fit. I find it a little curious that it came out so close to the original.
I’m a bit exhausted by all this. Getting that much re-writing done in about 10 days required a lot of focus. So forgive me if I step back and recharge a bit before getting too much into this blog.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 