Tag: rejection

End of the apprenticeship

I got in a long conversation with my roommate tonight, where we talked about girls, government, the economy, 2010 elections, corporatism, Ursula K. Le Guin, and all other kinds of good stuff.  Towards the end, we got to talking about my goals to be a full time writer, and I showed him the record I’ve been keeping of my daily word counts.

In case you’re interested in seeing a copy of it, here it is:

wordcounts (to 27 February, 2010)

I basically showed him how I’ve been keeping track of my work, setting and keeping goals on a daily basis, juggling work, school, etc while taking a very professional approach to my writing.  While it impressed him, it impressed me almost more–all of this is so habitual by now that I sometimes forget how hard I’ve been working at it.

The most surprising thing?  Since May 2009, I have written over 422,000 words!

😮 😮 😮

There’s a saying in writing that says you have to write one million words before you write your first good word.  Until now, I thought I was still somewhat short of that number–on the upper end, certainly, but still short.

Well, I’ve been writing on a more or less daily basis since August 2007.  If I’ve written almost half a million words since May 2009, how many words did I write between August 2007 and May 2009?  At least half a million, I’m willing to guess!

In other words, it is quite possible that I’ve already surpassed my millionth word.

Wow.

I’m not sure what to think about that.  On the one hand, it’s exciting. On the other hand, it’s downright scary.  If it’s true, it means that I should move past the apprenticeship phase and start pushing this as my career.

That is insanely scary–and yet, at the same time, absolutely thrilling.  It’s going to mean investing a lot more time into researching the market and sending out to agents, receiving lots of rejections and wondering if my stories are any good.

Scary.  And yet, when I finally do get a publishing deal (and I’m more confident now than ever that this will actually happen someday–inshallah someday soon), that’s when it gets really scary.  If that first book doesn’t earn out, my career will be toast.  I’ll have to slave away in an office for the rest of my life.

Holy crap, that’s scary.  At the same time, though, it’s gonna be awesome.

Bring it on!

Trading old hangups for new ones

So I started my internship with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last week, and it’s been quite interesting.  Trying to figure out the new routine while starting a new novel has been quite challenging, but somehow, I’ve written at least something every day (except Sunday–I try not to write Sundays now).

I can tell, though, that it’s going to be just as difficult to juggle writing and work as it’s been to juggle writing and school.  There is NO room for procrastination–when I succumb to other things on my to do list instead of forcing myself to pound out the next scene, the day goes by and nothing gets written.

There is one thing I’ve been putting off for almost a month, though, and that’s the query letter for Genesis Earth. I recently received a very encouraging rejection letter from Eddie Schneider, where he basically said “this is good, but I’m not the right agent for it because it doesn’t excite me enough.”

I’ve written the book, polished it, made the writing solid–now, all I have to do is find an agent who’s passionate enough about it to take the project on.  That’s the last hurdle–most of the difficult work is already finished!  All I have to do is write a solid query letter and send it to the dozen or so agents I’ve researched…but yeah, I’ve been putting it off.  Query letters are…difficult.

For that reason, I’ve decided to set a new goal: submit Genesis Earth to at least 12 agents/editors by February 1st.

The only way that’s ever going to happen is if I write a query letter in the near future–as in, sometime this weekend.  When I do, I’ll post it up here and ask what you think.  Queries are very tricky–they are extremely different from novels, and otherwise good writers often botch them up.  We’ll see how this one goes.

So look out for an “I need your help!” post here in the near future!  Thanks!

First personalized rejection!

Okay, I’m taking a quick break from the Final Fantasy 6 Werewolf tribute posts to mention some exciting news.

This might sound counterintuitive, but I got an encouraging rejection letter a couple of days ago from Krista Marino, one of the editors at the BYU Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers conference!  This is what she said:

Thanks for giving me a look at Genesis Earth.  You’ve got a great concept and storyline worked out.  Unfortunately this just doesn’t feel like a book for teen readers.  All best, Krista.

In publishing, from what I understand, personalized rejections are a significant step above the standard form rejections.  Once you start getting personalized rejections, your writing is generally at or near publishable, and you’re not too far from breaking in.

What’s more, it seems that her reasons for rejecting the ms had more to do with audience, genre, and her personal tastes as an editor than problems with the story or my writing.  That’s very encouraging–it tells me that when I find an editor/agent who’s a good fit for this kind of story, I have a decent chance.

Or I could be wrong and it’s generally standard for editors/agents to give personalized rejections to conference attendees; I’m not sure.

Regardless, it’s a step up from a form rejection.  I should probably send a thank you postcard to her in the near future.

I also need to start looking for other places to submit Genesis Earth.  So far, I’ve only got three partials out right now.  I’ve been putting more effort into finishing the 4th draft, but I plan to finish that this week (one way or another, inshallah), so at some point in the near future I need to crack open Writer’s Market and just find a bunch of places to submit.

Also, just tonight I got a peek at the artwork for my story coming out in this month’s issue of Leading Edge. It looks REALLY good!  I lucked out with some awesome art!  I don’t yet know who did it, but I’ll be sure to post a link to the artist when I find out.

Also, once the issue goes to press, I’ll be sure to post a link where you can buy it.  Currently, the only way to buy copies of Leading Edge is through a mail-in form that you print out (lame, I know), but they just got a new volunteer webmaster so that’s probably going to change in the near future.

(Man, somebody read my story and illustrated it!  Drew pictures of it!  And they’re good! I can’t get over that!)

🙂 🙂 🙂

WOTF rejection

So a couple days ago, I got a phone call from my Mom.  A piece of mail had come in from the Writers of the Future contest.

Yeah, it was a standard form rejection.

Well, everyone puts in their time.  I guess this counts toward that.  A modified version of this story did well in the Mayhew contest, so I know it’s not utterly bad.  But I can see, in retrospect, how it wouldn’t do well with WOTF.

The main body of the piece was a scene I took from the middle of my novel–really, it was more of a scene than a coherent, unified story.  I threw on a beginning and an end, to try to fix that problem, but it probably didn’t mesh well with the real meat of it.  Which is fine, because it was originally meant as a scene, not a short story.

The thing is, I’m just not much good at short stories.  I don’t usually read them, and I don’t generally write them.  Novel writing is my craft–every time I try to write a short story, I end up writing a novel.  Once and a while, something clicks and a short story pops out (kind of like a Polaroid), but it’s not the usual thing.

So I’m not discouraged by this rejection from submitting to WOTF again, it’s just that it’s going to be kind of sporadic.  I have one more short piece that I could submit to the contest right now, but I don’t expect it to go far.  Still, it’s better than letting it sit in my hard drive.

In the meantime, I should probably submit that WOTF piece elsewhere, see what happens.  That’s probably what I’ll do.

What I really need to do, though, is work on my novel.  World Fantasy is coming up!

Some updates

Just a few quick updates before I go to bed:

My short story, Decision LZ150207, is getting published in The Leading Edge! Hooray!  This will be my first publication credit.  It certainly won’t be my last!

As you can see from the progress bar to the right, I’ve started work on draft 2.2 of Ashes of the Starry Sea, the novel that I finished back in April of 2008 (my first “finished” novel–and the project that spawned this blog).  My goal is to finish this draft by August 1st, 2009.

It is a beast of a novel–I’m predicting it will be at least 150,000 words.  The draft is currently at 158,000 words, but I’m going to have to add several scenes as well as vigorously trim out the bad writing.

And boy, is there a lot of bad writing in this draft!  I knew, when I wrote it, that I wasn’t that good, but holy cow!  Way too much introspection, way too much “tell”-iness, not nearly enough concrete details.  Too many adverbs, too much wordiness, especially in the scenes with the action.  This is going to be a deep revision.

BYU’s writing conference was a blast!  I’ll try to post more about it in the near future, hopefully tomorrow if I can get around to it.  The three editors who attended are open to submissions from the conference, and one of them prefers full manuscripts to partials, so on Saturday I printed up the full 2.0 draft of Genesis Earth.

Holding the full manuscript in my hands was surreal.  It’s one thing to write it out digitally and see it on your screen, but it is something else entirely to hold the tangible, physical thing in your hands.  I just…keep wanting to hold it.  It feels so real.

But yeah, I’m kind of uneasy sending the full manuscript off to this editor, especially since she hasn’t asked me for it specifically (she just told all the conference-goers that she prefers full manuscripts).  I don’t want to get in trouble sending my full ms out to multiple places, so my game plan is to send this to her ASAP so it can get rejected within the next 1-4 months (what she claimed was her turnaround time).

Because of that, I’m sending her a draft which could be more polished, but oh well.  Anything could be more polished–eventually, you just have to send your stuff out.  Besides, as pessimistic as this might sound, I do think that my mss has a fighting chance.  We’ll see what comes of this.