I am growing slightly concerned that I’m losing the plot, and not just the plot of my second book this month. I’m at the 23,000 word mark for Sue Key and it has got even more surreal than I had originally pictured.
The idea was to write the start of a three-part fantasy series I’ve been waiting on writing for five years. Instead it has got a lot deeper and more involved than I was expecting. This could be a good thing. I may have hit a stride. My decision to write different chapters from different character perspectives is a departure. The subject matter is a departure. My main concern is that naming a race of goblin-like creatures after my favourite cheese may have been a slight oversight.
It will all work out in the redraft though surely.
Tag: Writing
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NaNoWriMo – Day 20
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NaNoWriMo – Day 6
It’s day 6 of NaNoWriMo and I can imagine I’m starting to annoy everyone with just how well I’m doing. Only yesterday I got an apology message for the way someone had approached the news that I had already hit the 20,000 word mark. It’s getting worse for everyone else because today I hit 25,000. That’s right, I’m halfway through the challenge in just six days. I have found it obnoxiously easy and I am not gloating because I know it is down to the fact I’m essentially writing my own diary. How did I feel? Great. Just write that a lot. Despite the way I am going about this I am still here to support my friends who are writing actual proper things and will continue to hit up The Alex once a week for our meet-up sessions. It’s so good to meet so many people who are trying the project out for their first year. The meeting we had on Sunday was a real eye opener. At the moment I feel like I’ll never stop so it’s grounding to see people who aren’t taking to it in the same way I am this year. It’s excellent in fact. Their writing will be a damn sight more interesting than mine because they’ve thought about it whereas mine just falls out of me at a rate of knots.
The NaNoWriMop website is estimating that I’ll finish on November 12th. I could fit in another book before the end of the month then right? -
Happiness is a rejected manuscript.
Last night I got home a little worse for wear to find the first of the manuscripts I sent out last week back in my house. It wouldn’t have riled me up if I hadn’t spent so damn long in the post office explaining why I needed so many stamps (you’re expected to include a fully paid self addressed envelope with all submissions for their safe return). Feeling a little deflated but also a little gassy, the latter as a result of Heineken (you can take the boy out of Holland but yea yeah etc.), I ripped open the envelope to find the following message:
This might just look like an ordinary rejection to the untrained eye but it outright thrilled me, and while I wasn’t able to take it all in at that moment, I found myself thinking it over in the shower this morning as I tried to wash the fur from my tongue and the beer sweat from my brow.
This rejection letter represents the first handwritten response from an agency I have received (excluding the submission of Situation One which took a year to be returned to me). I have read in the Writer’s & Artists Handbook that if you get a handwritten response you’re onto a good thing. Last year each of my submissions was returned with a combination of either a template rejection letter, a photocopy of a rejection letter where someone had crudely scrawled my name in the gap beside ‘Dear’, or worse still, a letter which nobody had bothered to fill the blanks in on.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that running a literary agency is incredibly hard work. They receive so many submissions and any kind of response is taken on board and appreciated. The letter I received yesterday is from Darley Anderson, the actual genuine man himself, proprietor and all-seeing eye of the literary world. While I am ready to admit this may have been as a result of me sending it addressed to someone no longer employed at the agency, I am taking this as a victory. The fact it got as far as Mr Anderson is a small triumph. Having studied the roster of staff in depth there are any number of people who could have written that response to me, or printed the Word document: Rejection Letter To Twerp.doc. Instead he took the time to respond himself, and within a week of receiving my manuscript.This means, at least to my mind, that I escaped the slush pile. It must have been reviewed before it was passed through to him, and I may just be romancing it all but surely those who read it beforehand identified something in it. My cover letter had been seen and under the words ‘50,000 words’ and ‘love story’ a line had been placed, possibly indicating who would be best to field a response. Am I getting too Sherlock here?
All I am saying is it’s good to know I am not just throwing my efforts, time, energy, money into a void. There is something on the other end, and it’s hurling stuff back.
Paul Schiernecker 