The Business of Writing

Update 5 24-30 May 2021

Well, last week I made some promises and I had to keep them. That is one of the points of this entire exercise. To keep myself accountable, to achieve the goals I set out to.

Those of you less charitable might say that the full year I’ve put into this series hasn’t really gotten all that far. But we all work at different paces.

Writing Goals

So, every week I aim for about 6000 words. But this past week my workshop partner was out of town and I really felt that I was ignoring other work.

Writing wise I only did a single small chapter. But the PoV was experimental. I’m adding in a number of povs from the “villainous” side of things.

By the numbers, the week was a failure. I only wrote 1134 words. But I also worked more on the outline for the novel.

Hybrid Writer.

I’ve talked about this in probably a dozen different posts, but it bares repeating here for newer readers. I am a hybrid between pantser and plotter. This is a place that Robert Jordan claimed as his writing method.

I know all of my main cast, I know all of my villains, and I know the goals of all of these individual characters. I have the main arc of the story and how the characters interact within it, and I have the beginning, end, and several of the pieces through the middle in mind.

However, getting from the beginning to the set pieces, to the end… well in there I tend to pants a lot of the material. A lot of my secondary and tertiary characters don’t even have names.

When it came to starting this novel, I was falling behind in my arbitrary deadlines and I freely admit I started this novel with less planning than normal.

Put it all together and I have taken time to outline the next 15 chapters of the book and now I’m putting together a character list, sketching maps, and making some more timelines.

Query Letters

Last week, I said I would finally get the query letters together. I have one letter that I first wrote in my undergrad and then revised five times in my Master’s. Used that letter as my base template, and, knowing that that particular agent was closed to submissions, I started writing the other letters.

Then I wrote the first three letters before I realized I was a complete idiot.

I couldn’t use my first letter because that lovely agent was on Hiatus. What if the rest where?

As it turned out, the three letters I had written were all addressed to people who were currently closed. I then spent a lot of time going through the list and finding just who WAS open.

First Batch

Armed with a list of ten possible choices I managed to write another three letters before I realized that most of my day was gone.

My goal was to complete and send out 5 letters in the first batch and then wait 6 weeks and if I didn’t hear anything, send out the next five. There are several problems with that.

First, many of my agents were with the same agency and you can’t query two agents in the same office at the same time. Besides being in poor taste, in some offices it’s automatic deletion.

Second, the agents were open at different times, in a few weeks my list of open/not open would be totally different.

In the end I sent out three letters, along with the requested packages. (Some agents want the first five pages, some want the first chapter, three chapters, a synopsis, etc. In each case I made sure to deliver exactly what they wanted, and HOW they wanted it).

So now we wait. Meanwhile, I have three more letters already written and a pattern to crank out more in the future.

I then created a dry erase board to chart all of my rejections.

A Good Week

I might not have cranked out a near 10k week last week, but I have been enjoying the writing and workshopping process. It has been a real delight. I think I will want to try and do this with every novel, maybe get a couple more writers involved as well. Not too many as the workshopping time would start to edge into the writing time. But still, I think a three-way split could be a good time.

The only problem I’ve encountered so far is the need to go back and revise. I’m trying not to do that. To that end I have started a notebook where I write down all of my ideas and changes based on feedback. So, now I have a plan for how the revision will go.

Having feedback from two sources would double down on problems and give a boarder perspective. And there is still much to think about having decent beta-readers willing to read the whole thing and give feedback.

But I’ve had a lot of issues with beta-readers. A lot of people who say they want to read and then when you drop a full 200k novel on them they collapse or fade away.

Anyway, the week was productive.

I’m leaving you with a short one this week. Next week is the 52^nd update to this series, meaning we officially hit the one-year mark for my thesis diary. I’m gush more about that next week.