I’m Waiting
I sent off my submission to the gods of editing. I hope they are writing nice rejection letters. Heck, I hope they are finding me a spot on the editorial calendar and they all say yes and I have to pick and choose who gets the rights to publish my story.
Okay, I’ll wake up from dreaming.
Stephen King put a nail in the wall of his room and started filling in up with all the rejection slips he received. Now you submit electronically so what do I do, get a flash drive and copy my sorrows onto it and hang that on the nail?
I won’t get rich and famous from what I’m writing now. It is just a couple of short stories. I write these to get my foot in the door. I appreciated the time and effort of the magazine editors, sorting through everyone’s first drafts. I guess going electronic saves a lot of wasted trees. I am told that you need to be published in order to get anyone to seriously look at your book. I know, I know, this isn’t the only path but it is a path that is well traveled. So if it worked for them, maybe it will work for me.
What do I get (if I get lucky enough to be in print)? Maybe I get, just maybe, $25 and three free magazines. That will keep us in canned tuna for the week! More importantly on my next cover letter, excuse me cover email, I can say “I had a story published in such-and-such magazine just last year.” That and more good luck or good writing will get two feet in the door.
So what did I submit?
I’d love to share it here but I can’t. I’m offering first rights so you’ll just have to buy the magazine. I hope. It is a story that I had to ask my wife for permission.
I said “Someday I’m going to write about ax murderers, you don’t believe I will become one, do you?”
She replied, “No honey,” with wrinkled brow, wondering where this was going.
“I want to write about a married guy who travels and meets with a woman. I’m calling it ‘Close Affair’, if it’s alright with you?”
I married the best, most supportive woman in the world, “Yes, I trust you.”
So cross your collective fingers. I should get rejected by mid-March.
Just in time for my birthday.
I like to watch TV but I probably shouldn’t. If all of us inspiring writers spent that time we spend in front of the television, in front of a keyboard, there would be more new authors on the best selling list.
However, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
One of the my favorite shows to snuggle up on the couch (with my wife) is ‘Castle’. If you haven’t seen it, it is about a writer who, through a friend in the mayor’s office, gets permission to shadow a female detective while she solves murders. It is well written, entertaining, has wonderful mysteries and many, many background plots to warm your heart and keep you interested from week to week.
One background thread is that Richard Castle is writing a series of books based on his favorite detective, Kate Beckett. Her alter-ego in the books is his lead character, Nikki Heat.
Here is where marketing genius takes place. We’ve all seen the Coke bottles on the counter with their labels spun towards the camera, or the car drives up, logo center screen like some commercial. Well, those are commercials. So instead of getting paid to subliminal advertise somebody else’s product, what if in your TV show, you could advertise your own product, writing.
Thus available now, at your local Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc. is the Richard Castle novels. These are written by the fictional character based on a fictional character.
A ship in a bottle on a ship in a bottle.
I recommend the show because it is about a writer trying to write. No it won’t teach you about your craft and make you a better writer, but it will the seconds best entertainment you could have about your new hobby. (The best entertainment will be laughing all the way to the bank with a seven figure check.)
What is educational about this process is the writers, ghost writers, who write the show and then must have written the book(s), change the voice of the writing, just enough but not too much. It allows you to see the book through the eyes of the writer, see his inspiration from the ‘real’ world of the weekly show, inspire the fictional work of Nikki Heat.
And it is just plain good writing and good fun.
If you watch the show, I recommend the book. If you want to read the book, watch a few shows first. The book is good enough, stand alone, but better if you know all the inside jokes that it presents.
And when your done, get back in front of the keyboard and keep typing on the next great novel.
The Birth!
I birthed a baby today!
Well, metaphorically speaking.
I submitted a short story for consideration to a couple of magazine publications. Now my clock is ticking. Maybe ticking is too ‘fast’ of a word. No my clock is crawling.
The response time is measured in weeks, as in 10 to 12.
Unlike many of the ‘How to Write’ books I’ve been reading, where they talk of printing and mailing, now there are lot’s that submit online. With the advent of eReaders, I can’t imagine the shift will take long before they all go electronic.
I fear for the editors as the electronic word, submitted on a form or as an attachment will lower the threshold of effort and allow more submission without a corresponding rise in quality.
Why do I think so little of my fellow (and as yet unpublished) writers? It is my experience (and you can dismiss this because I’m still new to all this) that editing on the screen is simply not good enough.
I am puzzled how anyone could ever have written before the age of word processors. Doing it directly to paper, via the typewriter, would have cleared the forests of the earth had I been a writer back then. I just couldn’t do it. However, the word processor, for me, is not enough to complete the process. When I take the time (and money) to print my manuscript and sit in a comfortable chair, away from a screen and keyboard, I must have a pen because the mistakes float up on the page. I hope they will show up for you too.
I’ll blog later on the edit process and your target readers, but don’t skip the step of printing. It is too fundamental to the process to be skipped. Buy a laser or LED printer or take trips to your local office supply store and let them print it for you.
If your writing books, you need paper, so cut down some trees.
