Tag: books

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Now the Work Begins

I feel like a cicada popping out into the open every so often. Sometimes I forget I have a blog that needs to be visited more than once a year. Yep, it’s kind of sad, but I’ll work on getting better at it. For real this time.

The exciting news is I finally finished my WIP. The beginning, middle and end are complete and hey, it only took me two NaNoWriMos and a little extra. I actually typed the last page on November 17, 2025. After putting the printed copy in a drawer and leaving the file closed for a month, the dreaded self-edit began. Is it perfect?

Hell no. A sharper set of eyes than mine will have to gander at this 82,000-word monster for that to happen.

While my leaf-mold manuscript sat in the dark marinading or whatever it was doing, I started drafting a few query pitches. I’ve learned not to fear the query like I used to. Afterall, this is the first thing that an agent or editor will see of this thing that took so long to write. Might as well get used to writing them. Right? To get comfortable writing a query I had to realize the process is straightforward; hook the reader with an interesting situation and give an abbreviated dramatic overview of what the protagonist has to do to survive, stay out of jail, find a killer, etc.. While writing a query may not be hard, it is tedious.

Didn’t someone say writing was subjective? Yeah, that part. You get what I mean.

Sometime ago I wondered if agents weren’t trying to drive writers nuts. Case in point, the synopsis. Some want a one-pager while others want no more than two pages. What’s left are the ones who don’t specify how many pages they’re willing to read. Keep in mind the synopsis tells the whole story super condensed. We have to spill what happens in the end. There are no secrets in the synopsis. That’s the part that makes writing one so damn tedious.

If agents/editors would just agree on a standard criterion. Say, I don’t know, one page per chapter. Half a page per chapter? That’s doable. That would also mean we writers wouldn’t have to tailor so many synopses. We could have one file titled as such: synopsis/title as opposed to onepgsyn/title and twopgsyn/title. I mean really, what the hell?

The third step into publishing madness is the search for someone out there to send our monstrosities off to. Some agents who will be a perfect fit for our work. I want to give a shoutout to Duotrope about now. I absolutely love this database of agents and publishers and encourage any writer or artist to check it out for themselves. I believe it still offers a month free subscription. The site allows you to search for markets looking for all types of writing: horror, suspense, mainstream; you get the point. Duotrope has a submissions log that proves itself helpful especially for people like me who can’t remember where that story was sent off to.

Truth be told, I’ve spent hours picking and choosing who to send work to. We have to don’t we? Else we’ll be wasting our time submitting to uninterested markets. Reading each agent’s wants and needs is the only way to pick so it becomes a necessity, but it too is tedious.

I hope if you’re out there either finished or trying to finish your novel and you get or have gotten to the submission point, you don’t feel alone resisting the urge to pull your hair out of your head. You’re not. Submitting work is aggravating but necessary and where the real work begins.

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Connective tissue

A couple of months back I said I was using The Marshall Plan to plot and finish my second novel. My intentions were spot-on: working the outline, plotting out my second and third surprise, you get the idea. I believed I was ready for NaNoWriMo even if it spilled into December a little. Hell, taking the time to work an outline forced me to learn more about my antagonist Floyd Holt. So there is that…

But Floyd’s not who I want to discuss in this post. I want to explore a snag I ran into when the actual writing began. I’ve come to know it as connective tissue. Much like the tendons and ligaments holding muscle to bone and bone to bone and whatever else straps our bodies together. It’s the grey area that doesn’t get much attention unless it’s done badly. I equate it to the linkage between two train cars. We know it’s there, but don’t think much about it until we realize it’s broken.

While moving from the end of one chapter to the beginning of the next there’s a shady area between the two. The shade is especially dark if the following chapter deals with a different character. Imagin in a play when the curtain rises, the actors aren’t frozen in time. They’re milling around doing stuff—insignificant stuff, but doing it just the same. What the audience gets out of it may prove benign, but at least they get something. They get the character is alive and going on with his/her day-to-day. Actions happen. Thoughts happen. The beginning of his/her chapter or scene picks up somewhere during those happenings, moving the reader smoothly into that character’s life.

This connective tissue consumed many hours of NaNoWriMo for me. Having to shift gears from fifth to first from one character’s part to the next is where the real work happens. While I didn’t finish my novel in November or December, I did complete eight chapter that propelled me to the beginning of the end section. Basically two-thirds of the novel is complete. Would I have gotten that far without The Marshall Plan? Maybe. Maybe not.

Until next time, keep tapping away at those keys and be mindful of the connective tissue.