All I can say is finally! The past month has been horrible for my writing and I'm going to have to work my butt off this month to meet my personal goal of having my rough draft done by the beginning of April. Now that I have something writing-related to put on my query letters, I can't wait to have something to send out. Even though it will still take a long time to polish my novel once I finish it, I'm still excited and looking forward to everything that I'll no doubt learn along the way.
February was rough, but I guess setbacks are to be expected, but they're so not fair. Having the flu pass through our household wasn't cool at all. And who got the worst of it? Me, of course. My husband had maybe two days of it and my son (the only recipient of a flu shot this year) had none. I had it for over a week and it even developed into a sinus infection to boot! It was a long week of huddling under blankets and wanting the world to just go away and let me succumb to the germs, but I somehow survived and I'm back!
In case you missed it, my son wasn't sick at all this past week. Imagine if you will, a stay-at-home Mom, horribly sick and unable to move, watching an over-active two year old boy. Sound like fun? Yeah, I'm not ashamed to say that the Little Einsteins crew were a near constant in our house this past week.
Now that my husband and I are better, you'd think things would be looking up again, right? Wrong! The day that I starting feeling better, the toddler got a cold. Fun, fun, fun... So now he's all snotty and won't let me wipe his poor little red nose. Lucky for my writing, he's mostly wanting to just sit with his toys or lay on the couch. He lets me know when he needs me, but mostly just wants to be left alone to be sick. Poor little guy.
But on the bright side of things, I've been writing again. Yay! I'm hoping to finish the chapter I started this morning sometime this afternoon/evening. It's pretty fun to write. Running into an ex that you've been avoiding, that you still have feelings for, is always interesting, especially when you're the one who ran away from the relationship. I've missed writing about Casey and now that she's speaking to me again, things are going great!
I think the contest win snapped her into perspective. I let her know that if she didn't want to cooperate, I could always write the novel inspired by my short story. People already like Megan and Joseph, why not tell their story first... I woke up this morning and she was all ready to go and suggesting scenes to start on. Is it bad that I'm making threats to imaginary friends who live inside my head?
With what I've written so far this morning, I'm at 90,648 words and thinking that my goal of 100k words is too small. It's hard to say what the final word count will be though as those 90k+ words that were counted aren't all completed scenes. Thanks to my blue text technique, every scene is mapped out, it's just not written in the correct POV. I just need to go back and change those incomplete scenes from "campfire story telling" format to having it told from Casey's POV. Does this mean that "technically my first draft is "done"? The story is all there, I just need to polish it and make it flow with the rest of the text. Hmmm...
Let's see, what else... Oh yeah, my strange, glowing skull dream never returned. It's a shame too, that dream was so vivid and I really wanted to know what was down that next small hallway. Sure, I could play the "what if" game and come up with several answers, but I really hate doing that in this instance. I have no idea where this dream came from and don't even know how to get my head into that frame of mind again. I should really pull out my dream dictionary and look up the hidden meanings of everything that I saw, but that would be another procrastinatory outlet that I don't need right now. I have enough ways to keep myself from writing ithout adding something new to the mix. Google Reader, I'm looking at you...
Oh yeah, still no news from the editor about my short story. Its been about a month now and I'm not sure what to think. What is the typical turn around on hearing back on a short story? Is no news still good news with how the industry is changing or does no news mean no? I know that I've read about literary agents having to forgo sending out rejection letters, instead letting no response after a certain amount of time mean "no", but are editors doing the same? The publishing house that I submitted to doesn't accept unagented work, except for one line and this short story promotion, so its hard to find information on their response time.
My "think positive" assumption is that either a) he likes the story and is doing whatever needs to be done to see if he can use it, or b) he hasn't gotten to it yet. There have been all sorts of changes at this particular publishing house recently and I can only imagine how backed up people are. The short story promotion hasn't been cancelled though, as new stories have continued to be posted every week as promised. I'm doing my best to maintain this positive outlook and to not worry about it. I've let the editor know about the contest win associated with the story and now, again, it's out of my hands. Unless I've suddenly developed the ability to bend people to my will, there's nothing else I can really do- except wait. Just tested things out, and no... I still don't have that ability, darn't!
Well, I think that's about it for my writing-related news. I want to thank everyone who's following my blog now, whether publically or through some reader program. I do a little Snoopy dance every time I see that someone else has started following my little blog here. So thanks!
Until I blog again...
Talk 2ya later...
~Willow
Hi again!
Has it been an intense week for anyone else but me? Well, maybe not the entire week, but definitely the past couple of days.
Let me explain... Now I don't want to jinx myself, so I won't list specifics, but... yesterday something crazy happened. I stumbled across an open call for short stories. As it so happens, I have a completed short story that I'm pretty happy with. I'll go so far as to say that I down-right love the story. Loved the characters so much that I've even outlined a full novel for them to be written... sometime...
Finding a call for short stories isn't that impressive, but this call was put out by a MAJOR publishing house. I don't want to provide any names over the blog because I'm scared that I'll somehow jinx myself...
Anywho, there weren't any guidelines listed, just an email address. I copied over the address into my trusty Gmail account and sent off a quick email asking for specifics (formatting, length, genre, etc.) and waited, not expecting much because it was after what would normally be considered busines hours. Around an hour later, I had a response telling me how to submit and that they would gladly read my story.
Okay, at this point I was really excited. Not only is this a major publishing house but they don't usually take unagented work. And here I am -unpublished and unagented- given permission to submit my short story. I quickly make the required adjustments to my file and send it off, really excited that my story was going to be read by someone at...
Now, I do my best to stay on top of the publishing industry and know the major houses, but... as my novel isn't complete yet, I haven't done a lot of research on the actual editors at these houses. Sure, I know of a few, whose blogs I follow on my Google Reader but, for the most part, I'm clueless.
I pretty much assumed that the person I was emailing was a junior staff member or at most a junior editor, but still treated everything as if I were emailing a big wig in the company. Boy am I glad that I did! After sending off the email, I knew that doing anything else for my novel would be near impossible so I Googled the name of the person I had been corresponding with. While I was unable to find any company hierarchy or listing of agents with titles, I did find a news release from a couple of years ago. The news release listed him as being the editorial director for one of the publishing house's imprints...
*THUD* -- That was the sound of me passing out at the memory of what was going through my head when I first read that...
I also found a short summary of an article that was published maybe 6 months after the news release that I mentioned before. This summary mentioned something about this person being a VP at the publishing house... As I was unable to read the entire story in context, I don't want to assume that what I read means what I think it could mean... I don't want to draw conclusions based on a short blurb that was cut off mid-sentence when I can't find any other information to substantiate this.
But anyway... unless this publishing house has two people with the same name (and it's not a common name that you hear a lot...) it looks like I was emailing at the very least an editorial director at a major New York publishing house.
*THUD* -- There I go again...
Can you see why I'm alternating between mild and major freaking out episodes? If my story gets selected, it would be published on a website for this particular imprint of the publishing house alongside short stories written by other published and unpublished authors. Do you have any idea how hard it is to wrap my brain around what that could do for my writing?
To be perfectly honest, I'm just elated that someone at this house is even reading something that I've written. I'm too scared to even think about what would happen if they really like it. I keep having to repeat, out loud, that, "an editor at ... is going to read my short story. An editor at a publishing house that, for the most part, doesn't accept unagented work. One of the largest publishing houses in the country, if not the world..."
*grabs a paper bag to hyperventilate into*
I don't know anything about having short stories published, everything that I've researched thus far has been specific to novels. I'm not sure what the typical turn around time for getting a response to this type of submission should be. If it were a novel, I'd have a general idea of what to expect, but I never even considered having a short story published. Heck, I never expected to write a short story.
For now I think I'm just going to be excited that an actual New York editor is reading my story. Sure a part of my brain is shouting for me to finish Instinct so I can strike while the iron is hot should On Occasion... get accepted for publication... but the rest of my brain is numb from freaking out. At this point, I don't think that I'd be that upset if I'm not chosen. There are a limited number of slots available and I'm not sure how many are available for unpublished authors.
Is this what it always feels like when you have something out for submission? I feel like I'm checking my email every five minutes, even though I know that any sort of decision that I would like would take longer than it's been. What's sad is that I don't even have to "check" my email to check it... I found that if I keep my Gmail open in a tab in Firefox, it will update the tab name to show that I have an unread message. So now that tab never closes, lol. If I'm doing something away from the computer, I make random passes by it... just checking the tab title... How pathetic am I?
So, other than that... I've made a little bit of progress on Instinct, not as much as I had hoped... but I think I have a decent excuse this time... I've mostly been weeding out scenes that I had originally outlined, but now realize have no real value to the story. Nothing new is presented in them and they don't do anything to further the plot along. Nothing is lost by removing them, so they've been stuck in a file for ideas that just didn't cut it. This way, if I need to add something in in a later draft, I have pre-outlined scenes to consider. It feels so weird to see my word count going down and knowing that I'm actually making progress.
I have my "To Write..." list made up for tomorrow. It includes a couple of incomplete scenes that I'm really excited to finish up. So, hopefully I'll make some decent progress later tonight and into tomorrow.
Well, that's my vague, big news and a boring update on the novel. I'm sorry again for being so vague, but I'm still trying to convince myself that I'm not dreaming. I check to make sure that the emails are real a couple of times a day as it is... Maybe I'm overreacting to the situation, but this is pretty exciting considering that I've never submitted anything for publication before.
Until I blog again...
Talk 2ya later...
~Willow
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