Time crawls when you're in panic mode, then you change gears and its a month later--OK, two months later. Then I was not so gently reminded by one of my followers of my time/memory lapse.
I've been stewing about query letters, writing a synopsis and entering some contests. Entering a contest is a breeze, it's the requirements that bog me down. Writing a book seems a whole lot easier than preparing a synopsis and/or query for the darn thing.
Fortunately, after much finger gnashing on my keyboard, a couple of friends from my writing chapter helped with the query. Their suggestions and critiques were immensely valuable. My thanks to Michael Jensen and Ali Cross.
Then there was the question I've been trying to answer for many months. How do I publish? The answer finally came to me when I realized how much I guard my privacy. I would self publish through Createspace and Amazon.com. Setting up the account was easy enough until I got to the part where they wanted a book cover. I really didn't have one worth bragging about so I clicked on an option to have Createspace do one for me.
I'm a penny pincher. The price stalled me. I went to bed early grumbling about more money going out.
About midnight C.W. Johnson called me. He has written five books and has a sizeable fan base. He also read and critiqued the final version of "The Singing Stones of Rendor." Dare I say he was ecstatic about it. I've gotten a lot of great feedback from my beta readers which was very encouraging, but he is the one who iced it for me. "Get an agent," he said. He and I argue about a lot of different things just for the fun of it, but I don't question him about writing a book or getting published. He has been at it a lot longer than I have and done most of it the hard way.
To top it all off, I handed the phone to my muse who talked with him even longer than I did. By the time she finished she was all smiles.
So, now I'm using that query to sell the book to agents. Sometimes procrastination pays off.
As of today ten agents have received an email--more agents tomorrow as I trawl through the internet in search of that one agent who will pick it up.
Let the waiting begin.
UPDATE: 27 March 2014
Well that didn't take long. The waiting is over. My first rejection letter (email) just arrived.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Patience, my boy, patience
I know its obvious, but I hate flu season, and getting a cold. It's hard to avoid, especially when you have kids in school where it spreads quickly. I certainly empathize with those who have to go through it. Been there, done that and will likely do it again.
Fortunately my wife and I have avoided the scourge, so far. However, my editor hasn't. I sent the manuscript for "Singing Stones" to her the first of the month with hopes of getting it back within three weeks. About a week later her facebook posts told of an epidemic of generational proportions ravaging her family. She was down for nearly two weeks.
She's quite the trooper, though as she still takes care of family and business. Something had to be sacrificed to make time for all of it. Editing has to take a lot of time and it is something that can wait, if need be. Perfectly understandable.
Alright, I admit to feeling a little abused by the delay. That's selfish of me, I know. My muse was already on me for wanting one more edit of the story. She didn't think it really needed another. "You have written it perfectly," she said in present perfect tense. Although I wanted to agree with her I want it even more gooder (that's Utahn for perfect) . . . if that even makes sense.
As a procrastinator, I did take advantage of the postponement to reconsider how to begin the next book in the series. For several days I plugged away at different openings searching for the right time frame. Nothing worked.
Thank God for muses. Despite my spending more money on another editor she stepped in and helped me. Of course there was some begging involved, but we won't go there. After only a few minutes discussing the problem she set her laser on it and I soon popped out my first draft.
Of course the chapter may not survive the final edits, but I'm now on track. Perhaps my editor's flu bug was serendipitous for me. I doubt she would agree, though.
Then, inexplicably, my muse decided to read the sample edits Tristi Pinkston did on the first 20 pages. "Alright," my wife admitted. "Maybe it wasn't so perfect after all."
Fortunately my wife and I have avoided the scourge, so far. However, my editor hasn't. I sent the manuscript for "Singing Stones" to her the first of the month with hopes of getting it back within three weeks. About a week later her facebook posts told of an epidemic of generational proportions ravaging her family. She was down for nearly two weeks.
She's quite the trooper, though as she still takes care of family and business. Something had to be sacrificed to make time for all of it. Editing has to take a lot of time and it is something that can wait, if need be. Perfectly understandable.
Alright, I admit to feeling a little abused by the delay. That's selfish of me, I know. My muse was already on me for wanting one more edit of the story. She didn't think it really needed another. "You have written it perfectly," she said in present perfect tense. Although I wanted to agree with her I want it even more gooder (that's Utahn for perfect) . . . if that even makes sense.
As a procrastinator, I did take advantage of the postponement to reconsider how to begin the next book in the series. For several days I plugged away at different openings searching for the right time frame. Nothing worked.
Thank God for muses. Despite my spending more money on another editor she stepped in and helped me. Of course there was some begging involved, but we won't go there. After only a few minutes discussing the problem she set her laser on it and I soon popped out my first draft.
Of course the chapter may not survive the final edits, but I'm now on track. Perhaps my editor's flu bug was serendipitous for me. I doubt she would agree, though.
Then, inexplicably, my muse decided to read the sample edits Tristi Pinkston did on the first 20 pages. "Alright," my wife admitted. "Maybe it wasn't so perfect after all."
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Friday, December 6, 2013
Stuff just happens. After wrapping up the last of the developmental edits of "Singing Stones" our world began to fray at the edges. Nothing so serious that it couldn't be handled, but it took time. Time away from the more technical editing of grammar and punctuation.
The plan to read aloud the entire manuscript has yet to happen. Like most folks the major holidays tend to occupy our time with preparation and celebration -- and the unforeseen. My muse's 96 year old mother fell and hurt herself when she tried to pick up her Black Friday ad-laden Thanksgiving Day newspaper.
My mother-in-law is one of the sweetest people you could hope to know. She's also one of the most difficult to keep down. Since she didn't complain all that much we thought she probably just crossed a rib. She was not going to let the pain stop her from having Thanksgiving dinner with us. The celebration continued as planned.
The next day she asked to be taken to see a doctor. One of her sons came and took her to the emergency room. Results, two broken ribs and a fracture at the L4 level of her spine (just above the tailbone). OUCH.
I won't go into the levels of guilt we felt, but there was a scramble to get her the care she needed. Holiday weekends are not good days to go to a hospital. After a few days battling the Doogie Howser's and bureaucrats of the medical world she told us she was ready to go home. She had had enough. Today she sits at her basket of yarn ready to resume her knitting. She still refuses to admit to the pain.
That is one tough sister.
I tell you this story to give you an insight into one the characters mentioned in "Singing Stones." She's not fleshed out in this book, but you'll see a little more of her in the second installment with the working title of, "The Loom of Kanarrah." She doesn't have a large role, unless of course my muse decides otherwise. Watch for her. Her name is Della Nevers and her daughter takes a keen interest in Maynard. 'Nuf said.
The plan to read aloud the entire manuscript has yet to happen. Like most folks the major holidays tend to occupy our time with preparation and celebration -- and the unforeseen. My muse's 96 year old mother fell and hurt herself when she tried to pick up her Black Friday ad-laden Thanksgiving Day newspaper.
My mother-in-law is one of the sweetest people you could hope to know. She's also one of the most difficult to keep down. Since she didn't complain all that much we thought she probably just crossed a rib. She was not going to let the pain stop her from having Thanksgiving dinner with us. The celebration continued as planned.
The next day she asked to be taken to see a doctor. One of her sons came and took her to the emergency room. Results, two broken ribs and a fracture at the L4 level of her spine (just above the tailbone). OUCH.
I won't go into the levels of guilt we felt, but there was a scramble to get her the care she needed. Holiday weekends are not good days to go to a hospital. After a few days battling the Doogie Howser's and bureaucrats of the medical world she told us she was ready to go home. She had had enough. Today she sits at her basket of yarn ready to resume her knitting. She still refuses to admit to the pain.
That is one tough sister.
I tell you this story to give you an insight into one the characters mentioned in "Singing Stones." She's not fleshed out in this book, but you'll see a little more of her in the second installment with the working title of, "The Loom of Kanarrah." She doesn't have a large role, unless of course my muse decides otherwise. Watch for her. Her name is Della Nevers and her daughter takes a keen interest in Maynard. 'Nuf said.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
I took two weeks off. With the last of the major revisions completed I had to stop. The words were nothing but a blur. I'm sure there are still many more words, phrases and sentences which just aren't needed, but I could not see them.
Tomorrow is the end of that two week vacation and begins yet another task to catch grammar and punctuation errors. Also, I'll be going through my beta readers comments as I stretch my muses English Degree. We've decided to read the entire book aloud to each other. Reading it aloud is a technique often suggested for catching and fixing problems with pace and flow. This may seem like a tortuous exercise for accomplished/published authors. For me and the muse it seems most advisable.
It should be fun to actually hear the inflections my wife puts into the story. I'm sure she'll have plenty of suggestions on how to increase/decrease tension, exposition, narrative and dialogue.
When that is done I expect one last trial to put it through and a decision to make. I'll send it to a copy-editor for the extraction of my eye-teeth. If all goes well the book should be ready by the first of next year.
The decision will then be, do I self-publish or pitch to a publisher? I'm still not satisfied with the book cover and don't have the money to hire a professional. Well, I'm a great procrastinator so I'll shelve that decision until later.
Tomorrow is the end of that two week vacation and begins yet another task to catch grammar and punctuation errors. Also, I'll be going through my beta readers comments as I stretch my muses English Degree. We've decided to read the entire book aloud to each other. Reading it aloud is a technique often suggested for catching and fixing problems with pace and flow. This may seem like a tortuous exercise for accomplished/published authors. For me and the muse it seems most advisable.
It should be fun to actually hear the inflections my wife puts into the story. I'm sure she'll have plenty of suggestions on how to increase/decrease tension, exposition, narrative and dialogue.
When that is done I expect one last trial to put it through and a decision to make. I'll send it to a copy-editor for the extraction of my eye-teeth. If all goes well the book should be ready by the first of next year.
The decision will then be, do I self-publish or pitch to a publisher? I'm still not satisfied with the book cover and don't have the money to hire a professional. Well, I'm a great procrastinator so I'll shelve that decision until later.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Underwood No. 5
My father liked to tinker, especially with his ART-15 Ham radio. He kept that old WWII Army issue radio-transmitter until he could no longer find the vacuum tubes to keep it alive. Even then he may have cheated a bit and redesigned the circuits to include transistors. I never took up that interest, but my brother was certainly influenced by our father's passion for electronics.
Dad was also a scavenger. It was one way to keep that old black metal box squawking and beeping until the wee hours of the morning. I know, because my brother and I shared our bedroom with it.
His scavenging included city and county dumps. Our occasional trips to Las Vegas to visit my grandmother (his mother) often meant we raided the city landfill. He typically looked for discarded electronics, but sometimes his eye would catch a memory. His face lit up on those days. My brother and I went with him on one memorable occasion when he happened upon an old typewriter.
The old Underwood No. 5, a staple in many offices of the day, had a broken bar around the keyboard. He cleared away the debris and tested the keys and carriage. It worked--sort of. He took it home, cleaned it, oiled it and tinkered until it's key's clacked on paper and the carriage dinged on cue. Then he went to work writing letters and reports for his work. He was a hunt-and-peck typist and a professor of gutter linguistics. For every mistake he made he taught me new words and phrases. That's when my mother began to type his reports.
The years passed and that rugged old typewriter saw a lot of use. And a lot of cussing. The darn thing jammed up a lot if you typed too fast. Tangled keys could be a monumental task which invited Dad's linguistic clarity. The keys on the keyboard were too far apart for a kid like myself. If I missed a key my finger would get caught between them and sometimes get scraped. The ink ribbon would snag on the feed-guide and stop. Whining and weeping often followed.
Despite the frustrations I thought No. 5 was a marvelous thing and fun to use. At the time it was a grown-up toy for me. I could act like my Dad and still be a kid--except for the cussing. I used it mostly for homework assignments, but there were times I wrote stories for my mother. She took them to her ladies groups and read them. The stories must have been OK, because she kept asking for more. That was the first stage in my writing career.
Unfortunately the bulb of creative inspiration never lit up and that career turned so I could support my new family. Governmentese became my language of choice. There is a certain amount of creativity in it, but it ends up boring, barnacled and slug-slow. No one writes a best seller in that genre.
How times have changed. Old No. 5 has long gone. There are no ribbons to change or keys to untangle. No "ding" to signal a carriage return and no cussing because of a mistake. The cussing still exists, but for very different reasons.
Then one day, almost 4 years ago, my son said, "Dad, write a book." The bulb of inspiration finally lit. It may not be the brightest bulb in the litany of literary giants, or even runts, and I don't care. I'm having fun.
I may have been about 10 years old when Dad rescued that beat up old Underwood typewriter. I have no idea why his face lit up that day, but after he died many years later, I discovered some old letters he had written. Some were typed.
My father liked to tinker, especially with his ART-15 Ham radio. He kept that old WWII Army issue radio-transmitter until he could no longer find the vacuum tubes to keep it alive. Even then he may have cheated a bit and redesigned the circuits to include transistors. I never took up that interest, but my brother was certainly influenced by our father's passion for electronics.
Dad was also a scavenger. It was one way to keep that old black metal box squawking and beeping until the wee hours of the morning. I know, because my brother and I shared our bedroom with it.
His scavenging included city and county dumps. Our occasional trips to Las Vegas to visit my grandmother (his mother) often meant we raided the city landfill. He typically looked for discarded electronics, but sometimes his eye would catch a memory. His face lit up on those days. My brother and I went with him on one memorable occasion when he happened upon an old typewriter.
The old Underwood No. 5, a staple in many offices of the day, had a broken bar around the keyboard. He cleared away the debris and tested the keys and carriage. It worked--sort of. He took it home, cleaned it, oiled it and tinkered until it's key's clacked on paper and the carriage dinged on cue. Then he went to work writing letters and reports for his work. He was a hunt-and-peck typist and a professor of gutter linguistics. For every mistake he made he taught me new words and phrases. That's when my mother began to type his reports.The years passed and that rugged old typewriter saw a lot of use. And a lot of cussing. The darn thing jammed up a lot if you typed too fast. Tangled keys could be a monumental task which invited Dad's linguistic clarity. The keys on the keyboard were too far apart for a kid like myself. If I missed a key my finger would get caught between them and sometimes get scraped. The ink ribbon would snag on the feed-guide and stop. Whining and weeping often followed.
Despite the frustrations I thought No. 5 was a marvelous thing and fun to use. At the time it was a grown-up toy for me. I could act like my Dad and still be a kid--except for the cussing. I used it mostly for homework assignments, but there were times I wrote stories for my mother. She took them to her ladies groups and read them. The stories must have been OK, because she kept asking for more. That was the first stage in my writing career.
Unfortunately the bulb of creative inspiration never lit up and that career turned so I could support my new family. Governmentese became my language of choice. There is a certain amount of creativity in it, but it ends up boring, barnacled and slug-slow. No one writes a best seller in that genre.
How times have changed. Old No. 5 has long gone. There are no ribbons to change or keys to untangle. No "ding" to signal a carriage return and no cussing because of a mistake. The cussing still exists, but for very different reasons.
Then one day, almost 4 years ago, my son said, "Dad, write a book." The bulb of inspiration finally lit. It may not be the brightest bulb in the litany of literary giants, or even runts, and I don't care. I'm having fun.
I may have been about 10 years old when Dad rescued that beat up old Underwood typewriter. I have no idea why his face lit up that day, but after he died many years later, I discovered some old letters he had written. Some were typed.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Awesome News
The League of Utah Writers held it's annual Convention at the Airport Hilton this weekend. I entered the first chapter of, "The Singing Stones of Rendor" into the contest. I hoped it would get an honorable mention or perhaps third place.
It took "First Place" in the Leagues "First Chapter Category". My wildest dreams are possible, afterall. Judith, my wife and muse, deserves a great deal of the credit for this chapter because she suggested it in the first place. Then there are all my beta readers who have, and still do, contribute to the refinement of the book. Thank you all.
Though they spelled my name wrong the certificate is proudly posted below.
When this chapter was finished, and I applied all those hard-learned lessons, I felt very good about it. It had undergone a number of revisions which all came together to surprise even me. My muse gushed about it and said it was wonderful, but, you know . . . she might be a bit biased. My beta readers caught a few errors and made suggestions about expanding some significant points.
In the end, with the League of Utah Writers Award, I feel like my skills have reached a milestone. It may be the first public milestone on a long road, but at least I'm on the right/write road.
Thank you, beta readers.
Please join me on facebook. I have an author's page which will compliment this blog.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/NWKnudsen/549321498467365
The League of Utah Writers held it's annual Convention at the Airport Hilton this weekend. I entered the first chapter of, "The Singing Stones of Rendor" into the contest. I hoped it would get an honorable mention or perhaps third place.
It took "First Place" in the Leagues "First Chapter Category". My wildest dreams are possible, afterall. Judith, my wife and muse, deserves a great deal of the credit for this chapter because she suggested it in the first place. Then there are all my beta readers who have, and still do, contribute to the refinement of the book. Thank you all.
Though they spelled my name wrong the certificate is proudly posted below.
When this chapter was finished, and I applied all those hard-learned lessons, I felt very good about it. It had undergone a number of revisions which all came together to surprise even me. My muse gushed about it and said it was wonderful, but, you know . . . she might be a bit biased. My beta readers caught a few errors and made suggestions about expanding some significant points.
In the end, with the League of Utah Writers Award, I feel like my skills have reached a milestone. It may be the first public milestone on a long road, but at least I'm on the right/write road.
Thank you, beta readers.
Please join me on facebook. I have an author's page which will compliment this blog.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/NWKnudsen/549321498467365
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)