Novel Manuscript Finished

Spent much of the week getting my beta-reader email packages together, plus calling a few people so I didn't have to send them emails.

Why?

Because the 37th novel-length edit of the book is done!!!  That's right--37!!!  This week I'll send out my beta-reader queries and work on the next book.  This weekend I'll spend one day incorporating all of the red comments in this last manuscript edit, save it all to one long document, and back it all up.

Then, out go the agent queries as I work on the next book, tidy up and send out a few stories, and take a look at the new book my zombie story is in.  And, please, wish me luck!!!

Quick Jots for 5.6.2015

Just a few quick things:

--When a Star Wars geek fan said, "May the fourth be with you," I was automatically urged to respond, "And also with you.  Let's lift up our hearts.  It is right to give thanks and praise..."

--Seriously.  Like, I feel I've been unwittingly programmed.  And I'm as self-aware as anyone I know.  In fact, a lot more.  This is a very uncool, borderline terrifying, feeling for me.

--And I've never heard of "May the fourth be with you," before.  And I've been around my share of that kind of dork geek enthusiastic fan.

--I'm only four chapters or so from finishing my novel manuscript, for those of you who've been keeping track.

--It feels like minor-league summer around here.  To the extent that I feel like I will run over innocent women and children in my hurried attempt to get out of my workplace and go home.  And I usually stick around there a while longer to finish things up and to get things done.

--Despite that, I have two rose plants that I tried to save, but couldn't.  Their stems were snapped by the incredible weight of all the snow that had settled (and been shoveled) upon them.  I taped them, and propped them up, and watered them, and...yeah, well, my landscaper told me I should cut it at the place it snapped, and hope for the best.  Everything above that snap had died.

--This same guy told me the name of a bush I did successfully save last week.  It's the full, thick, green thing that the small purple snappy things come out of.  Begins with H, I think.  [Please leave the name in a comment below if you know it.  People have tired of me calling it "the purple poppy plant, with the little snappies."

--But, anyway, I saved that thing by getting a lot of leaves, detritus, and who-knows-what-else out of it.  The green is now fuller and more lush than it's ever been, and the poppy things are coming out.  Last year those purple snappy things didn't come out until June, and they stayed out for a couple of weeks.  Drove me crazy.  Meanwhile those purple snappy things had sprouted in everyone else's yard for miles around me.

--I just so happened to be watching a little black ant (not big carpenter sized) stroll into a tiny opening between the gutter of my deck extension, and the house.  So I sprayed half an entire container of ant killer in there, with the plunger you pull back and the gun nozzle you can point right in there.  Only twenty or so ants came out, staggering and dying.  (Made me feel bad, but those things aren't staying in a colony there.)  And the whole situation gave me PTSD flashbacks from the time thousands and thousands of ants came down upon me and my real estate agent in a former house.  Long story.

--And I know that there's a lot more than just those 20 up in there.  They just learned to stay further away from the stream of poison coming in.  I'll spray a lot more up there (which I already have, and no more of them have come out) and then seal that hole up.  Hopefully anything left alive in there don't eat their way in.

--I looked into bombing it out, but the hole is way too small, and apparently you only do that in an enclosed room, not in the outside air beneath a TimberTek deck and a gutter.  I also looked into the poison ant food that you place down and they bring it back to the colony, thereby killing the queen and everyone else.  But there's no place to place such a thing.  The deck and gutter are too far away, and the ants don't actually go onto those things, anyway.  They stroll beneath the gutter and into the hole.  They could've been doing so for who-knows-how-many years.  But I checked the deck, the gutter, the closet and washroom, and the office upstairs, and there's no evidence of penetration, sawdust, or anything else.

Any suggestions of what else I can do with that situation, please comment and advise. Thanks!

Making Money Writing and Secret Windows

Photo: Hardcover art, from the book's Wikipedia site.  (Go there to see the Contents page; one chapter is called "Great Hookers I Have Known," but if you remember your remedial writing days, you'll see right through that.)  I read the paperback with the building on the cover.  This cover is terrible and just a little creepy.  But it's what Wikipedia had.  The building cover is better.

Described as "a companion book to On Writing," this volume reads more as a long interview with King, done over maybe 10 to 12 years, with a couple of never-before-seen stories thrown in. 

It is worth your time.

I put off reading this for awhile because I thought it was, frankly, a cheap attempt to cash-in on his On Writing success.  But that didn't turn out to be the case.  This book is actually much different.  On Writing is, as its title says, at least mostly memoir.  Part writing tutorial, part memoir, is how I speak of it.  But Secret Windows is a book of questions King doesn't answer in On Writing, and as such is, as I said, more of a long interview, over 10-12 years, on a variety of topics--much of them, surprisingly, not about writing, per se.

This book is more for writers, in some ways, than On Writing is.  While that book is mostly memoir and sometimes a writing primer, this one is about the more minute parts of the business.  Did you know that King got an agent to hawk his novels and short stories?  I didn't, because agents don't sell short stories anymore--well, unless you're a Stephen King level writer, that is.  Then they'll be more than happy to sell your underwear or shopping list, just to keep you happy--and their client.  But for you and me, they won't sell our short stories today.  We'd have to do that for ourselves. (I know, because I do.)

Did you know that King sent out a query to agents before he'd finished his manuscript for Carrie?  I didn't, because that's a huge no-no today--and must've been then, too.  Because writers, like everyone else, won't finish something when they say they will, and agents know this.  So they all say--today and, I'm sure, then--that you have to finish the manuscript, perfect it, and then solicit them.  King was more ballsy than that.  He pitched them when he was almost done with his manuscript--for Carrie, I think--and his selling point was the huge list--I'm talking 20 or more here--of short stories he'd sold and been paid well for in just two years.  At $200 per story, times 20 stories--that's $400.  10% of that is $40, so 15% of that is $60.  Many agents in 1974 would take $60 to send out a couple of quick letters to publishers about a client's work.  It would take them about an hour, maybe.  If that.  Probably half an hour.  $60 p/h, max, in 1974 would sound good.  The bottom line is: King essentially was ballsy enough to say to these prospective agents: "Even with my short story sales, I can make money for you."  And then, more importantly, he finished his novel manuscript, just as he said he would.  That's good business, and that turns on agents, too.

So what's to be learned from this?  Be ballsy.  But also be productive, so you have something to be ballsy about.  And then, be good at the business, and finish the manuscript when you say you will.  Lost in all the millions Stephen King makes is that he has always produced, even pre-Carrie, and at a very high level of both quality (ie--it'll sell) and production.  In other words, he's always been bankable, and very good at the business.

You won't learn this kind of thing from On Writing.

You will from Secret Windows.

If you dream of a writing career like I do, you should read it.  And read On Writing, too, of course.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

photo: First edition hardcover, from its Wikipedia page


Very well-researched and captivating book about witches and healing, past and present.  The author wisely switches back and forth between the two, sometimes focusing more on one than the other, to create the feeling that the past influences the present, especially amongst families.  The author also manages to write about present-day witchery without the muddlesome, and mostly inaccurate, hocus-pocus that goes with it, making it seem more like Wicca than anything like the witches with broomsticks and dressed in black, such as those found in what we think of Salem or The Wizard of Oz.  This book's witches seem more like herbalists than spell-casters, and their witchery is always used for good.

The characters always seem real, especially the Danes of the past, and Connie of the present.  The author also manages to create real minor characters, which is no easy feat.  My favorites were Connie's mother and the elitist researcher who points Connie to Harvard's Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection.  His lines were priceless; I actually read them again out loud.  I have to admit that the antagonist is not much of a mystery.  You feel like knocking Connie upside the head for constantly being oblivious to the adversary's obvious meddling.  And it's obvious to me that the author has seen The Silence of the Lambs.  A character in that movie shares the exact same name, mannerisms and speech-patterns, and oily-slick aura and presentation, as his namesake in this book.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this book for me was its writing.  Sometimes it got a bit purple; in some passages, the author is trying way too hard.  But most of it is really good writing.  I was blown away by some small touches, such as how in one scene, Connie and Sam are talking, and we leave them, follow the dog for a couple of sentences as it walks away from them, then re-join them as the dog does, thereby showing the passage of a short amount of time.  Clever, without shocking us out of our suspension of disbelief.  There are a lot of small passages in there like that, and the writing is simply good, and exact, without bogging the reader down with so much specificity that it stops the story's progress. 

The reader does need to be interested in the mid- to late-1600s to enjoy the book, however; a healthy knowledge of The Crucible also helps, as part of the interest is to see what the author will do with the characters of that play, as well as the other real-life personages.  Overall, she remains true to them and to history, and so creates a captivating book that plops you more into the past than it does into the present--well, into the early 1990s, anyway.  I also guess that the book was placed in the early 1990s--rather than in 2009, when the book was actually published--because of the numerous scenes in which Connie talks to her mother on an actual phone.  I also suspect that too much present-day technology would be too jarring for us, especially since we want the author to return to the 1690s scenes, anyway.

A Real Achievement

A bit of an eye-opener today: an e-friend of mine wrote to say that I should be congratulated, that a 76,000-word, complete novel is a real achievement.  Funny that I'd never, not once, thought of it that way.  I've always been so hellbent on being published that the actual completion of the manuscript wasn't a big deal to me.  I'd felt, and still do to an extent, that if I didn't get the novel published, I (and it) was a failure.  Period.  The completion of it was nothing special--though I'd been through a bit of hell to finish it--and the only purpose of its existence was to see it published.

I now see that this was a bad attitude to have toward the art of writing, as well as towards the business in general.  First novels don't sell, usually.  Unless you're J.D. Salinger, or Harper Lee, or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald, your first completed manuscript won't ever see the light of day.  More importantly, most aspiring writers don't ever finish their first novel-length manuscript.  They say they're writing, and they call themselves writers, but they're not writing, and most of these writers never complete anything.

I did.  I not only finished what is called a publishable manuscript (even by the agents who've rejected it), but I also wrote a lot more stuff and eventually sold a story to a print magazine.  These are achievements--not only the published stuff, but the completed stuff.  Novels, stories, poems, essays, etc.  Everything a writer finishes is an achievement, and as long as I continue to see it that way, I will finish more pieces, and perhaps sell more.  If I only think of my writing as a success if I sell it, than most of the time I will feel like a failure--which I had, especially during an eight-year hiatus from writing at all.  (For some reason, I found myself saying that to a roomful of professors and writers, all of whom expressed their condolences to me, and who told me to continue writing, that I was too good to stop for any reason.)

So I say all of this not only for myself, but for every writer who reads this blog.  Do not think of your writing solely as potentially published pieces; if you do, and if they don't sell, you'll fall victim to despair like I did.  Look at your writing as potentially living and breathing pieces; this way, once you've completed them (and I do mean fully complete, not just a "rough draft" complete), you'll feel as if you've given life to something that had never existed before.  You'll feel a sense of accomplishment.  This way, also, you won't be waiting around for that piece to sell; you'll feel successful and write (and complete) something else.

Manuscript Info. Garnered from More Free Stuff

Okay, for this as of yet untitled ms.--maybe The Gravediggers?--we'll start with the exhumation of 6 or 7 bodies in 1888 RI, as the father of these people had had a disturbing dream, that he'd had an orchard (which he had) but that half of the trees in his orchard would soon die.  He recognizes this as an extended dream-metaphor, thank you, Freud, and this makes him listen more to his family's eerie complaints.  His wife has been getting sick, and 5 or 6 of their children had already died.  Sarah had been the first, about 19 years old; another daughter was next, though this daughter complains of seeing Sarah, at night, sitting with her (on her?) in bed, causing her pain.  This daughter dies, another gets sick, and has the same complaint.  The last straw comes when the mother gets sick, and a son, who is of age and about to marry a girl in a neighboring town.  The mother complains of the same thing about Sarah.  So all of the bodies are exhumed, and all have their hearts burned on a nearby rock in the family cemetary, and all the problems stop. The mother recovers, but the son, after marrying the girl in that neighboring town and becoming a promising young farmer, dies. 

Nothing is ever recorded about his death, so, ah ha!, that's how "it" spreads.  Vampires, consumption (tb), or plague, I don't know.  But I'm hoping for all three.  Other isolated cases (one family member) will be mentioned also, but only in the form of consumption, to highlight the panic, but to also show how the panic and ignorance of others hides the true demon.

This all sounds like the hokey local superstition and folklore that it is, but I can make this work in fiction.  I'm pretty sure.


This summary of information was obtained through the materials gathered from the free e-books in my free e-Google.  Though I understand that Google may one day soon take over the world--the entire company would make a decent James Bond villain--I have to admit that it is incredibly convenient and useful.  I've got a couple of emails, my other blog site, and my free books all there.  And when I write, I save that writing to a flashdrive, to my emails, to my harddrive, to my Scrivener, and to my free Google documents storage.  I do not work for Google, I swear.  Not only did I get the above composite information from those free books, but I can also get the clothing, speech, beliefs, etc. from the very old books that I saved for free there, too.  My goodness is this convenient and useful.  I repeat: I do not work for Google.

So this is the beginning of yet another new work.  Wish me well, everyone, as I have a tendency to start new stuff with really good ideas and then stop them cold when I get bored with them.  This stuff here, for example, is the root of WIP 7, all novel-length.  I hope to do some combining and shuffling, but, boy, I don't know.