Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Monday, March 24, 2008
Procrastinate? Me? My cunning plan is to do some work on Stalled Novel #1 today. Mondays are never good, and last night was another sleepless night. Chalk it up to age once again. Well, that and achy muscles. The achy muscles bit is making it rather hard for me to sit at the desk for extended periods of time. Getting out to move is good, though, so perhaps I should do just a bit of that before I settle in. One thing I did do while I wasn't sleeping last night was to spend some time mulling over Stalled Novel #1 and trying to figure out exactly why it petered out. I think I know: The protagonist is too passive. She gets tossed into an overwhelming situation right off the bat and handles it well, but there seems to be a point at which she's overwhelmed by the whole thing. Or more likely, I got too wrapped up in the world I was building and forgot that the protagonist needs to be an active participant.
Doh!
Be that as it may, here are a couple of interesting things I ran across today, one slightly related to yesterday's rant. (And yes, I'll do the convention bit soon.)
Jim C. Hines has a nice entry over at the Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelists Blog on the speed of publishing. I've remarked several times that this business seems to move at the speed of molasses on a glacier. On one hand, it's frustrating, on the other, it's a good opportunity for improvement, as Hines points out. All that time you're waiting, you're writing, or should be. And your next work will be better than the one that's in the pipeline.
I've mentioned attorney Bert P. Krages before. He wrote the Legal Handbook for Photographers and has a very popular handout on his site outlining the rights of street photographers. He also works as a literary agent and offers legal services to writers. Plus, he co-authored The Law (in Plain English) for Writers. I found his handout on How to Prepare a Polished Submission this morning. (The handout is a PDF file; this link goes to a page that links to the PDF). Of course, you should always follow submission rules to the letter, but he has some good E-mail tips on the last page. Some of his points are self-evident, but he makes a good point for not using HTML formatting in your correspondence. You never know what e-mail client your recipient is using and whether or how it will render HTML or smart quotes - heck, you don't know if they even have HTML turned on. Some people do that for security reasons. You may want to move your beverage before you read his last bullet point, though.
Off to move around a bit, then I must get down to work.
Tags: Writing, Publishing