|
April 2006
The Writer's Quest, part 4
This was to have been the final month that Cardan's Pod would run on Collector's Times. However, I made the same decision for CT as I did for my writing class; the final chapter was just too long, especially compared with the other chapters. Even divided into two chapters and an epilogue, both chapters are still longer than the previous 24 were. A lot of things to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion; I wanted to end the story coinciding with CT's anniversary issue, just as I had started it with the April issue in 2004, but I think the new divisions work better all around. We have Chapter 25 this month, and for May we'll have Chapter 26 and the Epilogue (unless Sheryl decides to run both 25 and 26 this month, in which case, don't look for a new chapter next month).
What you are getting this month and next month is the most current revision of the story, incorporating many of the comments and feedbacks I've received in my class. Many things have changed, some of them minor to the story itself and some major. The italics are, for the most part, gone. The adjectives in the narrative have been pared down to a bare minimum, left only where I believed them necessary.
Chapter 26 goes to the class tonight for review this week and feedback next week. It's time to finalize with the suggestions I've been given (and sometimes grudgingly taken - oops, there's an adjective) and start preparing the submission package to send off to agents.
Agents and publishers are known for being fickle, and the only attitude a writer can adopt to save themselves from discouragement is that persistence pays off. Rejection letters become collectibles, and among writers groups they may be displayed with humorous pride. Rejection means we have taken the step to submit; the old adage is that a writer without rejections is one that has never tried to get published.
Some writers get rejected even after they have successfully been published. One such author our instructor told us about last week decided to see what would happen if he retyped his best-seller and re-submit it to his publisher as if it were a new work.
It was rejected by the same company that was already publishing it. The author sent a signed copy of his book to the editor that had turned it down.
Perhaps by next month's column I'll have a rejection letter or two to report. I figure I'll get a nice scrapbook to collect them in, and another when that one fills up. It's nice to dream that instead I could report an early acceptance letter, but since many of my favorite authors collected ample rejections before getting their break-through, it would be little short of a miracle for me to skip that step.
By the way; I made a special t-shirt to wear to class tonight, especially since part of the schedule for this week includes discussion of a rather depressing piece of highly acclaimed "literary fiction". My t-shirt reads, "Please don't tell my Mom I write Genre fiction . . . (She thinks I do screenplays for porn movies . . .)
|