Waiting and Teen Movies

Last week I queried about the status of Kingdom of the Dead. The publisher requires full manuscripts and my novel has been out over 170 days. I probably should have waited until the 180 day mark, but I had convinced myself that they never got my submission for the reasons in this post from a few weeks ago. They got my submission and have “set it to the side for further consideration” which kind of had me excited. I have crossed my fingers every time I’ve checked my email since then. I hope my query didn’t annoy them.

After that I went to another publisher’s website. I had sent my novel, The Lion of Solkara to them. It was forty days over their estimated response time. I started to think that maybe this publisher had also “set it to the side for further consideration”. So I went to their website to find an email address. And I discovered something.

They had added an extra six months to their estimated response times.

That’s right 6 months. 180 days. 4320 Hours. 259,200 minutes.

I get it that publishers are inundated with manuscripts. But I couldn’t help but be a little annoyed. I HATE waiting. For me it is worse than the rejections. When I get a rejection, I can go back and revise a story, or I can get all upset and eat some yummy delicious fruit snacks and forget my problems. But with waiting, the only thing you can do is…well wait.

I was so upset that I skipped my writing time last night and started reading The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. It is the sequel to Name of the Wind, and I have to say there is a good reason it hit #1 on the New York Times Bestsellers list. It is really good, which actually didn’t help with my annoyance because I started to compare my writing to Mr. Rothfuss.

I went to bed feeling frustrated and inadequate, it was like I was a character in a bad teen movie. You know the ones where the nerdy guys make a pact to lose their virginity by the end of the summer? It was just like that…sort of.

Except, instead of girls I am talking about publishing and hopefully there won’t be any comical misunderstandings between me and the most popular publishing company in school, which totally embarrasses me but makes a less popular but just as pretty publisher(who was staring me right in the face the whole time) see me in a new light.

And I probably won’t learn any life lessons about how I should view publishers with more respect and I shouldn’t just use them for a quick contract. Oh, and I am not planning on having a big keg party at the end of the summer so that me and all my friends can get big publishing deals…

Okay so it really isn’t the same at all, but you get the point.

Happy Belated Thanksgiving

Happy belated Thanksgiving to everyone. We had a great time on Thanksgiving, rather than spend all the money on food, we all went up to the local Indian casino, ate the buffet and gambled it was a lot of fun, and though at first it seems nontraditional, we did feast with the Native Americans.

The next day in the mail I got a coupon from them for $50 in free play, apparently last month I went up a tier in their players club star level, whatever that means. So we went up again on Saturday. It is only a forty minute drive so it really isn’t that much of a commitment.

It was kind of weird to go up there twice in one week. We usually go once a month, if that. The result of our gambling expedition? We are $120 ahead for the week, that is even counting gas and meals we bought up there. Its not the million dollar Powerball jackpot but it was still nice to get some extra money right before the holidays.

When we got home Saturday I took out the trash, laying on top of everything else in the dumpster was a box. For some reason I looked inside, this is strange in and of itself. I don’t usually decide to peek through the garbage. But inside of this box was nearly 900 comic books. Whoever threw them out was obviously a collector they were in amazing shape, none of them were very old. The oldest one was from 1989 but I grabbed the box and took it inside.

I haven’t read a comic book since I was in high school but I started reading through the stack of these and am having a great time. My dad always bought me a box of comics from the Sears catalog every Christmas, so this is like a flash back to my youth.

I didn’t get much writing done over the holidays. I am plugging along on Blood Plague, made it to about ten thousand words. This novel is coming easier than any other one I have ever written. I have a list of chapter, and what I want to happen in them. Even more amazing, I already know how the book ends!

Side Note: I have been getting a few emails about the Current Projects box on the left, mostly from writers who really want to have one on their website. I think this is great, I stole the idea from Brandon Sanderson’s website. But that’s not the point. The way I figure out the percentage is that I guess the book will be 100,000 words. This is a pretty good number for me, The Lion of Solkara was 112,000 words and The Laws of Summer was 98,000 words. My other novel, Kingdom of the Dead, was around 80k but that was a nanowrimo novel. Plus using 100k as my goal makes the math super easy. When I am 10,000words I am 10% done, at 13,000 I am 13% done, etc. If I ever get around to writing the epic fantasy novel rolling around in my head I might have to adjust the math, but for now this is what I am doing.

The Lion of Solkara

I got an email about the Lion of Solkara. Apprently the publishers spam filter had deleted my attachment. But they liked the synopsis enough that they wanted me to resend the manuscript. This is a giant step forward from the last publisher who told me that he never even read the manuscript because epic fantsy "wasn't marketable".

I am feeling super excited.

The Lion of Solkara

The Lion of Solkara has gone through another edit and been sent off to another novel pubisher. It took me days but I think I made it into a much better story. I ended up adding about 12,000 words.

I'll have to wait and see if it gets accepted. Just like with my short stories I am planning on giving it a good edit every time it gets rejected. So far it has worked with my short fiction. I have had stories accepted after many rejections. Sometimes being accepted into better paying markets than the ones I got rejected from.

Zombie Love?

I have been looking at the novels I've written or am writing, The Lion of Solkara, Summer's Blood, and the Kingdom of the Dead. And much to my amazement they all have zombies in one form or another. It doesn't really matter if they're the ghouls from tLoS or the lifeless from SB or the straight out zombies from KotD they are all zombies.

I can't believe I didn't see it before, I thought my Dawn of the Dead meets Lord of the Rings idea for KotD was totally different than my other novels. The only real difference is the role the zombies have in the novel. In tLoS they are a mad necromancer’s horde, in SB they are created when the Lord of the Underworld accidentally rips through the planes of existence into the world of the living, while the Winter Court and Summer Court are at war, in Chapter 22 of a 30 chapter novel.

Maybe KotD will get the zombies out of my system and I can write something a little different.

I just finished my Roar of the Crowd sub, it came out to be a 5,200 word monster of a short story, about twice as long as most of my short fiction, which worked out really well considering they have a 5,000 word minimum.

I have decided that tLos is just going to take too much time to edit, and have retired the novel. I will be concentrating on the other two, and my new idea.