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Aug. 6th, 2006 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseThe last two days in reverse order:
Progress notes for August 5, 2006:
Raising the Storm
New Words: only roughly 300, not counting retrofitting.
Reason for stopping: Managed to get to the end of this point of view, need to think about what the next guy sees and feels about events.
Tea: Plain ol' Orange Pekoe.
Can't stop fidgeting: Had to retrofit in the set up for a point of view change, plus more hints of the real problem most of the heroes haven't even noticed.
Mean Things: A well-meant spell is accidentally preventing first aid.
Progress notes for August 4, 2006:
The Blood Rose
New Words: 325 plus some tweaking along the way.
Reason for stopping: Because I'm not supposed to be working on a freaking novella!
Tea: Decaf orange pekoe.
Mean Things: Torture, but only in backstory.
Can't stop fidgeting: The fact that I put some new verbiage into this at all...
I can't actually say why I decided to poke at this old novella -- it's a project I'd love to finish properly. I had a good draft and knew exactly how it needed to be changed to turn it from good to saleable.
But I deliberately stopped partway through, albeit after writing extensive notes on the changes to make, because -- well, in short because it's a novella.
Novellas are almost impossible to sell short of short story collections. And I've already beaten the odds and sold two, if to low paying markets. The second one kind of hurt, too, because I know for a fact how many people bought and read it -- and the number is under 30. When you send a story out, professionally edited and all, it's because it matters to you - or at least, that one did to me, and I feel very sad for Kanna that so few people were interested in what happened to her.
(As Jim Macdonald said, many writers care far less how much money they make and far more how many readers they have, but since the two numbers correlate very closely, and the total readership isn't checked, double checked and triple checked by qualified experts as the royalties are, writers end up obsessing over the size of their advance and their royalties.)
In theory, this novella could do better - but it seems unlikely. I did shoot myself in the foot with the last finished draft, since it was, as they say, as good as I could make it at the time, and I sent it to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, which is the only one of the major genre magazines that would have taken a story this length and this exact genre.
So here I have a story I like without much chance of a home. And I worked on it a bit when I'm supposed to be trying to get a novel done. Rrrrgh. At least today i got back into the right project - and, not that you'd know it by the word count, with enthusiasm and some success.
Progress notes for August 5, 2006:
Raising the Storm
New Words: only roughly 300, not counting retrofitting.
Reason for stopping: Managed to get to the end of this point of view, need to think about what the next guy sees and feels about events.
Tea: Plain ol' Orange Pekoe.
Can't stop fidgeting: Had to retrofit in the set up for a point of view change, plus more hints of the real problem most of the heroes haven't even noticed.
Mean Things: A well-meant spell is accidentally preventing first aid.
Progress notes for August 4, 2006:
The Blood Rose
New Words: 325 plus some tweaking along the way.
Reason for stopping: Because I'm not supposed to be working on a freaking novella!
Tea: Decaf orange pekoe.
Mean Things: Torture, but only in backstory.
Can't stop fidgeting: The fact that I put some new verbiage into this at all...
I can't actually say why I decided to poke at this old novella -- it's a project I'd love to finish properly. I had a good draft and knew exactly how it needed to be changed to turn it from good to saleable.
But I deliberately stopped partway through, albeit after writing extensive notes on the changes to make, because -- well, in short because it's a novella.
Novellas are almost impossible to sell short of short story collections. And I've already beaten the odds and sold two, if to low paying markets. The second one kind of hurt, too, because I know for a fact how many people bought and read it -- and the number is under 30. When you send a story out, professionally edited and all, it's because it matters to you - or at least, that one did to me, and I feel very sad for Kanna that so few people were interested in what happened to her.
(As Jim Macdonald said, many writers care far less how much money they make and far more how many readers they have, but since the two numbers correlate very closely, and the total readership isn't checked, double checked and triple checked by qualified experts as the royalties are, writers end up obsessing over the size of their advance and their royalties.)
In theory, this novella could do better - but it seems unlikely. I did shoot myself in the foot with the last finished draft, since it was, as they say, as good as I could make it at the time, and I sent it to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, which is the only one of the major genre magazines that would have taken a story this length and this exact genre.
So here I have a story I like without much chance of a home. And I worked on it a bit when I'm supposed to be trying to get a novel done. Rrrrgh. At least today i got back into the right project - and, not that you'd know it by the word count, with enthusiasm and some success.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-06 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-06 11:29 pm (UTC)It's mostly that jumping from project to project at whim is a longtime flaw, and results in many unfinished fragments, which results in few saleable things. Not that I'm very good at getting things sent out in a timely fashion either, but in theory, the more things are finished, the more chance of a sale.
That reminds me, I have something printed out that needs to go out the door...