… doesn’t look like it’s going to end any time soon.
Today I read a post on Baen’s Bar from someone who has been in their slush pile for a more than a year longer than I have.
… doesn’t look like it’s going to end any time soon.
Today I read a post on Baen’s Bar from someone who has been in their slush pile for a more than a year longer than I have.
The fortune cookie I got last night said “don’t be afraid to take a chance when the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself”.
I happened to be out having my “five years unrejected”* party for Cantata. So I was there because I have been waiting for an opportunity of a lifetime to show up, and it hadn’t yet. Silly fortune cookie.
*Last year I joked that I was going to have a “four years unrejected” party, but didn’t really do anything. This year I my husband thought an actual “celebration” was in order, so he took me out on a date. Next year I guess I’ll have to do something on a grander scale. Hands up everyone who want’s to be invited to a “six years in a slushpile” party.
I haven’t got a rejection slip back on anything since early March, and I’m starting to become absurdly terrified that all the bad news is going to arrive at once.
This must be mere silliness — it’s true that one novel submission and a couple queries are overdue, but the other three novels out aren’t expected back for another… :checks records: …two months, …two months, …and two months.
Eeep.
Eyes of Infistar is submitted.
It is now too late to worry about it anymore.
Hopefully I have a year before I have to think about it again much, and I can finally get back to Asond, Samanth and company.
Although, maybe that's being a bit too hopeful. Boyd wants a private printed copy of Eyes, and thus has got cover pictures on his brain. What do I think, he wants to know, of having Algernon striking a heroic pose while Peluge holds up a couple fingers behind his head?
I think that Peluge and Algernon, fun as they are, are not the main characters and shouldn't be allowed to dominate the cover.
Besides, I don't have *time* to work on cover pictures, which are BIG and require a great deal of time consuming attention to detail. Black Flag is behind schedule, Dicing With Flames is supposed be done in February, and I promised myself I would complete the storyboards for Scent of Spring before the end of December.
I'm also in the middle of an overhaul of my writing site.
I wrote two more agent queries for Eyes this morning, but I can't send them out because the only envelopes I have on hand need to be licked. I refuse to subject someone who has to respond to a hundred or so letters a week to those. I'll pick up some with the pull-off strips tomorrow.
The Donald Maass Literary Agency has a page “This month we are looking for….”, and the latest is Quirky detectives we would like to meet. It just so happens that I have this story I'm supposedly revising, which features quirky detectives. Of course, they seem to be expecting detectives to be found in mystery genre queries, not science fiction, but this way I can give them (almost) what they ask for and surprise them at the same time. Sounds perfect, right?
Okay, maybe not perfect. But it was a tempting enough situation that I have written and snail-mailed a query letter, hoping it would arrive while “this month's” request was still in effect and maybe, therefore, get a smidgen of extra attention. Which means I really can't afford to delay working on Eyes anymore, because you never know, they might ask to see it. (It seems a pity to abandon the characters of Dicing With Flames in the situation they are in, but the mountain can't collapse on them if I'm not there to tell it to, so they can wait.)
So, if you have read Eyes, and sent me comments, and I did not respond saying, 'yes I got them, thank you very much', then I didn't get them. Could you please try sending them again? I would love a chance to thank you for the effort you have gone to on my behalf.
And if you haven't sent me any comments, well, anything you can get to me in the next three weeks or so, will be greatly appreciated. 🙂
It's always a bit disconcerting to get a rejection from somebody you hadn't submitted to.
And behold at the week's commence I did send out a query requesting information about the submission that has languished now at the same house for nigh on these two years.
And this very day did I receive an most courteous answer…
And the answer was neither yes,
nor no.
It is, I am informed, still “on the list”.
And I, not having devised any schemes or actions to take in such a case,
intend to do nothing.
I am, after all, busy writing the next… er, fourth book.
(Poor, Asond! He so hates to be wrong, and I have been putting him in situations where there isn't a right answer. I suspect he will have something pithy and very annoyed to say on the subject tomorrow.)
I have a plan.
I upgrade my current case of submission blues to a full scale midlife crisis.
That way when the rejection slip finally arrives I have a grand excuse to do to pull a really big whine session and ritually burn a printout of the rejection while ingesting a massive overdose of milkshakes. Once that is done, I'll be able to send the silly book out to the next place, finally, and go back to my regularly scheduled creataholic pastimes secure in the knowledge that I have gotten my mid-life crisis safely out of the way.
By doubling up like that, I can probably brush through the whole thing without even having to get my hair restyled.
I got my writing quota done for the week, and the WIP is now over 40 000 words.
But I got nothing done on Black Flag.
I can't seem to concentrate on anything that isn't writing related, and art, even if it's art that tells a story, just doesn't seem to count. This is not normal for me, I usually have no trouble working on multiple projects at once, especially if they are in different media.
But I have a submission that is preying on my brain.
They say that the best thing to do is to start on your next book. I did that. And when I finished that book I wrote another book, and another book after that. I am now about halfway done the fourth book. (Except that its my eighth book, because the one I'm fretting over is my fourth book, but this is mere quibbling.)
With my current project rotation system, I've already finished writing the rough draft of the next book before the previous one is edited and submitted. So although I still consider 'start on the next book' to be excellent advice, it clearly it doesn't qualify as cure-all for the submission blues. If it did, I would be completely immune.