Sent out a Query!

Today I sent out my first four query letters. I’m sure they were horrible, but I guess the point is that I did it. Advising websites say that it takes anywhere from 4-6 weeks for responses to occur, if at all. And it’s very much one of those, “if we don’t call you, don’t call us.” Tomorrow, I’ll bring some envelopes to work and mail off three more.

I figure next week, (or later today if I’m bored enough) I’ll do some more research, find some more agents, rework my query letters and send out some more stuff. I’ve heard of authors being rejected 100+ times before finding success. I figure I’ll give it about that much time. In the mean time, I’ll keep honing my novel, plus I’ll keep working on new projects. If this novel doesn’t go anywhere, then I’ll just keep writing until I find something that does.

Wish me luck!

What’s this birthday thing?

So another year has come and gone. I’ve actually written this blog for longer than I ever thought I would. It sure as hell hasn’t been consistent. I’ve stopped writing about political stuff for the most part. I guess it frustrates me to the point that I don’t really give two shits about it. I also used to try not to cuss in my blog. I guess I don’t give three shits about that.

Maybe people say that cursing is a sign of stupidity, a lack of vocabulary. I would have to agree. I am both stupid and have a small vocabulary.

Though this last year has been marked with some trepidation, it has been on the whole a good year. My old band dissolved and got mixed into the solution of my new band. We’ve had a monster response so far. We’re saving up money and should be able to hit the studio in a few months.

I also finished my book. I had sent it off to some friends. One friend could not get past a graphic scene in the third chapter and refuses to answer any of my calls. A second friend read it once, thought it was great, wanted to read it again, but it depressed her even more the second time. The third friend I never really expected to read it, besides he’s in grad school and waaaay busy with too much stuff. Anyhoo, second friend is sending the book back. I’ll maybe tone it down a bit and send it off see anyone can stiffle their gag reflex long enough to reject it. Or not.

I started going really bald, so I preempted all and started shaving my head. I’ve been getting back into metal and industrial and away from hip hop and whatnot.

I’m not sure what else is happening, but I’ll keep me posted as I see fit.

Noveling

Well, my novel sort of on a stand still until my peeps read it and respond.

But I’m not letting that trip me up. I’ve started work on another novel. Originally, I wanted it to be short stories. I didn’t want to spend another indeterminate amount of time working on some behemoth, but the more I thought about the stories, the more they fleshed out to another novel.

I don’t want to give away too much, especially when I don’t know for sure what it’s about, but I really would like to make this story more chaotic, with perhaps more cohesion at the end. I don’t want it to be kitchey, though. No grandstanding or anything.

Hmmm… this FT job is kicking my ass though. I don’t seem to have enough time to work on it too much. That and the music is taking off. I’m really excited about this incarnation of the band. Hopefully we’ll see it going some place.

Click… Click… DONE!!!

After two years, I have finished the first rough draft of my novel. My wife’s already read through it all, thinks it stands a chance of not stinking and is already egging me on to start the first re-write.

The final totals:

words: 197,000
pages : 378

I hope to be done with my first revision by mid-August, so the wife can read and opinion it before she goes back to school. Then, I’ll start harassing my friends to read it before I send it out to be rejected!

Novel update

Ok. So I finally finished part five of six of this novel I’m writing. Here’s the stats so far:

Part V words: 25,000
Total words: 186,000

I’m printing it out right now, so I can re-read it and see how bad it really is. Let me just say right now, though, that Canon printers suck big cheese.

1: they do not have refillable ink cartridges, so you are forced to buy their crappy ink. Paying $30 for 5 mL of ink is waaaay too much. If I had known that that had a chip that counted pages on the cartridge and refused to print after a certain number of pages had printed, no matter the actual amount of ink in the cartridge, I would have never bought it.

2: their printing software, for lack of a better term, sucks. I can’t save my printing settings at all. If I’m in a rush and just press print then it will print the first page first and the last page last. When you are printing 100+ pages, it really blows to re-order all the sheets. I miss my Epson that would actually save the settings. Plus whenever I try to print webpages, it shrinks them all down to where they are unreadable. I finally figured out how to select fit-to-page. Maybe I’m a dumbass, but I think for the printer should always print to page unless you tell it otherwise.

3: the thing jams like smuckers. Every five pages or so, it jams. Only because it’ll try to grab more than one page at a time. “Oh no!” it freaks out, “What did I do! I should stop!!!” Idiotic piece of plastic shit. My old printer used to keep going until it got the job done.

But that’s what I get for trying to save $20 on the printer. Only a few months more and I’ll feel that I suffered long enough to justify getting a new printer. This time I research ink prices and which cartridges can actually be refilled. It’s such a waste just to throw out that much plastic every few weeks.

Hairs!

Ok. So to continue with my self-deprecating, or else to celebrate the fact I’m getting old, I will write a blog about my hairs, or lack there-of.

Last week I went to my friend’s bachelor’s party. We played paint ball in the woods and when we ran out of CO2 we did what any testosterone loving guys would do: threw the paint as hard as we could at each other. My wife got my turn caught on video. I bend over, two guys chuck paint at me, and I proceed to cuss about how much it hurts. When I watched the video, all I could focus on was the straight view to my scalp when I bent over.

I have known now for a while that I was thinning and tried my best to convince people of it. “I’m getting old,” I would say. To which older people would say, “You’re not that old.” Which is about as annoying as admitting that I’m getting out of shape and then obese people saying, “You’re as skinny as a rail!”

What? Just because I’m not obese doesn’t mean that I can watch my weight? Likewise, time, no matter how illusionary, does march forward and I am getting older.

I think that most people confuse my “I’m getting old” with “I don’t want to get old.” Getting old in this culture has such a negative connotation to it. Maybe I just don’t buy into it. I like getting older–not because my body is starting to fail, but because I have always pretty much existed in my mind. I thrive on intellectual activities. As such, getting old allows me to experience more of life and in more perspectives than I ever thought possible when I was younger.

Granted, I’m pushing the limits of attention span and memory capacity. I find that I can’t juggle as many things as I could when I was younger, but here’s the clincher: the projects I did when I was younger weren’t as nuanced nor complex as now. Rather than doing Mathcounts, acting, music, writing, boy scouts, school, family, pets, and recreational reading, I now only do a few things, mainly family, music, and especially writing.

During high school and before, my writing was shallow, written quickly and then put away before given much thought (much like these blogs). I even published three books of unrevised writing and got my friends to buy them. I still have the master copy, but can’t read it any more. I rushed through it and though I gave it my best shot, I know I can do better. So some day I might take some of those story ideas and breathe new life into them but for now, I’m content to focus on my novel, which by the way, I just started Chapter 29 of 36!

So, back to my hairs. After seeing that video, I realized that no amount of persuasion could convince me that I wasn’t going bald. I had conclusive proof. The next day, I best a hair cutting kit and shaved my head into a buzz cut. It only barely hides the evidence, but rather than attempting the one hair comb over that my wife thought I should try, I accepted my genetics with open arms.

Stroke. Stroke. Done!

Well, not all the way done, but most of the way, now. I just finished Part IV of the novel. Here’s the stats for part Part IV: 65,345 words. 117 single spaced pages.

For the whole novel: 171,416 words. 307pages.

Part IV turned out to be more of a giant then I expected. I’m printing it out right now, and then I’ll do preliminary editing, if for no other reason then to remember my place so I can outline Part V.

My biggest obstacle so far is just myself. I think video games are my alcoholism. I find myself playing stupid little web games rather than writing. I want to be done with that bullshit. I’m almost done with this mammoth novel. If I really bear down, I figure I could be done by the end of summer.

Another One Done

I’m filled with a slight glow. I got up extra early this morning since I knew that I had a tough section to write. I quickly ate breakfast and sat down to work. I was five minutes late to my real job, but I finally got Chapter 23 done. It’s not the end of the part and a very, very rough draft. But that’s ok. I’ll go through when I’m all done to hit the re-write. I was only a day late from my goal of getting Ch. 23 done in February, but hell I got it done. I’m three chapters away from hitting the real climax of the story. It’s just been so long. So much time spent writing, and then trying to write, and then writer’s block. It would probably help if I just got rid of the goddamn internet. It’s sooo tempting to hit the fun stuff, to start playing games, and to skip the real work. I’ve wasted whole week, whole months, by getting hooked on certain games and spending my whole free time on them.

Though my job sucks, it’s one of the final best motivations for getting on my ass and writing. (Get it? I got to sit down to write? Oh sheesh. Never mind.) My hours have recently been cut back. The commissions are less than stellar. My wife’s hours got cut back even though she did good enough work to get a raise. We’ve got a whole bunch of debt and keep cutting off dead weight, bad expenses. Trimming here and there. We can’t afford to eat as healthy as we once did. We can’t afford health insurance any more. It’s stupid because we’re keeping the car. I wish we could just get rid of it again. Having the car itself isn’t so bad, just the goddamn insurance.

Yuck! This was supposed to be a self-congratulatory post, not a bitchy post. Please rest assured that I’m happy (with a strong grumpy undercurrent) about this. I’m writing more than usual. I outlined Ch. 23 late December, early January. I spent most of January working on a proto-type for a board game that still hasn’t quite come to fruition. Sooo, I basically wrote 14,000 words this last month. I’m proud because a lot of the nitty-gritties of writing are coming a little easier. I’m able to visualize a scene a bit better. I trust my instincts more. If I don’t have something solved before I write, I write anyway and let the characters figure it out. But the most important thing is that I’m not stressing about having a finished product right away. I’ll have time to re-write later and that’s where the story will really come together.

A novel novel

I have this superstition about my stories:  I don’t talk about theme, characters, plot, setting, or most anything until it’s actually done.  It’s like masturbating before sex–even though it’s easier and can be fulfilling, it doesn’t beat the actual experience of getting some.  What I do share is something much more superficial:  words written.  I figure it’s the best way to convey work done without actually pre-emptively popping the pork, so to say.

As of today, I have 126,000 words written, with a little more than half the novel completed.  I’ve been working on this current incarnation for the last 14 months, while battering around the story idea since 2002.  For all those who want to know how many pages?  At an average of 350 words per page, that’s about 360 pages so far, give or take.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is estimated at 140,000 words and 520 pages.

So, there it is pitches.  Hopefully, I’ll still be blogging by the time I get it published.  Or at least finished.  Then maybe I can recruit some people to help me edit it???