Author: Chris G Page 19 of 77

It has somehow been nearly a month since I last posted, claiming I would be resuming active work on the novel. And I have! Yay, me.

I took that small-fonted, thin-margined printout I mentioned last time, and read it cover to cover. I found a few consistency issues, some ways to trim it down a little, and bunch of little typos. I marked those in pen on the printout, and am about 70% of the way through fixing them in the manuscript. That separation of reading from writing, of not being able to edit it as I find issues, definitely helps me focus. Having a full printout was nice, but I’ll probably go back to PDFs for the next pass. Using even the minimal paper I squeezed this onto still makes me feel too guilty.

I have a couple of things going on the critique front: the critique partner I’ve been working with is willing to try switching gears to higher level beta-reading. I also signed up for Scribophile, and have poked around a little to learn how it works. Their system of “karma” and various kinds of “spotlights” seems overly complicated, to the point that I’m surprised there are so many people on there, seeming to know how it all works.

I also received the critique I bought with my entry in the Writers’ League Manuscript Contest. I haven’t fully processed that yet, but it pointed to more work on the opening scene along the lines of what I’ve heard from others. Which I thought I’d addressed, ha ha, but that’s okay.

That critique also reinforced a realization I had during my own recent re-read: the genre for this thing isn’t urban fantasy, despite its occult magical aspects, it’s more of a thriller! My confusion about the genre has been nagging at me for a while, so I’m really glad to have finally realized this.

I’ve done pretty well at spending at least a brief time each day working on this (80% over the past 30 days, according to Streaks), and that’s been a big boost to a feeling of momentum. There’s a long way to go, but I’m going.

How about this pandemic, huh? I’m grateful to be on the really lucky end of the spectrum so far: healthy, working remotely at my relatively secure job, an introverted homebody with plenty of company in the form of a family that includes zero school-aged kids. That acknowledged, the stress of this crazy time is not nothing. My mental capacity for spending time on an amateur work of speculative fiction has, you know, seen better days.

But I’m back, or at least I’m going to try to be. After the initial mondo sprint of NaNoWriMo, I’ve never really put huge chunks of time into this, but I’ve been pretty regular. The slow and steady tortoise, carving out a couple of mornings or evenings each week to sit down at the laptop and open up Ulysses and chip away at this thing. Those have fallen off, but I’m going to try to get back to them. In fact, I’m going to try to spend at least a little time on writing every day (I know, resolutions, bleh, but I’m aiming for a “most days, that’s fine” attitude more than a I’LL DIE BEFORE I BREAK THAT CHAIN one).

The Writers’ League hasn’t officially cancelled or online-ified June’s Agents & Editors Conference, though I can’t imagine it will go ahead as planned. So that’s a big milestone for my year gone. I submitted a synopsis and first however-many pages to their manuscript contest; I hope to still get feedback from that, regardless.

I’ve given the full manuscript to a small number of people, and haven’t had any of them finish it yet, which I’m trying to be cool about. It is a very small sample size, and I knew all along that reading this whole unpolished, unprofessional rough draft was a big favor to ask. I have gotten feedback that it has a slow start, and I’ve been worried for a while that there’s more going on than there needs to be. So I’m thinking that before continuing with lower-level edits – I want to bring the narrative voice closer to the protagonist’s point of view – that I should read it over from a higher level. Try to judge the pacing of the story, character introduction, world-building, etc., and not get bogged down in touching up the words and sentences. To that end, I just exported a PDF with a really small font and margins, and sent it to the on-demand printers at Office Depot. Tomorrow I’ll pick up 70 double-sided pages crammed with text, and start it all over again.

I haven’t checked in here for a couple of weeks, but my efforts toward publication continue. I finished that pass of copyediting I mentioned before, and with a drink or three to bolster my courage, I posted the first few chapters of it online, along with an invitation to read the whole thing. It was only to my small circle of online pals and acquaintances, so response wasn’t staggering, but it was a step, and I took it.

I also attended a second meeting of the critique group, including bringing printouts of my first chapter to be read. That was another big step, exciting and somewhat mortifying, but good. I got some worthwhile feedback from it, and see some ways to improve the story. I think that having other writers focus on a single short chapter (the group works in roughly 2,000-word chunks, which happens to match my chapter sizes pretty well) will give me a different kind of feedback than I hope to get from more casual reads of the whole thing.

I have another meetup with that group again tomorrow, and have my second chapter printed out and ready to go. This time it includes a short statement with introductory context, and I’ve stapled the pages; I’m learning how this works. However, my whole novel is 83 chapters, and this group meets about every other week, so I don’t think I’ll spend the three-plus years it would take to run the entire thing past them.

Which is partly why I’ve also gotten in touch with a possible critique partner. We haven’t quite managed to arrange an introductory meeting yet, and even that is just to see how we get on and if we might be able to help each other out. But I found his contact info in a listing in the Writers’ League’s “classifieds” (which is a Google Sheets doc; not fancy, but workable), and his interests and genre sounded like a fit, so we’ll see.

Last but not least is something I feel pretty self-conscious about. But it’s a small step that I took partly for the symbolism of it, and if I’m documenting my journey here then I guess this is part of it. After last month’s Third Thursday panel talk, I met a guy who had attended the Agents & Editors Conference last year. He said he wished he’d had business cards to hand out to the, well, agents and editors he met there. So I looked into it, found that for $15, Vistaprint would sell me a box of 100 (probably about 98 more than I’ll ever give out), and decided, what the hell. I thought I was official before, when I used my Writers’ League discount at BookPeople, but forget that. Now I have little cards that say it: Chris Grayson, Author.