Welcome to the second periodic open mic week! I do screen first-time comments to avoid being swamped by spam, and there is sometimes a delay in approving them depending on my schedule, but I will get to them, I promise. Topics are not limited to writing, but I reserve the right to cut people off if things get nasty.
I’m wondering if anyone else is observing the same pattern in sales of their books that I am.
My sales increased in March, as though readers needed more reading material at the beginning of stay-at-home. But in April and May, my sales essentially died, perhaps as parents began to really grapple with overseeing their children’s schoolwork—or maybe as everyone started baking and gardening instead of reading.
But my writing buddy (who gives me feedback on my first drafts) had just the opposite. Her sales tanked in March and then rose in April/May.
What about you all?
I would like to start submitting my current WIP. It’s YA dark fantasy and is about 32,000 words long (despite efforts to increase it). Where does one submit stories of that length? Most publishers that I know about tend to go for novels, and magazines want things to be shorter.
The magazine Deep Magic takes fantasy stories between 1k and 40K.
The magazine Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Stories takes anything over 1K with no maximum, in most genres.
Is anybody else having great difficulty staying focused these days? If so, have you found good ways to get yourself back on track?
I’m finding it difficult to get fully dialed in on my writing.
So far, I’ve been using huge doses of patience with myself, along with regarding each day as a chance for a fresh start.
This allowed me to at least get a story typed in that I’d written longhand, as well as getting revisions done on said story.
This is a challenging time for most of us. It is for me. I think we need to realize that our usual productivity may not be within reach. So setting the bar a bit lower can help us get some writing done, even if not as much as we would wish.
I am having unusual difficulties — I often have usual ones — and I need to remember to keep flipping between projects to keep fresh.
To try this, remember you have to keep flipping BACK, so things get done.
Fiction is mostly coming harder, and I can’t seem to work on it for as long as usual.
Essays and thought pieces, though, seem to be coming to me faster. A response to stress, no doubt, but not one I expected.
I always have trouble staying focused. 🙂
Monthly quotas help. Watching/reading things that feed into what I’m (supposed to be) writing helps. Talking with friends about the WIP as though it were a show we’re both fans of helps (although I find that one extraordinarily hard to achieve). Post-its on the bathroom mirror, a whiteboard I see when I wake up, etc. help. Carrying around the last few lines where I stopped helps, so I can work on it at odd moments.
Ultimately, though, the only thing that really gets me going when the brain just won’t stay in harness is the terror of looking at myself in the mirror ten years from now and realizing that I could’ve gotten somewhere if only I’d done the work.
How I do agree with your closing comment! I’m so afraid that when Life with its standard commitments rushes back in, I’ll regret all the time I piffled away. Sometimes it gets me working.
Does anybody have any opinion on how long one should wait before bugging one’s beta readers for comments? The beta copies went out just before the pandemic hit, so I don’t know whether they’re too ill to comment, or too occupied to make the time, or maybe think it’s so godawful that they don’t want to say anything.
One of the people I sent the beta to was my agent, at *his* suggestion (“because I know the markets”). This is probably a whole different question: when, if ever, should one bug one’s agent?
I would touch base with beta readers after 4 weeks. Not “bugging,” just checking in to see how each one is doing generally and checking to make sure no emails have gone missing in the “ether.”
As you say, checking on an agent would be a whole ‘nother deal. 🙂
I’d recommend a month.
Indeed, in the spirit of telling you completely useless advice, it’s probably wise to say so to the beta readers while asking them to read the work. (I don’t know about agents.)
A month seems like a reasonable compromise between “betas have lives, y’know” and “I’m going crazy here”.
As for the agent, what kind of communication response time do you normally expect from him? Obviously feedback on a whole novel is going to take longer than answering a quick inquiry, but it’s a place to start. That said, I would hope that after a month, a quick “Hey, have you had a chance to look at it yet?” wouldn’t be out of line.
Four weeks seems like a reasonable time to wait before bugging beta readers; I may have bugged mine a little too soon at about three, since one of them promptly bailed saying that she just couldn’t deal with critical reading during the pandemic. They’re probably not maintaining a tactful silence. Our current situation is so weird that it’s messed up a lot of peoples’ productivity, I think.
Trying to spruce up a novel to kick out the door.
Last week’s entry on plot, and my inability to help anybody 😉 started me thinking. I came up with this, which might be beneficial. (More likely not, but I’m so restless right now, writing up something is better than pacing the floor.)
https://kevinwadejohnson.blogspot.com/2020/06/plot-scenes-and-incidents.html
No doubt an extended example of a plot won’t help either, but it’s worth a try:
https://kevinwadejohnson.blogspot.com/2020/06/lets-plot-out-story.html
It’s a good after-the-fact analysis, for anyone who’s looking for such a thing!
I actually analyzed it as I threw it together, but that’s doesn’t really matter. Does it give anyone any help on how to vary incidents and punch up the pacing? If so, great. If not, well, I tried.
Writing issues I need to work on other than the perennial “Plot is Hard!”
o Descriptions. Descriptions of clothing, because clothes make the man/woman/scaly green alien, and “how to describe people” advice skimps on that. Descriptions of places that avoid the white room & talking heads problem, without getting bogged down and boring the reader. Other writers have managed interesting and evocative descriptions; I want to do that too!
o Bringing scenes to an end without having them trail off into the weeds (or cutting them off too early). Maybe this is kinda-sorta related to Plot is Hard, but it feels different.
o Dialog is something I’ve deliberately worked on, but there’s still room for improvement. I could use a broader palette of gestures, expressions, and stage business. Better yet if it’s an expandable palette, and broad enough that I can use it to help individualize characters. I could also use a better feel of where to put “Johnathan said” – beginning, middle, or end – and also for how and how not to use “said Johnathan” in addition or instead.