Everything is always over and dying and too late.
*flings self off cliff*
haha!
i want PARA to come and give our next
puglet toast! <3
Everything is always over and dying and too late.
I'm so cheerful I could star in a Thomas Hardy novel.
Only that Para would totally toast with water, but hey, there's an idea.
I think we get so excited, so anxious, so time driven as writers wanting to get our idea out there NOW, we sometimes forget that writing takes time. Edits take time. Not just to do them, but to sit on them and let the flavors marry together for a bit before we read it again JUST TO MAKE SURE.
For me, this is what's been missing in my own writing for the last year. I've had no time to sit on anything, no chance to let things marinate and develop and BLEND for fuck's sake. I hate it. Sometimes I wish I was back writing before agent, before editor.
Sometimes.
And I have too many author friends (and no, I'm not referring to anyone in Purgatory) who have rushed off to query projects that weren't ready yet. It was like they couldn't help themselves. They had this imaginary ticking time bomb where they were just DESPERATE to start querying! In several cases, I'd read at least a partial of the story and it wasn't ready. It didn't work yet. In one case, the writing wasn't even polished! In another, it had been edited pristinely and yet, the manuscript had no life to it.
It made me sad because I think both authors had something really special on their hands, but they just couldn't - or wouldn't - wait.
Neither got an agent. Both self-published manuscripts that were not ready for the public. And I feel like the publishing world missed out on books that could have been really fantastic and special, if the authors had just given themselves a little bit more time.
Wow. I totally didn't mean for this to turn into a rant. I've just been really in tune with the frantic nature of trying to get published these days, and I feel like some authors are shooting themselves in the foot.
I totally hear you about a lot of projects needing time to marinate. But it's tough to do that when the industry moves so fast. You read a cool book and you get inspired to write something similar, but the trend was already dead by the time you picked it up. An agent seems like a good fit, but by the time you're querying they've stopped handling fiction at all. Everything is always over and dying and too late.
I totally hear you about a lot of projects needing time to marinate. But it's tough to do that when the industry moves so fast. You read a cool book and you get inspired to write something similar, but the trend was already dead by the time you picked it up. An agent seems like a good fit, but by the time you're querying they've stopped handling fiction at all. Everything is always over and dying and too late.
Yet publishers are also pushing authors to produce faster with short stories and novellas to release between novels. The internet has put pressure on every level of production now and he who's slowest loses. Something has to slow it down or we all have to speed up.
Have to admit, I always feel hideously unaccomplished when comparing how much I write with how much more other people have written already/are writing right now.
Sometimes when I'm having one of my depressive weeks I get all inferior feeling when I see people like lily, and blond, and taz, and all the others with several books going. Then the other crazies come out in my head and beat down the inferior one and throw him back in the box and scream at him "You aren't them" and then all is right in the Calebverse again.
Guys, guys, guys. Do you not recall (Caleb excepted, since he wasn't here back then) the YEARS of my agent hunt: the angst, the screaming, the R after R, the weeping, the group hugs, the group idea of the Revenge Query?
This whole multi-book author thing is a Greek comedy-tragedy mask that somehow got form-fitted to my skin. It's... surreal. Do NOT judge yourself by me!
But I am human, even though I refuse to accept that most days, and I do get those occasions of inferiority and envy. Those days it's kept to myself until the cavalry arrives.
Then after all that I usually take it and spin it the other way and say "see all of them did it. You can too."
Uh oh that's how it always starts. Then there are the t-shirts, and wrists bands, then the decoder rings, and before you know it you're in a cult picking up the bones of small animals along railroad tracks and eating fudge.Today is an "I Caleb" day, clearly.