Curiously, the thing most liely to distract me from the Procesor is painting (Plastic arts as opposed to 'house' So that even in deep avoidance I can continue to enjoy that rich glow that can only be garnered by genflection to the muses.
Of course there is the excoriating guilt of the non house cleaner to accomodate, but my duty is to generations as yet unborn! Which is a pretty good excuse!

Here's a very "novel" and seemingly successful method of submission:

http://www.bksp.org/JAKonrath1.html

A great story: up to the line "Unfortunately, that novel didn’t sell. Neither did the next two."



colin M

Yes, but what about the next sentence:

"But my agency believed in me, I continued to hone my craft, and novel number ten went up for auction and became the first thing I ever sold."

And what a sale!

Interesting how two different people picked up two very different conclusions from reading the same thing!

You should check out the guy's website. He is either very inspirational or very depressing depending on your view point.
Brian.

It seems to me to be the victory cry of a very particular kind of writer. So really the schism comes down to this?

Upon the one hand the pragmatism of writers like this one, ambitious to just
'be a writer' as an intention in itself. That is to say, almost without
reference to the actual substance of the work.

That is as opposed to the ambition 'to write' which might be stated as
the intention to create something that just happens to involve the act
of writing it.

Those two intentions are actually pretty far removed from each other
when you start analysing them, no wonder the two clans don't
understand each other!
The illusion that they are in fact engaged upon the same act is strong
because the habits of them are so similar, this leads them into
unnatural communion on web lists! But each never does
quite comprehend the other.

The piece also paints a picture of a world where editors and their ilk have different standards than readers, an assertion that i find incredible given that they are hired for their supposed ability to know the public taste, otherwise, what do they actually do?

The notion seems to describe a world obsessed with novelty in which it is nevertheless presupposed that readers
will not cleave to something unless it is altered and reduced to match
something that they have formerly consumed.

Therefore stories of certain types are
far more likely to be selected, excluding 'rogue elements'.

At any given time there must be collosal excluded unrepresented audiences!

And the pandered to readers become further habituated to a certain 'flavour'
of story and anything deviating that much more 'strange'. Thus
perpetuating the original self fullfilling prophecy.

Certain opinions become increasingly 'true' the more they are excercised.

The lesson to draw is that one cannot writing for 'a public' at
all but only encode ideas so that they can pass inspection by innumerable
intermediaries, which is I agree, depressingly probable.

Hello dreamer and Sanguimane!

I'm afraid I don't agree with either of you; that pragmatism is somehow in direct opposition to creativity; and I'll try to show you why.

I didn't look at the guys website and i don't know what he's written; it doesn't really interest me. What interested me in his story is the question: if agents and editors perhaps don't even bother to read queries and other submissions, how to get noticed?

I write for the joy of it. But I am also pragmatic. I want to get published. Don't we all? Why are we here, if not? I want to continue to have an income from writing, so that I have the time to write more, and not spend my days doing mindless jobs just to pay the mortgage. So then. If it's true that agents and editors hardly glance at submissions, then that means I have to take this fact into account and get noticed right from the get go. This guy seems to have found a way of getting noticed. That's good. I can learn from him. Whether you write mindless pastiches of whatever is the latest flavour of the day, or exquisite prose: to get published you have to get noticed first. That means sending in a killer query letter to get them to even request a submission. That's the first step. And that's the step i'm intersted in.

Have you read Simon Trewin's articles? He puts his finger on exactly my problem with the industry; I have been through it and some out the other side, alive and kicking, but furious and fighting. It's ugly. I was with a major publisher who tried to get me to dumb down my writing in order to appease the aquisition teams. For my fourth novel, I submitted 100 pages and a synopsis. My editor sent me back a 5-page mail telling me how to change the story - don't let the protagonist get old, end it when she meets her lover again, don't bring in the granddaughter, and so on.

This was supposed to be a major novel. She was raising me to be the next best-selling author - that's what she told me. I could have expected a big advance for this proposal, and all the promotion an author could desire.

I told her to stick it. I stopped writing that novel and, last year, wrote something completely different, the one I wanted to write, doing something she had told me to avoid at ALL COSTS. I knew she'd probably reject it, but I didn't care. My agent was on the editor's side. She saw the big money coming in so of course she was on the editor's side.

When the fourth novel was finished I showed it to both and both said the writing, the story, the characters were better than ever before but the LOCATION would not get past the aquisition team. They wanted a complete rewrite. I was glad; because now I had good reason to dump then both.

So I am back to square one, looking for an agent and editor who will feel the passion with which I wrote this. And though I have written this book from my heart and will not pander to the aquisitions teams, I will make compromises with the query letter - THE QUERY LETTER! THAT'S ALL! - in order to get some agent and editor to even look at my stuff and take me on. That's being pragmatic and realistic. I have not sold out to the "dead hand of safe bets", as Trewin puts it. And I never will. In fact, I had already written what seemed like a killer query letter that did get quite a lot of interest from the agents I sent it to. The guy in the article inspired me to rewrite my CV, add some more saleable stuff, and so on. Nothing wrong with that.

I should also say that sometimes it's the right thing to drop one project and move on to the next. My very first novel had an agent who loved it but it never got published. It broke my heart for five years, I shed blood sweat and tears over it. But one day I saw the time had come to move on, wrote my second, and THAT was the one that got published. Now I am so glad the first one didn't make it - it just wasn't good enough. That's the reason for my earlier comment - that even if the guy's first novel never made it, a later one did; the main thing is that he found a way of getting attention, and thus getting published.

I have the worlds largest blind spot about contacting these people. Almost as large as the one that obscures my desire to contact publishers, a thing that I do from a sense of grim duty about once a year! Sanguine, I am similar, in spite of my seeming go-get-it attitude in the last posts. I am absolutely laid back and have no skills whatsoever in promoting myslef, I am shy to the point of paranoid; I loathe speaking to anyone on the phone whom I don't know, and tend to stutter when I do. Like you, I would much prefer that agents and editors came to seek me out. But it's not going to happen. I think many writers are by nature introverted, like myself, and that goes entirely against the grain of today's publishing world. I had to overcome it. I had to speak to audiences and was even on TV once. It didn't kill me, but I didn't like it and hope never to do it again. But I do want to get published, if only to see my old agent and publisher with egg on their faces! I've had to come out of my cocoon a bit, and I guess it's a good thing. I will never be gregarious and extroverted, but something had to give. Like (0) Helpful (0) Made Me Think (0) Made Me Smile (0) Pure Genius (0) Re: Agent submission process by aruna at 10:21 on 12 May 2005 I have the worlds largest blind spot about contacting these people. Almost as large as the one that obscures my desire to contact publishers, a thing that I do from a sense of grim duty about once a year! Sanguine, I am similar, in spite of my seeming go-get-it attitude in the last posts. I am absolutely laid back and have no skills whatsoever in promoting myslef, I am shy to the point of paranoid; I loathe speaking to anyone on the phone whom I don't know, and tend to stutter when I do. Like you, I would much prefer that agents and editors came to seek me out. But it's not going to happen. I think many writers are by nature introverted, like myself, and that goes entirely against the grain of today's publishing world. I had to overcome it. I had to speak to audiences and was even on TV once. It didn't kill me, but I didn't like it and hope never to do it again. But I do want to get published, if only to see my old agent and publisher with egg on their faces! I've had to come out of my cocoon a bit, and I guess it's a good thing. I will never be gregarious and extroverted, but something had to give. Like (0) Helpful (0) Made Me Think (0) Made Me Smile (0) Pure Genius (0) Re: Agent submission process by aruna at 10:24 on 12 May 2005 I have the worlds largest blind spot about contacting these people. Almost as large as the one that obscures my desire to contact publishers, a thing that I do from a sense of grim duty about once a year! Sanguine, I am similar, in spite of my seeming go-get-it attitude in the last posts. I am absolutely laid back and have no skills whatsoever in promoting myslef, I am shy to the point of paranoid; I loathe speaking to anyone on the phone whom I don't know, and tend to stutter when I do. Like you, I would much prefer that agents and editors came to seek me out. But it's not going to happen. I think many writers are by nature introverted, like myself, and that goes entirely against the grain of today's publishing world. I had to overcome it. I had to speak to audiences and was even on TV once. It didn't kill me, but I didn't like it and hope never to do it again. But I do want to get published, if only to see my old agent and publisher with egg on their faces! I've had to come out of my cocoon a bit, and I guess it's a good thing. I will never be gregarious and extroverted, but something had to give. Like (0) Helpful (0) Made Me Think (0) Made Me Smile (0) Pure Genius (0) Re: Agent submission process by aruna at 10:26 on 12 May 2005 Sorry about my last post. I couldn't get the message to gothrough and so I pressed Post several times, and that was the result. Something jinxes me on this site... Like (0) Helpful (0) Made Me Think (0) Made Me Smile (0) Pure Genius (0) Re: Agent submission process by Colin-M at 10:29 on 12 May 2005

Naomi used to know a way out of these things

hey waddya know, the secret lives on with me!!!

Colin M

Just checking to see what happens now - if I've been released from limbo....

MAGIC!