Posts from — August 2009

Welcome back!

I’ll bet you’re reading the title and thinking either I’m already insane or you have no idea what I’m talking about.

For those who haven’t done it, writing a 50,000 word novel is a particular bit of insanity the collective Internet goes through every November. This phenomena is called the National Novel Writing Month, or NanoWriMo for short. The premise is simple: write 50,000 words in one month. Now whether it’s a usable first draft, a steaming pile of dung, or a stream of consciousness novel consisting of the sentence “I’m a fish!” repeated over and over again is entirely up to you, the writer.

What I’m doing is to have my own personal NanoWriMo, but instead of going through just November, I’ll be starting in September and continuing through October and ending in November.

Yes, that’s over 150,000 words, or at least 3 complete first drafts in 3 months. In December I’ll be drinking heavily to recuperate and will probably shy away from keyboards, pens or any other writing implements like a vampire does sunlight. Either way, it’ll be an interesting exercise and I’m curious to see if I can accomplish it like I did NanoWriMo in previous years.

The only deviation from my course I might do is take a part of the second month to complete another 10,000 words for a YA novel I’m writing for my niece (which is what I’ll be working on during September) and round it out to 60,000 words (which seems to be the industry standard for YA fiction from what I’ve read). Then I’ll segue into the second book of my own novel series during October.

Now, since I need to get the YA novel done in time for December, I’m thinking of doing some editing/re-writing during November/October instead of another draft. Although I haven’t made a firm decision either way, if I decide to go the third draft route, I may opt to start on the 3rd book of my series or perhaps a short story collection.

Either way, it’s going to be an interest next couple of months.

Well, this blog post certainly took longer than I wanted to write it. But this is what happens when you keep putting things off “until later”. The “until laters” will get you and then you’ll find yourself months afterward thinking “What the hell just happened?”.

Putting aside my lapse in posts, I wanted to talk about the Alumni Retreat. I had a great time with friends as well as meeting new ones there. Probably the most surprising thing for me was finding out the retreat had people attending that weren’t alumni from Seton Hill’s WPF program. This little tidbit begs the question why was it called an alumni retreat if not everyone was from the program? I think I’ll bring it up during the planning sessions for next year’s retreat.

One of my goals of going up to the retreat was to meet the agents there. And as mentioned in previous posts, I hadn’t met an agent in the flesh yet so for me this was a novel experience.

The first pitch session I had was with Bob Mecoy of Creative Book Services. What was interesting was I wasn’t planning on pitching to him, but at the last minute I decided to pitch the graphic novel Calling Home to see what his reaction was. Overall it was a great session, buoyed by a longer discussion I had with him during lunch where I learned he was very interested writers who could finish a story to work with artists. After speaking with him, I determined going the self-pubbed route with Calling Home would be best since it’s already being serialized on the Internet and that it was better to use it as an exposure tool. It was an enlightening session for me.

The second was with Diana Fox of the Fox Literary Agency. This one felt a little more rocky. Well at least to me. Diana was very nice, but I was unprepared for the questions she asked about my work. The worst part of it was I felt like I had been caught unawares. I couldn’t articulate thoughts about my own novel! I was channeling my inner ten year old when an adult asked something and you didn’t know the answer because you were paying attention to the interesting knot in the wood floor instead of what they’d been saying. Even more icing on the embarrassment cake was when she suggested there might be some negative connotations to some of the ideas I had for the other books in the series. On a side note, it was great she knew something about the mythology of the city I was using in the novel since not many people knew about the Breton/Christian mythology of the City of Ys. I was sure I’d blown the pitch but she did want to see my pages so that was great news. I’m also grateful I didn’t sound like a moron, so at the end of the day I was happy with the results.

All in all, the experiences and face time I had with the agents and interaction with the other WPF’s definitely made the trip for me and I look forward to next year’s jaunt to Greensburg and would recommend it to any other writer who’s looking for a great, small conference that won’t break the bank.