Wet Invigorated Toes

As usual, I have no time. But I wanted to get this information out to those writing friends who stop by from time to time. As some may recall, I noted a few months back that I'd stepped my toes in the water of the agent world by sending my completed (to distinguish it from the one I began in November, not to imply it's really done) to an agented friend.

Today, he called back and offered me some great advice about ways to improve it. Since I have the book out with another friend who's an editor, I don't want to offer the exact details here, but suffice it to say I believe I now know what had been aggravating me about my book. I knew it wasn't perfect (and if it's going to go to an agent, I believe a first novel should be pretty damn close to perfect — as far as a particular novel can be), but he pinpointed what was missing.

I still have little time to work on the novel, but I don't think it will require months of work. Indeed, there's some rearrangement of material, but not a lot of new writing. I may even need to remove some detail and add some more that I'd removed from earlier drafts. This is why I keep everything!

Hope you're all well and all finding time to write. It's not easy. But it's worth it.

Quote of the Day

This is from a story in today's New York Times. The story is about the revelation that a woman's memoirs of being a gangmember and foster child were completely fabricated.

Nan A. Talese, who published Mr. Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, said the combination of these recent episodes could start to change the business’s practices. "I think what editors are going to have to do is point to the things that happened recently and say to their authors, 'If there is anything in your book that can be discovered to be untrue, you better let us know right now, and we’ll deal with it before we publish it,' " Ms. Talese said. But she added: "I don’t think there is any way you can fact-check every single book. It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship."

Vacation Reading...

Ah, vacation... I remember vacation. I get to sleep late (even though my body remains used to waking around 6), I get to do pretty much whatever I want, and I get to catch up on things that I put off.

And I spend most of my time reading and writing. At the moment, I'm taking a break from the revisions to my novel. I've met with my half dozen readers and paid them in alcohol, which helped to elicit honest assessments and criticisms that they were initially reluctant to express. Thank God for alcohol!

The comments that they made have been very helpful. I've got scenes to add, some to consider dropping or toning down (apparently a sex scene was a bit too much for most of my readers), and reason to be hopeful that this is a publishable novel that can be used to build an audience. Now I'm putting all that effort to good use.

So that's what I'm doing with my vacation. Plus I'm reading Bad Men by John Connolly. This is not one of his Charlie Parker novels, though it is set in Maine and Parker makes a brief cameo within the first hundred pages. As a result, Connolly takes many pages to develop new characters, and his usually quick pace is bogged down in details.

I'm 140 pages into Bad Men and I wouldn't give it a rousing recommendation yet. While I briefly considered putting it down and starting something else for the hours I'm not reading and revising my novel, I decided that since I'm on vacation I can take a leisurely pace in my reading too. Plus, I thoroughly enjoyed Every Dead Thing, The Killing Kind, and The White Road -- and especially The Book of Lost Things -- that I feel Connolly has earned the right to start off at a different pace.

Ok, break time is over. Back to my novel.