Sarah

I was checking today how long it's been that I've been working on Sarah's story (on and off, of course)... to discover that I put the first of the submissions to editors and agents in the mail on Sarah's fourth birthday... the exact day.  Weird!  :-) 

I won't go into detail about what a wild ride these last four years have been, or all the lessons I learned while writing Sarah's story, other than saying "wow!" 

Happy belated birthday, Sarah. 

Now if I could only get you to Shut Up! life would be a little simpler... but you're staying true to form, and the next story is likely to be just as wild a ride as the first.  :-)

Yesterday, I put the snail-mail submission package in the mail... which was an experience given that the clerk at the post office hadn't done an international return coupon in a long while.  At one point they had three gals working on trying to figure out what had to be done for one.  :-)  But it's off.

And today, I sent off two queries.

The hurry-up-and-wait submission process is underway.

But the even bigger news is that yesterday I cleaned off my desk.  :-)  I know it doesn't sound like much, but believe me, it's major.  :-)

Jara's story is still cogitating in the ether, while I try and get caught up with stuff around here.  Now that Sarah is off, Jane is starting to pester me.  Which is good, as hers is the next book that I "should" be writing.  But since I rarely listen to "shoulds", I'll not push her faster than she wants to be pushed.

So, today is work on paying work that I should have been doing yesterday, but I broke the website and need to try and figure out "why" when there aren't any people on it.  Plus a ton of stuff to do around the house.  Never a dull moment.  :-)

Good, bad, or otherwise, the cover letters, blurb and synopsis are declared done, and the first three chapters were given another copy-edit and declared good enough.

And... three submission packages have been emailed, and the final one is printed and in an envelope on my desk.

Sarah is done... for the moment.

Kind of a scary thought.  She's been my constant companion for several years now.  It'll be interesting to see if Jane is as good a friend.

I'm trying to get the submission packages ready, and it's driving me buggy.  And to make it all worse, I clicked on a copy of the manuscript that I submitted a couple years and several versions ago, and suddenly I was full of angst.  OMG, is the old one better?  Did I screw it up by trying to fix it?  Should I go back to this old version, or maybe one of the other versions is better, or some combination?  What should I do?  What should I do?

Well, what I really need to do is take a deep breath and hit the send button.

But not until tomorrow.  I need one gal to take a 2nd look at the synopsis and cover letter.

However, I do promise to not touch the manuscript itself.

The submission process isn't any fun at all.  :-(

Last night, instead of doing paying work, I updated the synopsis for the done book so I can start sending it out to other agents, since the one agent I sent it to never got back to me.

And, yes, I know not to send it out to only one agent and then wait, but life's been a little busy for the past several months, so I was content to leave it sit there for a while.  So, now it's time to move on and submit to more places, but I had to re-do the synopsis first. 

I actually did most of the synopsis work back in early December and sent it to a couple people to review, but then life got busy again.  It also didn't help that the beginning was really dry... which is not how I want to start a synopsis.  Then on the trip back from the funeral in Kansas, one of the many tangents I went off onto, while driving alone for 10+ hours, was the a new first paragraph.

So I fixed the beginning and polished the rest of the synopsis. 

Then I sent it off to the first agent (after asking her if she wanted a copy), and maybe I'll guilt her into actually giving me an answer on the manuscript.  :-)

Now I just need to polish the 1st few chapters of the manuscript again, now that I've learned more copyediting-stuff, then I'll send the whole package off to other places.

There are many things I should have been doing this evening, one of which could have been making some money to help pay the bills this month, but just as I couldn't face that task this morning, I couldn't face it this evening, so I did something else that desperately needed doing... I wrote the first draft of Sarah's synopsis.

The full manuscript has been off to an agent for several months now, without a reply, so it's long past time to send it on to other people, but before I could do that I needed a synopsis.

I'd written a synopsis long ago, for the second draft of the book, but the beginning of the book changed so dramatically that I needed a new synopsis.

I've been putting off this task forever because I have only vague clues about what editors and agents are looking for in a synopsis.  I've asked fellow authors, and they've graciously answered me, but I've yet to be able to translate what they say into terms and actions that I understand. (Read more)

I'm job hunting again. 

This job (with the bank), like the last one, has been wonderful and I've learned tons, but I need more hours.  So, I'm on the hunt for a full-time job... which is sucking up all the energy that I'd normally spend writing.

I've updated my resume, found a couple places to apply to (one of which I'm really excited about), and today I'm writing cover letters and sending applications off.

The agent is still sitting on my manuscript.  I emailed her last week to confirm she got it, and she did.  So it's more waiting.  Which is fine, as I don't have the brain cells to deal with it if she did get back to me. (Read more)

The manuscript is done and finally off to the agent that I met at DucKon.

And now I wait.

While I wait, I start on the next book.

But first I finish cleaning off my desk so I have room to start on the next book.

(FWIW, this is my 500th blog entry.  Interesting timing.)

Sure, I can tweak it from now until the end of time, but the 3rd major pass is done.  I'm contacting beta-readers to see who can turn it around fairly quickly so I can get it off to the agent who's agreed to read it.

My fingers are crossed that I haven't screwed up anything too major... we shall see.  :-)

But... it's done.  I typed the first words of this book on 1/20/2006, so... it's been a long ride, and I can't believed how much I've learned in the process.

Now, I just need to write the other six related books, and edit the 1st manuscript I wrote, and the other three books of that series, and... and...

However... right now, I'm going to bask in the fact that after 3.5 years... it's done.

  (Read more)

I wiped myself out staying up so late last night, and accomplished basically nothing the entire day today.

But forced myself to get at least one chapter done.  It didn't take much work, just some word tweaking, but I can't do more.

It's 5k more words done, and that's a good thing.

Edit Progress (7/29/09)

Complete (99.2k of 113k)