11/10/06: Plugging

[davidlevine]

Word count: 2951 | Since last entry: 829

I keep plugging away. Ten thousand words in a month seems doable for me but I'm giving up an awful lot of sleep to maintain this pace. I wonder how some people can write thousands of words a day, even with a day job. I think that perhaps I am editing too much as I go. On the other hand, this technique seems to work for me.

I talked with my agent today. He's gotten several requests to see the novel so it's going out to two different publishers at once (agents can do this, if they let everyone know it's happening). I hope that this will encourage one or both of the publishers to feel they have to act before the other snaps it up.

I also got a nice email from the slushmaster at Realms of Fantasy saying that he's passing the unicorn story (remember the unicorn story?) up to Shawna. He also said that the days of waiting 6-12 months for a response are long gone. We'll see.

One more tidbit of writing news before I fall over: I talked with Gordon Van Gelder at World Fantasy about when "Titanium Mike" is likely to be published. He'd said a while ago that it might be in the January issue, but then he'd had to retract that, and I asked him what had happened. He explained that my story is 15 pages long, and he'd planned to run it in the January issue, but then he sold one more page of ads, so he ran another story that was 14 pages long instead. (Or perhaps it was the other way around.) It's very informative to see how much influence these random commercial factors have on the makeup of an issue, even when you have a magazine that's owned by its editor, who can theoretically do whatever he wants. So if you're wondering why there were two alien kitten stories in one issue, or why one issue is heavy on the SF and another on the F, the answer might be as simple as that.

Comments

[sallytuppence.livejournal.com]

Huh! I never heard a term for it before, but that's how I do it: cycling. I'd always called it recursive writing.

David, I can do 1000 words a day or more on the weekends, but never during the week. Full-time job and two little kids make that difficult (though not impossible if I'm on a roll and my husband has time to pick up the slack).

I'm really interested in agents' submissions practices and how agents decide on how/where to market books. My agent has sent my MS to ten (!) editors, all at the same time, and has given them a deadline. (If the novel gets ten rejections all at once it's going to kill me.) I'm not sure if this is standard practice when submitting to the childrens/YA imprints of mainstream publishers. Genre submissions seem to be really different, yes?