Monday, December 04, 2006
Eating Italian
I was about to get a nice and early night last when I discovered a programme on one of the cable channels just starting. The History of Punk just couldn't be avoided and I ended up watching it to the end, some ninety minutes later. As a result, I only got five hours sleep and woke up today requiring a fair amount of coffee in me before I could get my eyes open without the use of matchsticks.
Two hours after getting up I reached the end of Slick. The final chapter starts well, but ends crap. I need a better finale so I decided to leave it alone and come back to it. I also decided to go back to the start and go through each chapter (of which there are forty) and update my chapter tracker. I've found this is a good way of highlighting all the main links and making sure the important details are correctly written. It's just a once over really, but the notes I took I'll work on this week. So I'm not shouting that I have completed the first version of the manuscript. Not quite yet. Once the notes are worked through, I'll claim victory.
I worked on other things in the evening. I'm still getting next year's GDR together and I think I may have found a possible market to pitch Hunting Jack to. I'm still not sure though. It's an internet publisher specialising in e-books who have a good reputation for marketing and the editors that work for them. It's tempting because I want Hunting Jack to have a good home. I want it to be back out there and available. With it sitting on disk I can never fully put it top bed once and for all - it always seems like a work in progress.
So I have to think seriously about this. Does it really have that good a chance of being published traditionally? It's been to a dozen agents and been rejected, and while there a lot more I haven't tried I just wonder if for a first effort it's really good enough anyway. Comparing my first draft of Hunting Jack to Slick is like comparing Canneloni to Macaroni. You might not get that. Meantime, I'll prepare the query letter and synopsis and as I do, try and make a decision.
Words today: 1707
Two hours after getting up I reached the end of Slick. The final chapter starts well, but ends crap. I need a better finale so I decided to leave it alone and come back to it. I also decided to go back to the start and go through each chapter (of which there are forty) and update my chapter tracker. I've found this is a good way of highlighting all the main links and making sure the important details are correctly written. It's just a once over really, but the notes I took I'll work on this week. So I'm not shouting that I have completed the first version of the manuscript. Not quite yet. Once the notes are worked through, I'll claim victory.
I worked on other things in the evening. I'm still getting next year's GDR together and I think I may have found a possible market to pitch Hunting Jack to. I'm still not sure though. It's an internet publisher specialising in e-books who have a good reputation for marketing and the editors that work for them. It's tempting because I want Hunting Jack to have a good home. I want it to be back out there and available. With it sitting on disk I can never fully put it top bed once and for all - it always seems like a work in progress.
So I have to think seriously about this. Does it really have that good a chance of being published traditionally? It's been to a dozen agents and been rejected, and while there a lot more I haven't tried I just wonder if for a first effort it's really good enough anyway. Comparing my first draft of Hunting Jack to Slick is like comparing Canneloni to Macaroni. You might not get that. Meantime, I'll prepare the query letter and synopsis and as I do, try and make a decision.
Words today: 1707
Colin 8:54 pm
1 Comments:
Big decision! Be sure to let us know how you decide to go with it - it's interesting to see what factors make a good e-book v. a good print book.
