Agents and Publishers

Before I go back to the editing / writing, I'm taking a few weeks off to clear my brain. Now I've been looking at how to contact agents in order to get the GIANT published. I've been reading through a lot of books on the subject and have learned valuable information. The best of which has been how to find an agent, how to write them, and get noticed. Every book stresses the importance of tight and professional correspondence, but that one I already knew. The process of landing an agent isn't too far off from landing a job.

I'm currently working on a query letter - a one page synopsis of the book. A thirty second pitch of sorts. Soon I'm going to put together a longer synopsis - which could be in the neighborhood of twenty pages. I'm going to work from my already established outline, but translate it into prose, and add in the best sentences and passages from the book.

The downside of reading all these books on publishing and writing is that they have instilled doubt in me. Am I really a writer? I don't know all the writing rules, I'm certainly not a professional. I don't even have a creative writing class to my credit. I'm confident the story is there - flow and motivation and all that (that is until I reread the latest draft), but I'm doubting my technical ability. I'm hoping though, that on a reread I acutally do know all the rules, just not what an infinitive (and all the other fancy writing words) is - like a person that can't read sheet music, but can play by ear.

Another draft finished. One more to go?

I'm working on two GIANT related items right now - one is finding and agent / publisher, the other is writing. Having just come from the writing desk, I'll speak about writing here.

I finished up the last draft quicker than I though - it was short - only dealing with four or five chapters, but two of those were completely new. It turned out the newest chapters were the easiest to edit - there was little change needed. It was mostly pacing, dialog and typo pickups. It leads me to think that I'm finally figuring out how to write. I've read a lot of 'how I write books' lately - all by established authors. Everyone of them says they only have three or so big drafts of their novels. That worried me - I've at least doubled that number. I knew that everyone works differently and I'm still early in my writing development, but still . . . So finding those new chapters in great shape boosted my confidence.

The other half of the edit was more rigorous, but well worth it. I had earlier made hand edits to the first few chapters of the second section of the book. The chapters were really suffering from poor flow, bad description, and a serious case of Boring. I cut a ton out of the paragraphs and rearranged a lot of what was left to really pick up the pacing. Additionally strengthened the back story and main character's motivation.

After all this I started a new draft for the cleanup last pass before I start shopping this around. Though all my paragraphs were not indented and had spaces between them. This made it handier to print and correct and had a good look on the screen, but needed to be standardized. It took about an hour and a half to indent all the paragraphs - in the end I took out 30 of 249 pages just by removing white space. Whew. In a few weeks I'm going to sit back down and start the typo pass.