Just like my main character at some point goes through endless cycles of torture, I go through endless cycles of revisions - with no end in sight, in fact!
When I read through my novel for my first *final* read-through, I was quite positive that I had taken note of most of the issues, and after the revisions that followed, I was sure that the last edits would be extremely minor, like adding a word here and deleting another one there. But boy oh boy was I wrong. I had hardly started rereading my first chapter when the edits starting piling up like mad. It's crazy that after all this time there are still such major changes happening. This of course leads us to the question: will I ever be done? Where does this end? Will I read and reread my chapters hundreds of times and still change things on the hundredth reread? And what happens when I'm agented and more edits need to happen? It feels like a endless, neverending cycle. In any case, I have gone over my whole manuscript once again, this time going through the document and applying changes as I'd go. The hope now is that once I reread it once more, I will have much less to modify. Best case scenario, I'd have nothing to modify, but we all know that's near to impossible. I hope to have the rereading done by the end of the week, as well as my preparations for querying. Meaning that, once again, I am pushing back my deadline for querying. My current deadline was today, but now I am moving it back to Monday 22nd. Fingers crossed, and I'll see you next week.
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What a week. I finished what I had intended - I revised the novel from start to finish: I transferred my manuscript onto kindle and read through it. As I did, I took note of any problems or inconsistencies. Then I went back and modified my document based on those notes. Now there's good and bad news about the progress so far. Good news is that most of the novel is pretty solid, and I'm happy with it: most of my comments were related with sentence structure and (EVEN STILL NOW) spelling mistakes. Bad news is that I was unhappy with two scenes towards the end of the novel which are going to see some bigger changes. So, I'm going to have to do that before sending off the queries... Organizing the Book's chronology After revising, I decided to print a calendar to organize the book's chronology, because why not? As the story follows a senior student, events such as school breaks, holidays, and exam periods are my anchors to help coordinate all the action. However, when completing this calendar, I visually saw where there were time gaps and where the reader may be confused about when the action is happening in the story. As such, I completed the calendar in a way that felt right, and will now re-read the newest version of the book on kindle (yet again) and see how I can make the time markers clearer - but those should be minor edits only (I hope). To meet or not to meet deadlines I am nearing my own deadline to send off queries (I wanted to send the first batch off this Monday! Oh my goodness!), and as you can tell from what I've written so far, it's starting to seem pretty tight. Still, I managed some progress on the front of queries this week. Over the last seven days, I have critiqued multiple query letters of other authors, and, in return, received critiques on mine. Most of those critiques were super helpful, and some not so much, but all in all I feel that my query reads much much better now. I've really been able to ameliorate it thanks to other writers' help! Still, I am not quite confident in making the deadline. While I feel that this past week was somewhat productive, I have had to work with a headache for seven days now which was just great. I also have job applications I want to send off next week, so that's also something to take into account. Plus all the editing that still needs to be done... I'm getting vertigo just thinking about it. Another thing that happened this week was the Jericho Writers pitch event on twitter, which I didn't know was happening until I received a notification that one of the agents I most want to send my query to, was the host of the pitch event. That I freaked out was an understatement. In something like half an hour, I had scrambled together a pitch tweet based on my previous twitter pitches. Sadly, I didn't get a reply or like from said agent, but either way, I am going to query her no questions asked once she reopens to submissions! So that's the progress so far. Solid progress, but still a lot of work to do. That being said, I'm not moving my deadline back a year like I did before, haha (that's nervous laughter). I might have to move it just a couple of days or so just to get right which agents from my list I'm going to query first. Then I have to check that their MSWL hasn't changed too much since I checked them out last (year). Then it's off to writing those emails! Ahh! See you next week! If you go on the writing projects page of my website, you'll see that the first project, DREAMING, is the one that I've worked on the most. I've even noted that I'm preparing to query it (with is super scary but also super exciting!!!).
During this eventful year, I've had a very hard time keeping up and finding time and energy to work on this project. However, I have had the opportunity to have a final critique partner look at it from start to finish, which really helped to sort out small and big problems. These past couple of weeks, I've been going through the last major inconsistencies, adding details or scenes where something was missing. Finally, these week, I am going to convert my word document to a kindle book so as to read it like a real book and see if there are any final issues to be sorted out. In parallel, I'll also have to look back on and refine my query letter and synopsis. Yikes. The worst one of the two, in my opinion, is the query letter, because you have to find the right voice and really push your novel to stand out. Plus, it'll be the first thing literary agents see. So that's my update for DREAMING. It's extremely daunting to finally get this book out into the world since I've been working on it for so long. Meanwhile, I will also be working on my other projects, but I hope hope hope that DREAMING goes somewhere. I believe in it! Here's my accountability timeline so that I can force myself to actually send it out:
I won Camp Nanowrimo July! But at what cost? For those who don't know, Nanowrimo is a month where you write a 50,000 word novel. In other words, normally you'd be writing an average of about 1,600 words every day. It's a great way to build resilience and gain a writing habit. I've participated many times and this time I won after 2 weeks. Or did I? It's kind of complicated. This month, I was going to write a whole new project, but truth be told, the subject matter of said novel was a bit dark and really didn't agree with my mental health this month. So, I decided to ease up the workload and to edit an existing project rather than write a whole new one. And while editing is also work, it's easier and faster to edit through a thousand words than to write those, at least in my case. On the NaNoWriMo website, you can put in whether you're writing or editing 50,000 words in the month. However, at the end of the day, it still counts 'edited' words as 'written' words. For example, I ended up having 'written' 10,000 words in one day, according to the website, with writing speeds of up to 75 words per minute, ha. The novel I've been editing was my actual NaNoWriMo project from last year, where I really did write 50,000 words in a month. I really was on a row back in the day! Since then, the novel has grown considerably, and completely changed in some aspects. See, that year I had the brilliant idea of writing in a non-chronological style. Which made the novel impossible to follow or organize. So this year, I've been editing it to make it chronological. This will make it easier to check for consistencies. But this also means that the beginning of the initial novel ends up being towards the middle of the new version. A total mess! Even though I officially won, as I've gone through 50,000 words, that doesn't mean I'm done with editing. Far from it, since the novel is a quite longer than that. As such I'll be working on it well after this month is done! For the time being, however, I am more focused on my main WIP which I'm going to query this August! Very exciting times! Below are my stats for the project. Be sure to add me on nanowrimo! My profile name is J. Dietz! Let me know below what you did for nanowrimo! Hi all! I have returned from a somewhat hiatus, but my job as an English teacher is finally coming to a close. Oof. Let me tell you, this year cost a lot of energy - more than I had ever bargained for. See, I may look alright from the outside (or so I hope), but inside, I feel like this: Now that I can once again focus all of my attention to writing, I'm going to be able to come back and post more often. But just to really bring home the point that I've been exhausted and overwhelmed by the almost 90 students I've had under my responsibility, this is my progress for NaNoWriMo camp of April 2022: As you can see, an absolute disaster. I had no time, motivation or energy to work on my project.
But enough of that, let's move on to now! First and foremost, I am currently rereading for the 1000th time my primary WIP to verify the background world-building and character development, and also to see that there are sufficient clues and foreshadowing elements for the ending not to be too out of the blue. Secondly, another book taking place in that same ''bookverse'' is coming along nicely. To organize the chronology of the novel (as a lot happens with causes and consequences), I wrote the chapter titles on little bits of paper and arranged them manually to have an overview and make sure everything made sense. Writing books is so crazy sometimes and it's hard to remember what happens when and in what order! But then again, it's also quite entertaining to try and order things around like a detective trying to put together a puzzle. Finally, camp NaNoWriMo for July 2022 isn't just around the corner, it's started today! Agh help! This morning, still at work, I started writing for a new project, typing it on my phone whenever I had a minute to spare. I managed 500 words so I'm going to need just about the double of that to reach today's goal. I'm going to add the writing project to my WIP page on this blog, but it's been in my thoughts for quite some time now (2 years to be accurate). I'm mixing a few ideas together because they're all quite similar. In any case, I'm going to have a lot of fun with the concept that I came up with! The project is a contemporary fiction with an unreliable narrator. More infos to come soon, so stay tuned! That's it for now, and I hope I'll find my way back to the blog soon! Hope you're all having a great week and happy holidays to those who have the summer off! I'm back to talk about another pitch event happening on twitter this Thursday! You can find it by searching the hashtag #sffpit. You can check out my post about pitmad which happened some time ago below. This time, the pitching is for science fiction and fantasy manuscripts. My main work in progress being a YA fantasy, I couldn't resist the urge to participate. Additionally, I'm prepping it for querying soon, so the timing is ✨ perfect ✨. To be fair, I'm pretty nervous about the final stages of drafting this novel that has been in the works for so many years now. Maybe I'm even more scared of it getting rejected. But I can't give up before even trying, so here I am. This post isn't going to be too long, but I thought it'd be good to revisit what this pitch events are and why they are the way that they are. What are pitches and why do them? A pitch is where you (try to) describe your novel in a short paragraph and make it sound as exciting as you can. This is because the goal is to win over the agents that will be looking through twitter (and have them like your tweet - basically the same thing as for pitmad). Agents are people who represent books and bring them to editors and publishers. So it'd be great to have one. It's like with acting: with an agent, the chances of actually get published are higher (even if they are still horrifyingly low). You can go to a publisher right away, but a lot of them only take in books represented by agents already. With an agent, you have a helping hand in the publishing process, someone who knows what they're doing. As authors, we don't necessarily have the training or the professional know-how to do all of it on our own. We haven't necessarily done a master's degree in publishing, obviously. Needless to say, it's better to have them at your side if you want to publish traditionally. Why pitch on twitter? Nowadays, more and more people are connected via social media and so in some ways it's easier to connect authors and agents. The twitter pitch events are also very open because we don't have to choose the agents we're querying: they're the ones that find our pitches. It's a great way to practice writing pitches and the audience engagement with tweets are definitely helpful in finding which pitches work better. See, Sffpit runs for 10 hours and each author has 10 tweets maximum. These can't be word for word the same tweet, so we're going to have to write 10 slightly different pitches! I'll post again once the pitching is over tomorrow and go over how it went! Till then, see you all and good luck if you're participating! (Btw, I'm always looking for people to exchange retweets, so don't hesitate getting in touch! Below is a link to my twitter account!). So you want to start writing, but there's a question on your mind: where does this story take place? If you're lucky enough and it takes place in a real place, nowadays, you'll have plenty of opportunities to look up the area in google maps, street view, or to even go there in person. However, more than not, when writing fiction, especially in the areas of fantasy and science fiction, you're not going to be as lucky. I myself have finally started writing my manual book, and I've settled for a pirate story that's set on an alternate planet. I would have gone for alternate history, but I'm pretty sure that alternate history implies that the geography of the world remains intact, meaning that the places in the story will be real ones. However, in this case, I wanted to make up my own islands. What a disaster! I think one of the hardest things to do when world-building is getting the geography right. My go-to is to try to map out the world: where are the borders, the cities? Don't even get me started on getting the distances right and knowing how long it would take a character to walk/horse-ride/sail from one point to another! My goodness, to get to that point is such a pile of work. The first thing I tend to do is try and draw a rough outline of the map to get a feeling for the layout of everything. But how does one go about sketching this map? There are many online tools, but a lot of them seem more work than it's worth - unless you really know your world and already have maps at the ready. One of my favourite map generators is Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator. It's fun to play with, and it provides a lot of inspiration or pointers. The main problem is that it can be pretty specific (with kingdom names, etc), and IMO things like that shouldn't be decided by some website, since kingdom layouts and names all will have to do with the history you're planning for your world: should the kingdoms sound more alien-like? Do they have Latin names? Or are they more of the high fantasy type? Their borders also have huge consequences on the story, so if you already have ideas on that, it can be difficult to use tools such as these. Here's what such a generated map might look like: I'm also a huge fan of the fantasy name generator. Not only can you generate names for characters and places, but you can also create custom maps. But here, it's better for those that already have a rough idea of their land layout. I have maps in my computer book folders (from many different websites and drawing apps) that I would not want to show anyone by how bad and half-attempted they are. Thus, I'm left with drawing them by hand. Yikes. Technically, it's much faster and easier to draw up a map than to find a tool to make one online. But then, of course, there's the questions of drawing capabilities. And though I don't think myself that bad of an artist, I must say, drawing maps by hand is another skill entirely. I end up cringing at my countries when they look crooked and oh so fake. For the handwritten WIP, I've even tried the orange method - where you peal an orange and let the pieces fall on the paper, and then trace the contours to create the map. But it just didn't look right. In the end, I used the contours of the orange peals and displaced them as I traced the outlines. Luckily for me, instead of planning a whole continent, I settled for a single island, with a rough idea of the main trading currents. Now I just need to do the layout of the provinces and cities. No big deal, haha... Here's the island for now: Let me know how you go about creating world maps! Hello everyone and happy new year! I hope this year will be the year you achieve your goals! As usual, I'm pretty much terrified of the upcoming year because I know for a fact that I'll probably not get all of my resolutions done - least of all those related to my novel. However, I still succumbed and wrote down a list of resolutions. I even decided to tweet an accountability tweet to just put it out there! Half way there so far! I'm in the midst of critiquing the novel of a new critique partner after finishing a critique for a whole novel!! Sadly, the former critique partner hasn't messaged back and had only critiqued 5 out of the 20 chapters of my book. With some luck, this one will go a bit better. I hope to have the critiquing done around March and start querying then. I've pushed it back again and again, so far even that that the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook I got is no longer valid because it was a guide for 2020! It's frustrating, but I'm glad I didn't query this time last year because I literally forgot that having critique partners was a thing - and an important one at that. The feedback from strangers was somewhat of a wake up call, but it was also incredibly helpful, and I learned to stand up for my voice in writing. I presume the feeling of one's writing being judged will only get worse when querying. But why prep my wip when I can start a new project??? In other news, I had the great idea of writing a novel by hand after seeing Little Women and tick, tick, boom. I bought an aesthetic notebook, got a fancy fountain pen and sadly had to choose between three novel ideas. I settled on the sapphic Indiana Jones in space, but that might change midway through, haha! I will let you know how it goes! At the beginning of December, I partook in the twitter event called Pitmad. I've talked about it in the last post, so I won't go into an in-depth explanation here. This is just to summarize how it went for me. Pitmad happened on the 2nd of December and was adjusted to an American time zone. As it happens, it was exactly going on during my working hours. And, as a teacher, it's not like I can post or check twitter in the middle of standing in front of a class full of students. As such, I used scheduled tweets and checked on how they were doing during breaks that day. My first post went live a few minutes after Pitmad began: Not the happiest about this pitch, as I don't feel that it reads all too well. However, that's of my own doing, as I hadn't taken the time to prepare pitches beforehand and was prepping them minutes before scheduling the tweets. I got a few retweets as you can see, some of them through retweet swaps (which I only did with those whose pitches I liked). The tweet was seen by 122 people. Next up, I tried, for the first time, doing a pitch using emojis, of which I'd seen many, particularly on twitter. I checked to see if people were using them in Pitmad, and as they were, I decided to go for it: Yikes. While I enjoyed this one more than the other one, it got much fewer engagements. Of the 46 people who saw it, not one liked or retweeted it. Then again, 46 people really isn't that much. As such, it failed both on the level of engagement and of its reach. Also, I'd rather not say how much time it took to find and choose all those emojis... Finally, the third pitch. Ironically, I really think it was the best one, but I also think it went up at the wrong time (it should have gone up sooner): Nevertheless, 180 people saw it, and it got the most retweets of all of my pitches. As you can see from the tweets above, you may have noticed that not one of them got a like - meaning not one industry professional had either seen or liked any of my pitches. However, I wasn't discouraged easily. That very weekend was Pitlight: the same thing as Pitmad, only for writers to find beta-readers and/or critique partners. The format is much looser and the atmosphere much friendlier. As such, I used my above pitch and added in the main character's mood board: 132 people saw the tweet, it got a retweet and four likes. Of course, during both of these events, I retweeted and liked (for Pitlight) all the pitches that I liked or wanted to amplify. For Pitlight, I found myself liking the tweets based on their mood boards first and foremost before checking the pitch that went along with it. To be fair, I think the mood boards are an amazing way to pitch because they introduce the pitch visually, and it's much easier and faster to decide on whether you enjoy the 'vibes' of the story. A written pitch, on the other hand, becomes difficult to read through after a while. Anyways, I'm still going to hang around on Pitlight and engage with writers there. Who knows, maybe I'll find the critique partner that I need for a last read-through before starting to query my main WIP. Until then, have a good weekend all of you, and see you next week! A big thanks to all those that have submitted in last week's post! From the look of things, you were all writing novels for Nanowrimo and were more or less on track, which is awesome! As is, a month seems to have already passed... somehow. It's already December. Meaning NaNoWriMo is over and we're faced with one question: What now? (Great question by the way). The first thing that comes to mind (mainly because it's literally tomorrow), is Pitmad. Now don't quote me on this, because I am not as well versed in Pitmad as I am in NaNoWriMo. I only participated once and didn't get very far, probably because I participated on a whim, in the moment, and hadn't planned it in advance. Not that I'm any more prepared this time lol, but whatever. For those that don't know, Pitmad, to my knowledge, is a manuscript showcase that happens on twitter. You basically pitch your novel(s) in a tiny paragraph (like, 280 words). You then add in the relevant hashtag (#pitmad) and the hashtags relevant to the genre of your novel (#YA for young adult, for example, or #SFF for sci-fi/fantasy). Agents will be on twitter, looking around and liking all those that are of interest to them. As such, a like is very much like an invitation to pitch that specific agent. That is also why the goal is for your tweet to be seen by as many people as possible. But how? Mainly by retweets. So you need to have followers, or friends, or reach out to others to swap retweets - an introvert's nightmare. That is why Pitmad, in my humble opinion, is stressful. Unlike Nanowrimo, Pitmad revolves around the fact that you're pitching your novel to the public. Everyone. And it's especially awkward when you're not on twitter any other time of the year. So in order to participate, not only does your novel need to be ready, but you've also got to be ready to share the pitch of your WIP for the world to see. Though it's not like many people will see it, if you've got as many followers as me, but still. It's out there. I'll let you know how it went in my next post, but you can also see it happen live on my twitter (@zoe7_justine) if you want to have a laugh. What about you all then? |