Happy Monday, all. I’ve had a productive weekend of revisions and I’m coming up for air just long enough to write my journal installment this week.
Action!
Actions I've taken as a writer. Where am I? What am I doing?
My priorities:
1. Finish the revisions to The Outer Planets at Warp 11
2. Begin querying agents on P2PC
Over the weekend, I made a big dent in #1. I’ve cut nearly 3,000 words from the recent version of The Outer Planets (which has undergone a major tear-apart and put-back-together since I entered the Golden Heart). Today I’ll finish a full novel sweep, then start begin another sweep looking for “not absolutely essential and can be cut, condensed or changed” passages. Time to shine up that scalpel. The doctor is in.
And…I’m about to start #2 with P2PC, which is spiffed, spruced and ready to go. Very exciting! More next week!
Discoveries
New authors, cool web sites, great resources, great workshops, great online sites!
Anyone considering or involved in an agent search should read this wonderful blog from fellow Golden Heart finalist and LERA member, Bria Quinlan. It’ll help you put things in perspective, provide tips and suggest ways you organize your plan of attack. (Well, not literally “attack,” of course…there’s nothing more career-killing than turning into an agent stalker! Maybe I should say your 'plan of query'?)
Click here: Advice for Your Agent Search
Pssst!
The latest buzz. Submission calls. New publishers. Industry changes. Inspirational sayings or quotes for writers. And our take on them.
Aha! It seems there is a down side to the e-book phenomenon. (We knew it was too good to be the fairytale it looked to be.) It *seems* some of the publishers are having difficulty tracking e-book sales, and including these sales in authors’ royalty statements.
With the explosion of e-books in recent months, this can range from troubling to disastrous for an author’s career. It definitely means less money in their pockets—money they legitimately earned.
New York, we have a problem.
There are dynamics at play that every author, writer, or writer-to-be needs to understand. There is an excellent and indepth article available by Kris Rusch that gives an overview of a rapidly-changing industry, the difficulty of staying profitable in these changing times, and how that’s affecting writers. It also lays down the groundwork for a plan and explains why the author won’t be pursuing this corrective action personally.
If you want to skip right to the chase on the Great Missing Royalty Puzzle, start with the paragraph that begins “Earlier this month, however...”
Kristine Katherine Rusch: The Business Rusch Royalty Statements
Bookshelf
Books we're reading and mini-reviews. Writers must read voraciously. Sometimes we find gems in the literary universe or sometimes certain elements of a book really speak to us (and our muses). Do we know about book giveaways? A big debut? We'll dish on those.
I got some yippable-wootness news via Heather Massey’s The Galaxy Express blog last week when she wrote an article on the coming SFR BLUE GALAXY by Diane Dooley. What’s so cool about it?
Now, where have you heard me lament on that topic before? Oh yeah…right here! Because P2PC (one of my 2011 Golden Heart® nominations) is also told entirely from the male POV.
So let's hear it for the boys!
*hugs BLUE GALAXY and Carina Press and Diane Dooley* I love you all!
BLUE GALAXY will be released in May 2011 and it will immediately move to the tippy-top of my Leaning Tower of TBR®. I hope to do an interview with Diane Dooley (a fellow Brigader, I might add) in the very near future.
In the meantime, if you’d like to read the blurb (not yet available on the Carina Press site, so also courtesy of Heather Massey and The Galaxy Express) you can go HERE.
Happenings
Events, conferences, cons as well as Facebook, Twitter and blog events.
Oh my, it looks to be an over-the-top and event-packed RWA conference in New York this June. I hope to be able to post a tentative schedule of affairs in an upcoming journal entry.
Ping Pong
We'll comment back to our co-bloggers on things they've posted on their journals.
@Donna Hear, hear and your article: The Top Five Way to Guarantee Romance Readers Will Hate Your SFR Novel. For a small subgenre, SFR can be extremely diverse, but as writers, we can’t overlook the “R” in SFR. Otherwise, we’re writing to whole different market.
@Sharon Bon Boomerang! Looking forward to hearing about your trip!
Thanks for the shout out Laurie - Google Alerts is a little slow :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by, Bria.
ReplyDelete(Yes, my alerts seem to be on delay mode, too.)