Got another novel rejection last night that resulted in some bummerment. I thought I had a good shot with this particular agent, but apparently not, based on the first three chapters.

It led to a good talk with the Damsel, who has read, well, just about everything I've done at both work and on my own time. She made the point that at work, I'm the guy who wrote a ton of dialog while other folks worked on the galaxy map. And, well, I will unapologetically refer to myself as the Michael Bay of the writing team -- I am all about the explosions.

And she said (very nicely) that my writing at work had more "Holy crap!" moments than my own personal writing, in her experience. Maybe not because my personal writing isn't good, but because most of the time, I'm writing in fantasyland, and when I do that, I have to spend a lot of time building the world, which is my least favorite part of writing. I like the dialog, the fight scenes, the twists and turns. I am not, as everyone who has read my stuff will attest, Setting Guy.

So I'm doing some thinking about what to do moving forward. I think that each novel I've written since going to Clarion has been more marketable than the last -- Courtship and Cutlery is fun, but has all kinds of weird government geekery and people riding on ostriches. Palace Job moves pretty quickly, but everyone is still doing crystal-fu that takes a lot of getting used to. With the new epic, I feel like I've got a real world that I can play in for a long time, but I'm still trying to convince people to read about a world where folks fly around on crystal gliders and then get out and have swordfights.

And I don't know. I really love the new epic. Once ME2 is done, I want to clean it up and then get to work on the next one. But as the Damsel noted, I'm getting a common theme in my agent rejections these days, and it goes all the way back to the dreaded Competent I got at Clarion from David Hartwell (and pretty much every other teacher) -- the rejection letters almost all say that my story is fine, but they just work up the enthusiasm that would make them want to represent it. If my big weakness is setting, and that weakness is stopping stuff from selling, then maybe I need to do something closer to what I was thinking of before, where I write in a modern setting so that, you know, I can hide my inability to make up new worlds by going with the familiar.

Or maybe, again, I'm never going to sell anything on my own. Maybe I'm pretty much always going to be a video-game writer. I can think of worse fates. Seeing what the guys in Art and CineDesign and Tech Design have done with the words I wrote, what the VO directors and actors have made out of the scenes I've written... it's humbling. And hell, Mass Effect has sold, what, several million copies? I could do worse.

This isn't a giant emo whinefest. I'm just doing some thinking about where to go from here. Play to my strengths and write more modern stuff, or try to build my setting-making ability and get the epic to a level where agents can actually work up enthusiasm for it. I don't know.

Took a little time this evening and bundled all my market stuff for the old novels into a single page, for easy access. Okay, I just wrote "I got discouraged in 2008 and didn't push things as hard as I could have," but that's a damned lie, when I stop and think about it. Every novel is out somewhere, and I do not have the power to make agents or publishers respond to me faster.

For 2009, I may withdraw Conscience of the Demon, which has been at DAW since 2003 -- the folks at DAW are nice, but they've stopped responding to my yearly queries. The people at Baen, who've had Gilding the Apocalypse since 2004, reliably tell me it's on somebody's desk, and while I'm not in love with a five year turnaround, the communication is enough for me.

No idea what to do with Courtship and Cutlery. Anna Genoese got the full manuscript for Tor Paranormal Romance (per her request after reading the first 50) in 2005, and then she left Tor, and now Tor Paranormal Romance has a policy of not answering queries (which is fine; if the policy is there, at least I know it). I may have to pull this as a lost cause as well, since there's no guarantee that it actually made the transition to another editor at Tor.

The Palace Job has been at a small Canadian publisher for more than a year with no query response. No idea what to do there. I might withdraw it and fling the first 50 pages at Tor's normal fiction line. If I'm leaving the novel in limbo, I might as well leave it in limbo with a larger publisher.

It's tempting just to let this stuff sit, to avoid doing anything given the crappiness of the publishing world at the moment, but if I do that, then I'll just have a bunch of trunk novels. Some of these might be trunk novels anyway (I don't think that they are, but time may disagree with me), but I need to keep sending this stuff out.

Another option is to focus more diligently on agents, but agents have been only a little more responseful than publishers in 2008. I got several polite rejections, which is great, and a bunch of non-responses, which is less great. I'm also trying to figure out what to do in terms of these agents, because ideally, I get an agent and that's that -- which makes me feel odd about querying three agents simultaneously for three different books. If the books were different enough that an agent wouldn't handle some of it (a romance and a hard SF novel, for example), that'd be one thing, but it's all fantasy. Again, no idea what to do here.

But I need to keep doing something.

The Palace Job is off to an agent, first chapter plus synopsis.

So last week, I queried several places. One week later, I have heard back from exactly none of them.

I think I've gone through some phases as a writer:

• New writer: They'll get back to me next week, right? I mean, they couldn't have anything more important to do than read the novel of a nineteen year old who desperately needs to get laid! That kind of fiction just leaps off the shelves!
• Veteran writer: Yep, I query every couple of years. It's hard, but those are the breaks. I'm trying to sell them my stuff, so I do it on their terms.
• Professional writer: What the hell? Sure, tell me it's gonna take awhile, but tell me. If you don't have the professional ability to answer a simple query after a frelling year, then don't accept slush in the first place. It doesn't hurt my feelings to have you not accept slush. I'll just send it somewhere else. But this "Oh, we try, and it takes several years, and we can't respond to queries sent by e-mail or snail mail" garbage? If your organization is that bad, why the hell do I think you're my best shot to getting onto the shelves, again?

Seriously. Either accept slush correctly, or don't accept it. I'll be fine either way. But don't make the big magnanimous gesture and then expect me to put up with simple incompetence.

(And yes, each of the four could have extremely reasonable explanations, with an editor out of the office sick, on vacation, swamped with a deadline, or trying to hunt down my manuscript. All four, however, is one of those state-of-the-market moments.)

Not sure what I'm going to do, but the wheels are in motion.

So, it's February, when I usually do the yearly queries. Currently, I'm at:

Conscience of the Demon: Some (honest can't remember if it was full or partial?) at Daw since October 2003
Gilding the Apocalypse: Full ms. at Baen (past slush, with senior editors) since November 2004
Courtship and Cutlery: Full ms. (requested after partial) at Tor Paranormal Romance since September 2005
The Palace Job: Out recently enough to not worry about querying (less than a year)

Coming up on five years. Dude.

I kind of see why some of my writer buddies who've moved into video games don't write as much of their own stuff any longer. Mass Effect took years to come out, yeah, but at least I was working on it every day (that I was on the project), and it's been bought and played by (checks public figures) well over a million people already, which is more than the average novel.

Nevertheless, I like my Victorian murder mystery and my Peruvian deity getting a cow dropped on him and my gay jellyfish-wielding wizard and my three-phrase-vocabulary magical talking warhammer. And so I will query. The folks at Baen have always been great about getting back to me. The Daw folks have been solid with sufficient poking. The Tor folks, as always, have never responded. Ever. Maybe all of Tor has really good spam filters, or maybe I'm just an arrogant entitlement-freak for wanting an answer to my once-yearly queries.

Tomorrow we query. Huzzah!

I've allowed the allotted time pass for the agent who only responded to queries in which he was interested, so The Palace Job is off to another agent. For the record, clear guidelines are awesome. I'll always take a clear guideline, however much tweaking it involves to make things fit into their submission format, over something nebulous that leaves me wondering if I'm going to get autorejected because I didn't know that the agent didn't want the first three chapters if each chapter was 5,000 words.

Kicking around more plotting ideas for the next book. I keep worrying that I'm not making it big enough, and then I remember that I thought the same thing about The Palace Job, and I ended up having to cut an entire act of the initial outline, and then cut about a quarter of the rough draft to get it down to a good length.

Hope everyone is having a great time at WisCon!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand out to Roc, a lovely company full of openminded and generous people, whose position of accepting e-subs I note as an indication of their undeniable physical, mental, and spiritual prowess.

(Note: Opinion of Roc may change upon receiving rejection letter.)

I might look at additional agenting possibilities (after giving the guy who only gets back to people he's interested in another few weeks), but for the most part, Loch & Co. are off to the races. I can stop writing for a year with the arrival of the Little Bud and just do a bit of outlining for whatever the heck I end up writing next.

I now have novels with Tor, Daw, Roc, and Baen. For what I'm writing (Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy, and slightly different fantasy), that's pretty much a perfect tetrafecta. (Okay, technically the word that means "trifecta, but four" is superfecta, and also, technically, it means picking things in the right order, not just getting all four, but you know, in Internet terms, I totally think that tetrafecta or maybe quadrafecta is the way to go. So take that, proper English! Everyone knew what I meant!)

Sorry. I'm still scarred from that spellcheck.

Finished the last few chapters, did the onerous spellcheck (in which I discovered that I have an odd propensity for kennings ranging from the sensible (we have footprint, so bootprint only makes sense) to the lazy (treeline isn't a real word?) to the arcane (sailwings are parts of the airships in the book)), search-and-replaced the wizard and the kid with their new names (and made sure that the search-and-replace didn't miss anything or destroy anything else), and saved it under a new name.

Final wordcount: 105,998, from a first-draft wordcount of 137,600. That's a cut of just under 23%. I'm hoping that means that I'm looking at a fast-paced nailbiter of a novel and not an incoherent mess.

Tomorrow, I look at the instructions for sending it out to the places I plan to send it.

Tonight, we celebrate.

I really think this one can sell. I think that about all of 'em, honestly, so that's not the most trustworthy feeling -- and when I say all of them, I mean even the bad ones that only my mother and a few childhood friends could get through -- but even on an intellectual level, this one feels stronger. I think I knew what I was doing more, both in terms of the art and in terms of the craft.

And if it doesn't, if it's just one more trunk book that made my friends laugh in a few good places, well, it has still been a good learning experience. And anyway, there are worse things in life than making your friends laugh.

We'll see how it goes.

Thanks again to everybody who took the time to read it.

Up to Chapter 24 -- the real Chapter 24, which was misnamed "4.3 -- Twenty-Seven" due to my charming oversight while renumbering chapters.

Wordcount: 106.8.

Knocked off another few chapters. I'm at the end of 21 now.

Wordcount is down to 107-something. I'd love to be at 106 by the time it's done.

May just finish this thing yet.

Nothing big last night -- there was some big pregnancy discussion going on, and, well, that trumps Writing Night pretty handily.

I did get a bit done tonight while the Damsel put the Dude down to sleep, though.



Down to 108.6k-words.

As always, we'll see how it goes.

The Palace Job is out with another agent again, at least in query form.

Form reject of The Palace Job query letter by an agent. Turnaround time of about a week and a half, which is very nice, although, you know, not as nice as a request to see more.

So it goes.

Up through Chapter 14. (Slightly more than halfway, by page count.)

Wordcount is down from 112,800 to 109,400, roughly. If I can shave off another couple thousand, I can justifiably claim that it's "just over 100,000 words", which is a phrase I'd really like to use. That's quite a bit better than the 137,600 it was running after the first draft. (And thanks to everyone who read that first draft, which, in retrospect, apparently had several unnecessary words.)

Working at BioWare is really good for getting one over one's artistic hangups. Cutting words has never been this easy for me.

If you haven't read The Palace Job or don't care, don't look.



Also, through chapter six of final edits (sans name changes, which I'll do with a search-and-replace at the end). I'll hopefully get more done in a writing night tomorrow.

EDIT: Got a little done tonight, actually, and hit 7 and 8.

At some point, I should explore the idea of a filter or something, so that people who don't care at all about The Palace Job don't have to read about it. On the other hand, if you don't care about The Palace Job, this is probably not a good blog for you to be reading. Also, I don't know how to set up the filter.

Anyway, crit check on the book, for those who've read it:

The crits are still coming on The Palace Job. I've got a lot of good feedback from friends and loved ones.

More Loch crits incoming. One more full-novel critique that largely stuck to existing data points*, and a couple of first-chapter critiques that I'll be using for my "make first chapter so awesome that no publisher can resist seeing the whole thing" plan.

* Sticking to data points isn't bad at this point. I feel like I'm getting pretty consistent feedback. A few people had pet peeves, which is to be expected, but most people praised the same areas, and I haven't had a consistent "Everyone says that this one section is horrible" thing that's going to require a massive rewrite.

Next step'll be the synopsis, then, in whatever free time crunch and moving leave me. I'll be putting it behind an LJ-Cut to make sure that people who haven't read the book don't get spoilered.

I've gotten back four critiques of the Loch book so far, which is awesome. It's not quite enough for me to start making polls and asking people who read to give overall opinions like "Should I keep this scene?", but it's giving me some good data points.

• One person really hated Randarion's name. He got used to it, but he didn't like it at first. It's unclear whether the fact that I tipped this reader to the name's origin mattered, or whether other people are gonna hate it, too. We'll see.
  
• Two people had issues with Histler's name, concerned that it was too close to "Hitler". I honestly never considered this when coming up with this character name. It was "Whistler with no W" in my mind. And when you know the reason he got kicked out of the university, there's a reason that the name kind of makes sense.
  
• Nobody dislike Tern's name, but two people kept calling her Wren, which makes me wonder if it's not memorable enough. I'm unlikely to change this one unless someone actually says "I dislike this name," but I found it interesting.
• My wife actually liked the fight scenes this time, or at least tolerated them enough to read them rather than skimming. Either I'm getting better at writing non-jargonish fight scenes, or my wife is slowly being pulled into fantasy-geek-land.
• Without giving stuff away, people have independently sent me favorite lines that have a lot of crossover. There are a few lines that apparently worked with a lot of people. There's one in particular that almost everyone brought up as a favorite.
  
• The cliffhanger-style pacing appears to be working for most people. (The Damsel stayed up until 12:45, 1:00, and 1:30 on three different nights reading the darn thing, and I got the satisfying, "Go the hell away! I'm at a really tense part!" reaction from her on the last night, which is a pretty good sign that the ending is working.)
• If the pacing is good enough, few people are going to notice the random inclusion of Chapter 27 between chapters 22 and 23 (Incorrect title, not an actual incorrect chapter, as when I included Chapter 21 twice in the first draft of Courtship and Cutlery).

It looks like this is also going to be a more diverse reader-group than my first draft. Everyone who read my first draft was a good friend, but due to the odd quirks of who had time, my list of people who read the complete first draft was "Three lesbians and a vegan." Their sexual orientations and eating preferences in no way affected their ability to read critically and provide really helpful feedback, but "three lesbians and a vegan" is going to look fantastic in the Acknowledgments section. (it would also make a pretty good Bay Area California-based sitcom title.)

I'll probably start working on a synopsis and cover letter while waiting for more critiques from friends. The nice thing about the marketing copy is that I can do it during lunch or in spare moments, unlike actual writing writing, where I need at least a full hour to get into the right zone.

Hoo-hah. Onward we go.

It's probably a good thing that I'm not married to everybody who's reading the book. The Damsel's initial reaction when asked what she thought of the first chapter was, "I liked it... um, but were you trying to make it a surprise that (spoiler thing that, yes, was supposed to be a surprise)? Because I kind of saw that coming."

Mind you, this is the Damsel, who outcalls me on whodunit in any particular episode of "CSI" and who watches episodes of the BBC's "Hustle" while working out on the elliptical machine. And also, she's married to me, which means that she pretty much knows every trick I've got. If there's anybody I'm not going to fool with my clever plot twists, it's her.

And as early critiques go, I suppose that's not bad.

It's better than the fact that I appear to really be in love with the word "behing". Everybody reading this: I know. I don't know why I do it. Maybe it's the I-N-G. Maybe it's that I'm getting ready to type some other word. I dunno. But please just assume I'm going to do a "behing -> behind" search and replace at some point. I promise that it will not go out to agents looking like that.