A manuscript goal

My new stated goal-I'm approaching a year since I started writing my manuscript. I went back and sifted through old entries on this blog to determine my "start date", and it turns out all I said was that I started it after submitting some contest entries to The Writing Show. I was pretty sure I had started writing the manuscript at the end of August, beginning of September; the vague wording of my blog entry seems to support this. My new goal is to finish my pass of editing the manuscript by the end of August.

If my wife finishes the batch of pages she currently has in her possession and then finishes my final set before September 1st...I can mark September as the time to begin working on my query letter and whatever other material may be needed for querying agents.

I then plan on getting a lot of rejections, feeling sorry for myself, and figuring out what I have to do to tweak the story and see if it can be salvaged to the point of submitting again to other agents until maybe...just maybe...it'll be accepted for representation, then hoping like crazy that it sells and brings in a paycheck.

That's the dream, anyway.

Wish me luck!

If the Editor Edits, Is This Still Mine?

My first attempt at writing a novel is slowly taking shape. I wrote the first draft, then went back to start cleaning it up.

I'm catching a lot of little bits here and there; there are missing quotation marks, missing words here and there, and places where the wording was so awkward it makes a baby's first steps look graceful by comparison. So I cut and trim and alter things as I can.

My wife is far more trained in the art of utilizing the English language. As I moved through my manuscript, I would bundle up a batch of pages I went through (say, 50 pages at a time) and send them to her for editing. Essentially the story is getting a light touch-up by me then a heavier edit by her in one pass...I edit edit edit, then send it to her and when she's done I re-integrate her changes into the master manuscript.

But this got me thinking...is the story still mine?

I think it's a ridiculous thought. I mean, the story itself is still mine. I came up with it. She's not adding characters or changing events (yet...I am waiting for her to start suggesting things that work or don't work and I'm hoping it'll help improve the story.)

Still; there was always this little fantasy that I would be able to sit down and create a great story that would be well received as it is. I could write it out, edit it, and not rely on the crutch of a third-party to alter this and fix that and...essentially, by the time I saw the story or work in print, I'd read it and not find a spot where I'm scratching my head wondering why a particular passage didn't seem familiar. "I don't remember writing that," I think to myself.

I go back to my manuscript and reread the section. "That's because I didn't write that..."

Is the story still mine?

Perhaps the idea of a great story that sells is kind of a fiction in itself. From what I can tell from reading various blogs and stories on the publishing industry, unless you're Stephen King you probably won't have the clout to make the story 100% yours. If you're fortunate enough to have your manuscript picked up by an agent who then finds a publishing house willing to sell your story, you're going to have copy editors, editors, your agent, etc. all having a hand in shaping the story.

You as the author create a framework and most of the meat for the book. Then you're going to have a lot of surgeons using their plastic surgery techniques to enhance your book for marketability. There will be tweaks to layout, certain wording, etc. until they think it's ready to sell. So again...the end result is a story that should be close to what the author wrote, but not exactly what they turned in.

At least, that's my impression. Maybe someday I'll find out.

Manuscript Progress

Me oh my. It looks like quite a bit of time has passed since I posted an update!

Well, there's a reason for that. I've been working on the manuscript.

My last post had me halfway through the first draft with editing with a few chapters sent to a friend to read. I have mixed news on that front; the friend never asked for more pages to read. But she's busy and there wasn't really any expectation for her to have time to read it, so I'm not upset.

This post finds me nearly finished with the first pass of the manuscript. The first draft had 112,240 words; at the moment it has 96,958 words, and I'm making steady progress to the end. OpenOffice tells me that I'm on page 366 of 402, and as I cut words the page count goes down (duh) so the end is a moving target. This does mean that I have less than 40 pages to go before hitting "the end" again!

The important thing is that I fit some time in every day to review and cut. I may not be making huge leaps and bounds every day, but I do try to get at least a third of a page reviewed. I squeeze it in whenever I have some time; before bed, after work, half an hour to an hour over the weekend days. And every paragraph I review is one more paragraph down, one more paragraph closer to being able to sit down and work on another story!

Soon I hope to be able to sit down and start compiling a list of things needed to try shopping it around. I can't say I'm confident that it will find representation, but I do feel it's getting near a point where I need to try. If I wait too long or keep polishing polishing polishing, I'll never get around to trying to sell it, and never slapping a "good enough" label on it to shop it around is about as good as not writing it at all.

Small Edit: The online friend I was referring to above emailed me to ask me not to read into her not asking for more of the manuscript to read; I replied to her (and hope that it's not stuck in her spam filter! Hopefully she'll see this edit and know to look for it!) to let her know that I was just putting that note in the blog entry just to follow up on the previous entry I had. I am in no way offended! I should do an entry on my philosophy of paying dues in trying to get published as an author.

To be honest, I've been neglecting the blog in large part because I've been spending more spare time playing with the manuscript and life activities; the blog would look very boring if I just kept entering counts every day so I was waiting to reach more of a milestone to report. However, I noticed that quite a bit of time had passed since my last entry and while I was chipping away at the manuscript and making progress, it was taking a lot of time to reach that milestone. So I put this entry in.

I fully understand that my friend has been busy; she's had a lot on her plate, and that's just with the things I knew were going on in her life! So I am in no way offended or reading into her not asking for follow up pages. I just wanted her to know that and I in no way intended for her to be hurt or offended by the quick mention in the blog entry here! (Believe me...if I were, I'd say so. I have a tendency to be...blunt?...with my thoughts. The closest I get to subtlety is masking names in the blog entries because I want to maintain some semblance of anonymity in my activities and privacy of others being discussed.)