Thursday, December 4, 2008

Getting Serious(er)

With two and half novel first drafts completed, I decided it just might be time to be more serious about this writing thing. I don't think it's going away. Not going to outgrow it or grow bored with it. No cures in sight.

So, I joined Publisher's Marketplace today. I've belonged before on their free lunch, but it doesn't provide the detail to really do the research on what's selling, for how much and by whom. You can even click on Top Dealmaker's and see who is getting the best deals by genre. Even by "Debut". How cool is that? One Mr. Lazar is rated #13 on that list for number of deals made for debut authors. He's also had several 6 figure advances recently. Loving him more and more. [But staying realistic in my expectations.]

Another part of the getting seriouser is knuckling down and doing the frikkin' rewrites. Goals for this month remain the same, because I also know I can't drop the momentum on TNN. But my January is going to be all about the rewrites. [You've heard it before, but NaNo changed something. I did something I thought I couldn't do. It's kinda magical.] I will look at how many chapters I have in MMG and Vesta, then break it down into a certain number of chapters a day. If there are too many to realistically get through both in one month, I'll settle for MMG in January and Vesta in February.

Dreaming is great. Dreaming is what's motivated me this far. Dreaming is where a lot of the ideas come from. But doing the damn work is what pays off.

Time to get to work.

2 comments:

Jenny Maloney said...

A way that I found useful in the rewriting was to break it into chapters...like you've already done...but then determine which ones needed to go completely and where new scenes needed to go in order to fit in. Write those, insert them, and then go bit by bit. I also found being able to work with the beginning couple chapters and the ending couple chapters together was helpful.Originally, I was going from point A to point B the same way I'd written it...all that means is that you're just as tired at the end as you were when you were writing it. So feel free to mix it up...

Minion GIR said...

Which is why I post about stuff I'm trying to figure out because there's always someone out there who has done it already.

I think my last writing act of this year will be to read through both of my "finished" novels and make notes. I know I did it with MMG once, but there's so much I've thought of and learned in writing Vesta and TNN that I want to go back and see how much I've changed my mind. Then I can decide how I want to structure January to get the most best work done.