I mentioned earlier that I’m giving this year the big, open-ended, grandiose designation of Project 2015. Mainly, it’s a reminder to me that every day is what you make of it, good or bad. You can pay attention to things that go wrong and stew in your worries, or you can wrap your arms around your … Read More »
Tag: submissions
I spent most of the weekend hammering out a 1,200-word article about the Oakland Triathlon Club and its efforts to improve beginners’ access to our notoriously expensive sport. (Sometimes I joke that a drug habit would be a cheaper and more efficient use of time.) Club president Chris Van Luen encouraged me to aim high … Read More »
For a slightly longer version of how I ended up with an agent, I wrote a short piece over on my editing blog. Three-word summary: Persistence pays off.
Tomorrow, Amazon will name the winners of the Breakthrough Novel Award, its annual career-maker contest. This year over five thousand novelists submitted their manuscripts to a grueling elimination process that winnows entries down to a handful, to be chosen among by popular vote. The grand prize winner receives a $15,000 advance and a contract from … Read More »
The November writers conference is looming. Last week, the organizers asked us to submit our manuscript’s first two pages with a logline in the header. Logline, I thought, triggering a chain of associations. Log jam. Writer’s block. Screwed! Agent Jennifer De Chiara and super-helpful tweep defined it this way on today’s Twitter feed. It’s just … Read More »
I have begun an unscientific experiment in publishing. It’s unscientific because the sample size is statistically insignificant, and I am comparing a nonfiction guide to a novel. But bear with me. Participant A is my yet-unpublished novel, THE IDIOT’S TALE. I know you won’t take my word for it if I told you it’s a … Read More »
This Christmas Santa brought a heart rate monitor. Putting the pointy-headed intricacies of heart-rate training aside for a moment, what the numbers showed me was that my normal workout pace is a hair’s breadth away from my normal quitting pace. Ask E, who trained with me most of last summer. Many of those workouts were … Read More »
What news? Pending my annual, five-day writing retreat at Rockaway Beach, I wanted to update my blog in grand Internet fashion: using a lot of words to say, basically, nothing much. Reseach on Book 2 continues at a loping pace thanks to Matt Beynon Rees, the prolific former Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME, whose information-dense … Read More »
At the beginning of August, I joked with Jeffrey Richards that we’d come to the month where we stop counting rejection letters, and just collect the out-of-office replies. Like the therapists, the literary agents go away–and so, it seemed, did my ambition. Four of my submissions are floating around greater Manhattan, and I haven’t done … Read More »
A partial manuscript and full manuscript submission are still pending, and the good news of a few weeks ago (a cold query that turned into a request for a partial) came back with a form rejection last week. It’s been two months since the conference, and I am now wondering if I should query the … Read More »
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