FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
9hr ago
I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?
FtttG
9hr ago
I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.
The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.
How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?
FtttG
10hr ago
These look really professional. I particularly like the one on the Great Wall.
Since November, I've been sending out query letters for my novel (which originated as a project for NaNoWriMo 2024), and have yet to receive any requests from agents to see the full manuscript. Therefore, it sucks and I quit.
/s No way am I going to give up that easily. However, I do think my query letter is letting me down, and needs to be heavily reworked. Additionally, the feedback I've been getting over on /r/PubTips is that it's practically unheard of for a literary agent to take a chance on a debut novel significantly in excess of 100k words, and in my query letter I mention up front that my novel is 112k (rounding down).
This is not quite as precious and self-indulgent as it sounds: the first draft was 133k, and removing over 15% of that was no mean feat. But I'm coming round to the idea that if I want to get this thing published, I'll have to meet the agents halfway. To that end, I've commenced work on a fourth draft with the explicit goal of cutting ~12k words (more, if possible), or 11.4%. Having edited the first four chapters, I've reduced their word count by 10.6% without, I think, losing anything significant, so I think I'm on the right track. Hope I won't have to kill too many darlings.
I have made no progress on mastering "Phobophile" on the guitar. The last few days I've just been practising two-octave scales (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, Mixolydian).
FtttG
17hr ago
The latter. Personally, I don't think the standard gripes about a shortage of accommodation, unreliable public transport and an imperfect public health service a failed state make.
A lot of my friends are non-natives, and I often joke that, in Ireland, there are no issues, problems or inconveniences. There are only crises.
FtttG
17hr ago
FtttG
19hr ago
Yeah, he has these melodramatic writing tics that undermine the gravity and solemnity he's trying to project:
Tennis players would sheepishly wait for the crowd to clear so they could drive in and park. My sympathies were with them, these were their lives and happiness, after all.
Like, what? Playing tennis is your "life" and "happiness"? I don't even know what you're trying to convey here.
FtttG
1d ago
Sure, but that also describes many people who voted for Trump. Should we deport every working-age able-bodied adult who falls below a given productivity threshold?
FtttG
1d ago
"Really, you were fleeing from the dystopian failed state of... Ireland?"
I've encountered my fair share of Irish people unironically describing it as such. They lack perspective.
Years ago I talked about a movie called Wild which depicts a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail solo. (Don't watch it, it's trash.) One of the pieces of advice she receives from a fellow hiker is to burn her books after she's done reading them. When you're actually hiking a long distance, I imagine every pound counts; not so much when travelling by plane.
That being said, a lot of people have this odd reverence for physical books in general, wholly independent of their monetary or intellectual value, and a concomitant aversion to destroying them for any reason. It's an anachronistic holdover from a time when books were enormously expensive to produce and consequently to buy. When you've finished reading a disposable thriller novel (e.g. Dan Brown, Lee Child), the appropriate thing to do is to recycle it, the same way you would a newspaper. You are not "doing the right thing" by donating it to a charity/thrift shop: that just kicks the problem down the road when they inevitably recycle it three to six months later. (I used to volunteer in a charity shop: we never wanted for Dan Brown novels. We could have used copies of The Da Vinci Code for insulation.)
In spite of how insightful and relevant I'm finding it (and how short it is), my progress on The True Believer has been slow.
FtttG
3d ago
Sure. But bear in mind: this whole Amelia started a couple of weeks ago, and there are already videos of her quoting poetry at length that users of this board are calling moving. I'm sure the first draft of Columbia looked a little rough around the edges (and not a little racist against Native Americans) too.
FtttG
4d ago
If that's what was intended, it's not what I took from it. I wish the person who posted it would clarify.
FtttG
4d ago
- 2-3 dashes of Angostura, teaspoon of sugar, drop of water. Muddle until dissolved.
- Add 50ml of Irish whiskey, ice cubes and orange peel garnish.
- Top up with soda water (I think this is a vital step to offset the sweetness of the sugar and bitters, and often overlooked).
Obviously the whole "Amelia" meme is very culture war-loaded, but this jocular rundown of the whole thing (containing 100+ memes) made me laugh so much that it feels more appropriate for this thread. (It caught my attention because Scott liked it.)
Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter and synopsis don't strike them as compelling.
Hence, there are several filters a prospective author must pass through:
So it's not the case that an agent has to read hundreds of full manuscripts every year, adding up to several million words. If an agent receives 500 submissions, he might only bother reading the excerpts of 50 of them (5,000 words x 100 = 250,000 words), with the rest getting rejected on the basis of a weak query or synopsis. Of the 50 excerpts he reads, he might only request 10 full manuscripts (10 x 75,000 = 750,000 words). So at most he's only reading a million words of prose a year (and he might well decide to pass halfway through the excerpt or the full manuscript). A million words of prose in one year is very doable: assuming 261 business days in a year, that's 3,831 words a day, or roughly 15 pages. Last year I read at least 9,164 pages: assuming ~250 words a page, that's 2.3 million words, and that was for pleasure, not my day job.
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