This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 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 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).
I've heard that January is a bad time to query, precisely because agents know a lot of people have just finished polishing up their NaNoWriMo novels and are sending them out. Don't know how true that is.
One of these days I will finish one of my other manuscripts. 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.
I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.
How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?
About 83,000 words.
I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?
It's SF, actually.
Honestly, I've given up trying to find an agent or publisher with this particular book. I might try the indie publishing route someday, but I'd want more books in the pipeline to do that.
Anecdote:
GURPS Vehicles First Edition and Second Edition, for GURPS Third Edition, are sharply divisive books, with their complexity alienating some but appreciated by others.
When GURPS Fourth Edition is published, fans clamor for GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.
After twenty years of radio silence, the editor of GURPS finally explains that (1) GURPS Vehicles Third Edition is basically complete, but (2) the publisher has decided that the final editing of such a complicated book with such a shaky audience would not be worth the expense, so (3) the publisher has canceled the contract and returned the rights to the author, so that if he wants to he can excise the GURPS-specific material and publish it himself as a systemless vehicle-design supplement.
GURPS Vehicles fans ask the author about crowdfunding. He responds that he probably could get the book edited and published for 6 k$.
Astonished at the lowness of the price tag, various fans quickly offer a few kilodollars to the author. He responds that he is busy with another project at the moment, but in a few months he will put together a concrete plan for accepting money and finishing Definitely Not GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.
The point of this anecdote is, it would be pretty funny if this website contained enough fans of your commenting and moderation style that you could milk them for a few hundred dollars (not as months of Patreon/SubscribeStar donations, but as a lump sum) on the promise of a book from you.
Hah - it's flattering to think I have fans here, but even if so, I don't think my posts give much of a sense of how I write fiction.
Ironically enough, my only actual professional writing credits are with Steve Jackson Games. It's amazing to me they have survived all of Steve's really bad decisions. I guess Munchkin keeps them afloat.
...All responses coming to mind sound too much like glazing. I guess I'll say that I think that's extremely cool, and leave it at that.
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