Story Title: A Necessary Evil (aka The One About the War)
Words revised today: Second half of Chapter 5
Words now in Chapter 5: 4744
Percentage reduction: 24%
Words total: 57,811
Reason for stopping: End of chapter. Had to prepare stuff for the week's lessons. Also do my Welsh homework.
Other:

The opening chapters are still a mess. They're just not as strong as I would like, but at least the waffle is being cut.

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Otherwise the weekend was pretty unexciting. I don't feel as though I've done anything much useful, though I have done a heap of laundry and dried it and even ironed some. I've also: written a handout on how to copy and paste things; worked lots of spreadsheet tasks so I have printouts with which to check the students' work on Wednesday and decided which word processing tasks I'm going to use. Oh, and I've read quite a lot of Pratchett's latest, Wintersmith.

What I haven't done is send Moving a Mountain out to another agent. Um... Yes, I know. I should get my act together, but the weekend sort of dribbled away before I got chance. I didn't exercise either. I don't think cycling the few minutes into town and back on Saturday counts really.

Must try harder...

Tags: a necessary evil, agents, procrastination, writing progress
Current Mood: blah

I should be doing all kinds of things, like mowing the front grass and the back grass and strimming the out of control grass around the picnic table and...

Well, you get the idea.

I will have to sort out some clean clothes for G who is off to two academic conferences this week. (Salzberg via Dundee).

Otherwise, apart from printing out the first 50 pages of Moving a Mountain to send to the agent who requested them (!) I plan to do as little as possible today in an attempt to recover from the stresses of the last couple of weeks.

So here's a quizzy thing. ( Look behind the cut for the result... )

Tags: agents, moving a mountain, quizzy thing
Current Mood: sleepy and lethargic

Spent some time this morning Googling for details on a few more publishers. The novel will be going out again on Monday, but I wanted another publisher in hand in case of rejection. Another one will take unsolicited submissions, that is.

Not very easy to find.

However, I have one now and so can send the novel out into the cruel heartless world again on Monday, knowing that should it return unsucessful, I can turn it straight round without having to find a new potential home whilst under the influence of a rejection slip.

I'm still thinking about agents. I'm not going to rush this time. I've had two agents before (not simultaneously, you understand, about 10 years apart) and neither worked out long term. Not that there was anything wrong with either agent, it was just that the book they were trying to place didn't quite make it. Both then decided to shed their new and unpublished authors because in the first instance the agent had an unexpected family drama to cope with and in the second instance, his doctor had warned him he was doing too much and needed to slow down.

Worried now that I should call myself llygoden Doom of Agents. Should I warn any agents about my track record?

Ooops! Probably shouldn't have mentioned it here as agents might see it. *g*

Will try to talk to published author friends at WisCon about what to look for in an agent. I'm thinking that youth (yet combined with experience, naturally!), good health and an absence of estranged siblings would be a good starting point.

Tags: agents, moving a mountain, submission process
Current Mood: optimistic