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My quest to write the book that your kids'll have to read in eighth grade.

Posts Tagged ‘enter title here’

Sold my debut novel, ENTER TITLE HERE, to Disney-Hyperion in a two-book deal

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 8, 2014

Lisa Yoskowitz at Hyperion has bought World English rights to Rahul Kanakia’s debut y.a. ENTER TITLE HERE, in a two-book deal, at auction. Pitched as Gossip Girl meets House of Cards, the story follows over-achiever Reshma Kapoor as she launches a Machiavellian campaign to reclaim her valedictorian status after being caught plagiarizing. Publication is set for fall 2015. John M. Cusick of Greenhouse Literary brokered the deal.

–Publisher’s Weekly, “Rights Report: Week of May 5, 2014″

I’ve been writing and submitting stories for about ten and a half years. For the first six of those years, I had very little success. And one of the major notes I’d get back on my personal rejections was, “Your main character was too unsympathetic.”

And that always bothered me, because, to me, the characters were not unsympathetic. To me, they were just people, doing their best to make their way in the world.

About five years ago (it was in the spring of 2009), I got a “We didn’t sympathize with this character” rejection that drove me over the edge. It sickened and annoyed me so much that I took to my bed like a sickly Victorian maiden. I couldn’t believe that I had so drastically failed to communicate my vision.

On that day, I was so lost and so filled with despair. I felt like I was simply repeating the same mistakes over and over again, but I had no idea what they were or how I was supposed to fix them.

But one thing I decided was that maybe the short story wasn’t the right form for me. Maybe the novel length was what I really needed if I was going to bring my characters to life. So I decided to write a novel.

And eighteen months later, I finished one. In ALL THE MORNINGS BETWEEN YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW, an entire city is doomed to repeat the same day (it’s like Groundhog’s Day, if the entire town had been aware that the day was repeating). I meant it as an existential tale about how to find meaning in life when your actions don’t really matter.

And the book sucked. It was just really confusing and illogical.

So I wrote another novel. That book was THIS BEAUTIFUL FEVER, which was a young adult novel about a gay teen with self-image issues who lived in an alternate version of America that had fallen prey to a disease which made people inhumanely beautiful (even as it slowly killed them). It was a novel that I wrote in a white-hot fury, over the course of eight days, and it was a book that contained so much of me. I polished that book up and wrote a query and sent out that query to 93 agents (and four publishers).

(In the meantime, I wrote a third book. BOOM was an adult-market science fiction novel about a massive economic boom that’s sparked by the discovery of an infinite supply of [uninhabited] alternate Earths. The novel was, for various reasons, pretty terrible. Again, the problem was incoherent worldbuilding).

In the end, THIS BEAUTIFUL FEVER was turned down by soooooo many agents, but it did win second place in the Tu Books New Visions Contest. Although I was disappointed at the result, it turned out to be a blessing, because the winner of the contest got in touch with me and introduced me to an agent whom she knew. And that agent fell in love with the book and gave me an offer of representation.

John really did believe very strongly in the book. He gave me some excellent comments, and we went through three rounds of revision on it. He pitched it hard to editors and, after arousing a fair amount of interest, we ended up going on submission to five editors in October of last year. By mid-December, all of them had turned it down. In their comments, many said that the main character struck them as too unlikeable.

In the normal course of events, I’d have revised THIS BEAUTIFUL FEVER and we’d have sent it out on another round of revision. But I really wasn’t excited about doing that because, honestly, I’d stopped believing in the book. Although I’d absolutely loved the book for a long time, I eventually got to the point where all I could see were the gross deficiencies (and, yes, incoherency) in its world-building.

And we didn’t have to revise it or send it out because, in the interim, I’d written another book: ENTER TITLE HERE. This is another book that came out in a blind fury. I wrote almost 80% of it while I was on a 21-day family vacation in India and Sri Lanka. (The nice thing about going on vacation with my family is that we always leave plenty of free time during the day for doing work on your computer.)

ETH was a departure for me in many ways. I really don’t think I could have written it if I hadn’t started this MFA program. Before I came here, I’d written maybe 3-4 realist short stories in my entire life. I simply didn’t have the first idea about how to construct a realist story. But after being on the ground for a semester and reading my classmates’ work, I started to get a sense for it. And then this book came out of me (since writing it, I’ve written three other realist novels).

Anyway, I absolutely loved (and still love) ETH, and I always believed that it was going to succeed. When TBF was getting rejected left and right by agents, I said to myself, “Well, that’s okay, because ETH will definitely get me an agent.”

When it came time for submission, I was similarly sure that it was going to sell. I even wrote a blog post, three months ago, where I stated that I was 100% certain that this book was going to sell.

I feel like I’m too close to the submission process to really talk about it right now. But I will say that it was incredibly nerve-wracking. I discovered new levels of anxiety. You know all those posts a few weeks ago when I wrote about how sick I was? Well, all those stomach upsets were ‘just’ anxiety. Which was a bit shocking to me. I couldn’t believe that it was possible for me to manifest an entirely new physiological reaction to a common emotional state. I honestly think that this submissions process left me feeling more anxious than I have ever felt before in my life.

Which is interesting, because I didn’t feel nearly as anxious when the last book was on sub.

Anyway, the book sold. I am very happy about the deal. When we spoke on the phone, I liked the acquiring editor, Lisa Yoskowitz, quite a lot, and I look forward to working with her.

I feel extremely grateful to my agent, John Cusick. He put an immense amount of time and effort into getting me to this place. Not only did he read and comment on six drafts (divided between two books), but he also just sold the hell out of (both) books and aroused alot of interest in them. When you consider the actual sums that he stood to make from the sale, it almost doesn’t seem worth it. There are definitely easier ways to make that amount of money.

John was also the one who believed in me and saw potential in the manuscript that 93 other agents (and five publishers) didn’t think was so hot. More than anyone else I’ve encountered in my writing career, I feel like I owe him something. He deserves much more than the actual amount of money he’s going to get out of this.

Oh, and I also owe a ton to Valynne Nagamatsu. She did not have to contact me out of the blue and offer to put me in touch with John, but she did. It was a totally uncalled-for bit of proactive thoughtfulness, and I hope that I’ll someday manage to be as gracious as she is.

Anyway, as I’ve slowly been telling people the news, many of them have said something to me like, “You must be so happy” or “You must be so excited.”

And…I am, but I’m also not. I’m definitely excited and happy, but I am not more excited and happy than I’ve ever been in my life. The whole submissions process involved a lot of anxiety and strong emotions and sleep loss, and it sort of sapped my ability to feel positive emotions. Furthermore, all the good news came in little spurts (one offer here, then another offer there, the auction is starting, bids are coming in, etc). So whereas my friends and family experienced the news in one big moment*, I actually experienced it over the course of about three weeks.

But one of my writer friends did manage to get at the core of my emotions. She said something like, “Oh my god. You wrote that book. And they’re going to publish it. They’re going to publish something you wrote.”

I feel like a wizard who’s spent the last ten years trying and failing to summon a demon. I knew that I was on the right track, because sometimes there’d be a little spurt of flame, and, once in a great while, a little half-formed imp would appear. But I still felt like I was so  far away from actually producing something.  And then, one day, I came in and etched the pentagram and made the hand motions and recited the words, and then the room suddenly filled with smoke…

To me, the most amazing thing about this whole process is that I’ve finally managed to interest someone in one of my ‘unlikeable’ characters (and believe me, Reshma is one of the most unsympathetic protagonists I’ve ever written). I almost can’t believe that, after so many years of being at the fringes and acquiring rejections and achieving half-successes and then sliding back down into failure, I actually managed to write something that makes people experience an emotional reaction that is somewhat close to what I intended them to experience.**

 Joy-lifesize2

*My absolute favorite part of the submissions process was telling my mom that I’d gotten an offer from a big six publisher…and that another publisher was interested…and that we were probably going to go to auction. Watching her eyes get wider and wider really drove home, for the first time, the enormity of what was happening.

**Of course, one thing about talking to so many editors was that I also realized a number of ways in which I didn’t succeed in my aims. But whatever. I got close enough to sell the damn thing.

Posted in Background Checks, Books | Tagged: , , | 22 Comments »

Done working on ENTER TITLE HERE

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 8, 2014

Done. Done. Done. Done.

Tweaked a few scenes, changed a few transitions, reworked some awkward stuff. Oh, and I also added a sex scene. Yes, that’s not a comment I ever thought my agent would make on my young adult novel: “Instead of fading to black, there should be a sex scene here.”

That was honestly the part that I spent the most time working on. I know that teens have sex, but I, personally, never had sex while I was a teen. I didn’t even really have sex in college. But whatever. It’s not a real sex scene, actually–I just fade to black at a slightly later point in the scene.

But anyway, the long and short of it is that I am done working on this thing. If some common thread arises from the editorial rejections, then I might revise in response to that. And if it gets purchased, I will undoubtedly have to do tons of revisions. But, in some weird proximate fashion, I am done with this thing.

Now it belongs to the ages.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Going through Enter Title Here for approximately the millionth time

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 7, 2014

2014-03-07 00.50.51

The manuscript

Well, as we ready this sucker for submission, I am left to go through this manuscript one final time. This time, my agent went so far as to actually print it out, circle the typos, and mail it to me for correction (the manuscript arrived in an envelope that’d been torn open sometime during the shipping process). So I’m left to go through the 250+ pages of this thing for one last time (well, actually, if it sells I’ll probably have to go through it another ten or fifteen times).

The torn envelope

The torn envelope

I really like this book. I was telling a friend of mine that I am literally 100% confident that it will sell. And she told me, “Well…it’s good that you like it, but that seems like a dangerous belief.”

And it is dangerous. I know it’s dangerous. There’ve been many times in my life when I’ve been 100% confident that something would sell, and in almost every one of those cases, the work has failed to sell. And I know, intellectually, that this book is not a slam dunk. I know that most of the editors that see it are going to reject it. And I know that if one editor can reject it, then it’s possible for every editor to reject it.

It seems like the prevailing style amongst modern writers (well, the good ones, at least) is to display meekness and diffidence. Every extremely successful writer that I know is always saying running themselves down and expressing surprise at their success and talking about how they don’t feel like they deserve any of their sales. I don’t understand that at all. I’ve never felt like an impostor.

That’s why I keep moving forward. I believe in the work. I believe it’s worthwhile, and I believe it ought to be out there.

You know, it’s true that I am writing these YA novels now. And it’s true that those have a different tone and feel than the novels that I (try to) write for the adult market. But I am not conscious of using any lesser degree of artistry in their composition. On the contrary, they contain more of me, and are more deeply personal, than the adult works. I definitely didn’t write this book for the money, or because I just wanted to be published. Well, I did write it for those reasons. But not just for those reasons. I think this book contains, in full measure, whatever artistry I have it within me to put into prose. And I really want it to sell.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , , , | 6 Comments »

It is possible to write, revise, proof-read, and submit a novel after 160 hours of work

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 30, 2013

Just finished proof-reading Enter Title Here and sent it off to my agent. There’s a decent chance that he’ll request more edits, but I feel confident in saying that at this moment, in my mind, the novel is done. If I wasn’t currently represented, this is the point at which I’d begin writing my query letter and synopsis and assembling a list of agents that I’m interested in. You obviously have no reason to trust me when I say this, but this novel is extremely good. Given that, I thought it might be interesting if I broke down exactly how much time I spent writing this novel.

This analysis is possible because for the past eighteen months I’ve been keeping notes on two things: a) how much time I spend writing each day; and b) what I spend each day working on. Since I started ETH a little bit more than a year ago, this is the first time that I have a complete start-to-finish record of all the time I’ve spent working on a book.

I got the idea for ETH on July 17, 2012, but I didn’t work on it for another 5 months (though I did spend a fair amount of time visualizing it). I began drafting it on December 18, 2012 and finished the first draft on January 18, 2012 (hey, exactly one month!). The second phase of revision took place over 5 days in May and 4 days in September. This involved cleaning up the novel, tinkering with some of the characters, eliminating inconsistencies, and cutting about 10,000 words. I sent it to my agent in September and got back comments about a month later.

The third phase of revision began on December 7th and ended yesterday. During this phase, I made four passes through the novel. First, I went through from top to bottom, looking at every chapter, scene, and paragraph, asked myself, “Does this belong here?” During this pass, I cut about 16,000 words.  Then I made a second pass where I addressed the specific comments made by my agent. Then I made a third pass where I went through and tightened all the sentences. This resulted in cutting about 7,000 words. And, finally, I went through the novel backwards and had the mac’s text-to-speech software read out every word so I could catch any typos or dropped words. During this phase, I also did a final check for internal inconsistencies and stuff that I needed to google in order to make sure it was true*. And then I emailed it off.

In total, it took 165 hours of work over 60 days.

In terms of hours of work, here’s a pie chart with the final numbers:

ETH by hours

There you go.

I’m not saying that this is the best way to do it or even that I will necessary do all my other novels like this. In fact, perhaps this is simply a horrendous way to do it and I am leading you all stray. But this is certainly one possible way to produce a relatively good-looking finished novel. Now, everyone knows that you can write a novel in a month, but there’s always the implication that if you write a novel in that short of a period of time then you’re going to need to spend months, or even years, on revision. The major thing I’d like you to take away from this post  is that there’s no reason why revision has to take such a loooooooong period of time. In this case, my writing time was about 50% drafting and 50% revision.

Anyway, in case you wanted a chart that details writing days rather than total hours, here it is:

ETH by days

And here is the raw data table (note that halfway through, the title changed from Study Machines to Enter Title Here):

ETH data

*During this phase, I finally gave up on finding a real town in Silicon Valley that had the same features as the town in my story and just gave a fake name to the town.

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Novel revision deja vu

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 21, 2013

As mentioned earlier, I am working on revising Enter Title Here. And I am doing it using exactly the same process that I used, almost exactly two years ago, to prepare This Beautiful Fever for submission to agents. I’m enjoying the revision process considerably. Even when I am in no mood to begin it, I usually fall into it within a few minutes and then I’m happily marking it up for hours. Oftentimes I even overrun my allotted time and do more hours of work than I planned for. I like the novel so much that I’m even willing to put in the little touches. For instance, today I spent half an hour going through and finding places where I could insert super obscure dictionary words (one of them was “filipendulous”) for reasons that will probably only be clear to about 10% of the people who read the book. Yesterday, I looked at a scene that was working pretty well and then I tore it apart and rewrote it so it could be even better.

I like the novel a lot. This is not a given with me! I’ve written multiple novels that I did not like a lot. I’ve written novels that I couldn’t bear to revise. Part of my good feelings are probably because this novel hasn’t yet been rejected by any agents, contests, editors, etc. But part of it is just that I enjoy reading it and think it’s pretty good. Since I’m going through it sentence by sentence, I’m paying lots of attention to the actual writing. And sometimes (not often!) I actually come across a sentence that makes me think, “Hmm. That’s pretty good. All the sentences should be like that.”

That’s a pretty new feeling

Although I’m going through the same process as I did with the previous novel, I’m in a very different position. Writing that novel was a very speculative endeavor. Although I was full of hope for its future, I had zero expectation. I knew that publication was unlikely, not just because I was a new and untried author, but also because the book was a bit of a hard sell (agents and editors can talk until they’re blue in the face about how they want LGBT YA, but I don’t think the numbers bear them out).

This time is different. When working on a book that you love, it’s a very odd feeling to know  that it’s a very commercial concept  and that this is the right time (or at least a non-terrible time) to sell this kind of book and that you have an agent who loves the book and is excited to send it around. As much as I don’t want it to, that raises certain kinds of expectations. It’s actually not unlikely that this book will sell.

But that’s a horrible place to be. Because it could very well fail to sell. That is also a not unlikely scenario. And I know lots of aspiring writers read this blog, so let me tell you…the closer you come to the sale, the worse the rejection feels.I know, it doesn’t make intuitive sense. Since rejection is primarily painful for the way it undermines your self-image (as a smart person, good writer, etc), then you’d think a “close, but not quite” rejection would be less painful, since it implies that you have at least some talent. But I think the reason it’s worse is because when you come close, they provide reasons for why they rejected it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the happiness research, it’s that the brain loves vagueness. When the brain is free to believe anything, it inevitably believes the thing that is most flattering to itself. When you get an impersonal blow-off of a rejection, it’s easier to believe, “Oh, they just didn’t understand it. They weren’t the right market for my work.” When they send back a detailed reason that describes the things they liked and didn’t like, then it’s harder (though not impossible) to escape the conclusion that the work just wasn’t good enough.

So yes, in the future this might result in some major hurt. But, for now, I’m really excited by my novel, and I hope that you all can someday read it.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Doing that thing where I engage in a ludicrous amount of work in order to cut 500 words off a novel

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 18, 2013

download (1)Well, I’m working on revising my other young adult novel: Enter Title Here. For all the novel first drafts I’ve done, this is only the second time I’ve taken a novel through the revision process and come close to producing a final draft. However, when I was revising This Beautiful Fever, I did develop something of a system for the final stages of revision. And I am now in the penultimate part of it.

I am going through the novel, sentence by sentence, and systematically cutting and shortening everything. Now, I won’t say that brevity is the essence of good writing: I think that good writers often know when they should use extra words. But I’m not the most amazing prose stylist in the world, and brevity is at least something that I can reliably do. At times, this part of the process is a bit of a pain, but it can actually be a very immersive experience sometimes. It’s fun to play around with sentences. And for some reason, the second part of the process–after I’ve gone through and rewritten the chapter–is always to go through it again and figure out which sentences and paragraphs can go. I don’t know why I can’t do the latter first, but somehow the process of going through it really makes me see the whole thing in a new light.

It’s not particularly fast. In an hour of this, I can usually go through about 2500-3000 words of draft and cut 500 words from them. If carried through the entire novel, I should be able to cut about 15-18% of it, ending up with a draft that’s around 61,000 words long.

Sometimes I get a bit angsty over cutting little bits and pieces, but my solution is always to just cut them anyway and see if I miss them. Usually, I don’t.

Actually, this draft has been a marvel of excision. The first draft of 93,000 words long. The current draft is 67,000 words long. I’ve cut 26,000 words, and I don’t think anything is really missing. I’m honestly not sure what I cut. It was mostly just wheels spinning, I guess.

I think I’ve cut most of the easy stuff already, though. The cutting went in two phases. First I cut 10,000 words on this one day. Then (six months later), I cut 16,000 words in three consecutive days (9k the first day, 5k the second, and 2k on the third). Still, it feels good.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Been feeling pretty happy lately

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on September 8, 2013

Not much else to report on this fine Sunday. Just finished another revision on my 2nd / 4th novel*, Enter Title Here, and decided it was finally time to send it to readers (and my agent) for comments. I really like this one. It almost makes me sad that it’s already written…that I’ll never again have the experience of writing it for the first time (I wrote the first draft over the course of about 28 days, most of which were while I was in India over winter break). I’m sure I’ll write better novels in the future, but, well, the future always feels impossibly distant. And then when it comes, it’s over so fast. Looking back, I’ve realized that I actually do revise my novels considerably (except when I abandon them completely). But it always feels like 90% of their goodness is implanted within them during the initial drafting phase. Later revision can extract the badness, but it can’t necessarily add in more goodness. That’s why it often feels more productive, to me, to abandon a book that’s not working and go to work on the next one.

Not sure what I’ll do next. Maybe I’ll revise some short stories. I have some unrevised stories that’re as old as January of 2012 (more than 18 months ago). If I leave them any longer, I won’t even want to look at them anymore. Usually, I have a basic sense of what I want to do with them, but I can be a bit lazy about actually going ahead and doing that thing. In some cases, they just need to be polished up and then sent out into the world to fend for themselves–they’re not worth the effort it’d take to make them better.

And then there’re some novel-related things to do. I really have to do some more revisions on the novel that I drafted in secret over the summer (my 5th) . But I think I am saving that for the winter break.

Part of me really just wants to start a new novel. I have an idea that I am super excited by. Been kicking it around for a bit. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the good ideas don’t really go away.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling pretty happy lately. I like having a routine. And I also like working on new things. Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing left in life to do except all the stuff I know how to do. But I don’t feel like that right now. Right now I feel like life will be full of things that I can’t really imagine.

Amongst twentysomethings, there’s such a fear of aging. And there’s something to that. Life does become different as you age. You can’t party like crazy. Your brain loses some of its plasticity. But you also get to do great stuff. Like…be good at stuff. Produce original work. Be in charge of shit. Make major life decisions. Create tiny humans.

It all (well, except for the tiny humans) sounds very intriguing.

 

*I’ve written first drafts of five novels, but I decided not to revise or market the 1st and 3rd novels (both were adult science fiction novels) .

Posted in Background Checks | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Finished the first draft of another novel: Production Diary…

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on July 12, 2013

Yep, I did it again. Now, you might ask, didn’t I just finish a novel six months ago? Why am I writing another one? Is that other one revised? What’s going on here?

Well, it’s kind of a pipeline issue. This Beautiful Fever still hasn’t gone out on submission yet, and I can’t really have two YA novels out on submission at the same time, so Enter Title Here probably wouldn’t go out on submission until next spring / summer (at the earliest) anyway, which kind of takes some of the impetus off of revising it. And I also kind of wanted to turn in a portion of a novel for my thesis (due this January!), but it’s a bit hard to turn in a YA novel to an MFA program. I mean, it’s doable, but how good is the feedback really going to be?

And then, last April, I got a great idea for a short story. And the story spiralled out of control and became a novella that I then turned in to my workshop. But even the novella felt like it needed to be longer, so I decided it should probably be a novel. And since I’d already turned it in to my workshop, it’d be pretty easy to turn it in as my thesis (at Hopkins, your thesis needs to be something you’ve run through the workshop).

So anyway, I know that it’s very difficult to work on anything novel-length during the semester (because you’re constantly interrupted by deadlines for short stories), so I felt like I needed to husband my resources this summer. To that end, I decided that my priorities would (in order) be: a) Revise This Beautiful Fever accorded to agent comments; b) Write a first draft of Production Diary… (the novel I just completed; and c) Revise Enter Title Here at least enough that I could send it to first readers.

That way, This Beautiful Fever can (hopefully) go on submission during the spring and I can get comments back on Enter Title Here during the semester and then revise both it and Production Diary during the winter.

Anyways, I allocated about a month for each task, but everything got kind of skewed because revising This Beautiful Fever only took a week and drafting Production Diary took two months. Furthermore, two weeks ago, I got another round of comments on This Beautiful Fever, so now I’m going to revise that again.

Hopefully I can get to Enter Title Here sometime in August. (Dudes, I still have SIX more weeks of summer!)

Anyway, so that’s where I am, ta-da!

This is also my first adult realist novel. Yes, I have sold out and gone literary. I really don’t know if I like the novel, though. At several points during its writing, I considered abandoning it. Writing it was not easy or particularly fun (as opposed to writing Enter Title Here, which was an amazing rush). It’s hard to say why this is. I might’ve been in a bad mood because the novel is bad. Or it might be that I perceived it as being bad because I was in a bad mood. Or perhaps my bad mood resulted in the novel being bad, which only put me into a worse mood.

In any case, my mood picked up hugely about  two weeks ago, and I raced through the last third of the novel, which I actually feel alright about.

Not sure where this one will go, but I am glad I finished it and even if it turned out to be bad, I imagine that I learned a lot from it. Finishing a novel is cool, but what’s even cooler is the thought that this is just the kind of thing that I do nowadays.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

I totally understand why people quit writing short stories.

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on July 10, 2013

calvin-and-hobbes-on-writing-3 I’ve only written three stories this year (and it’s half over; also, one of those stories was only 700 words long)! The last story I completed was finished on February 17th. This year I’ve almost exclusively done novel-related stuff: drafting and revising Enter Title Here¸ revising This Beautiful Fever, and, this summer, working on the first draft of a different novel.

Not only have I not been writing stories, I haven’t even been revising them. I have seventeen unrevised stories, with some of them dating back to January of 2012. Normally I take a month or two at the beginning of the year to revise my backlog. I didn’t do that this time. And my submissions pile is showing the damage. Half my stories aren’t out right now, because I don’t really have anywhere exciting to show them. If I had new stuff coming in, then I might retire old stuff, but that’s not really happening.

It’s a bit disappointing. I like to always be in a place where someone could email me with good news RIGHT NOW. And that’s not really where I am at the moment. The effort-to-reward time for a short story is really good. You can get good news within a few months of writing the story. For a novel, it’s very bad. I wrote the first draft of This Beautiful Fever two years ago, and I’m still not in the GOOD NEWS COULD HAPPEN RIGHT NOW phase. Actually, right now, there’s no chance of good news happening on that novel, since I am sitting on a second round of edits from the agent. Good edits. Sound edits. But as long as they’re hanging over me, the novel isn’t going anywhere. Hopefully I can get them done before I go to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, but if I can’t, then I won’t be able to get them done until maybe mid-August. And the it’ll take him a month to read them. So, best case scenario, the novel doesn’t even go on submission until, like, mid-September–ten weeks from now!

And that’s for something I wrote two years ago.

The stuff I am writing now is even further from being in the GOOD NEWS COULD HAPPEN RIGHT NOW phase. Not actually clear how long their journey is, since I’ve only ever taken one novel from first-draft to submission, and that novel still hasn’t completed its revision lifecycle.

But, on the other hand, the prospect of writing more short stories is not too exciting. Firstly, because the last few stories I’ve been super excited about have gotten nothing but rejection. And, secondly, because the potential reward is so limited. I mean, I like reading short stories and I like writing them. But I also like getting readers and getting paid. And novels are where it’s at for that stuff.

And even though I’m a pretty fast writer, it does take a noticeable change in gears to switch over and write short stories, and I just haven’t felt like taking the effort.

The result is that I am in a different place nowadays, mentally. In some ways, it’s relaxing. I’m not worrying as much about submissions. I’m not tracking them obsessively. I’m not staying up at night wondering if some magazine is going to like my story. But I am also deprived of the pleasure of that kind of hope.

Sometimes I do think, “Wow, actually, the odds of an agented manuscript selling are much better than the odds of a story being accepted by Clarkesworld. So it’s not at all unlikely that something good could actually happen to me.”

But that prospect seems so remote. Any success that is further away than POSSIBLY RIGHT NOW is just too far into the mists of time for me.

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