Click to Subscribe
A Fiction Writer Alliance
A Day’s Correspondence between Two Novelists
© 2014 James LaFond
AUG/4/14
Sheri:
So, I heard back from that agent. They have decided to pass...for now. Told me a few of them really liked it but that it was in need of too much editing and they are short staffed. Recommended I find myself a good freelance editor and have them go over it. All well and good if you have the money, but I don't have 40-50 bucks an hour to pay someone to do that right now. The only thing I can do really is plod along, pass my test on this insurance crap, and have Jamie do the best she can until she is a real editor...well, I want her to anyway. She would be great, and I could get stuff for free LOL. Maybe once I'm up and selling insurance I'll be in a position to get them edited correctly. I'm kind of bummed but to be honest, felt that they should all get some serious editing done on them but just haven't had the money. UUUUGGGGHHHHH. I feel like Charletta Fucking Brown today. :(
James:
Okay,
That sucks.
Everything we write and go over until we are blue in the face can always use some editing. The problem is they are looking at genre tropes and adherence to certain marketing-based concerns, not necessarily English usage.
See if you can find a genre style guide and have Jamie read it.
Look your Estelle Staab stuff is real good and the Love Bites stuff is better. Do not stop writing.
The editing-publishing end is in big turmoil for now and for a while to come—it's not you. My boxing history books were cancelled by the publisher even though the editor loved it. He [the publisher] was right. After the 2008 crash people stopped buying big history books in that format. I have only sold a handful online.
Here is something of mine that I just edited which I think is among my best and I will tell Erique to place as a hardback.
Please archive this.
Sheri:
Consider it done Doodle :0)
Well, I'm not too disheartened just yet. I'm just wondering what I should do at this point. I have four (well almost four) completed novels. I'm not sure if I should just pull them from Amazon and keep reworking them until I have a solid bite with an agent/publisher, or if I should leave them as is, continue to try and sell what I've done and when I get the money, have them edited professionally. I know it's very important for professional editing and everything I've ever read on writing says not to skimp on that part, and that it's vital. I think like most writers I know there is always room for improvement, and I only want my best stuff out there for the public to see. I think I'll email a few writers, you're the first obviously, and maybe some writers groups and see what their thoughts are on the subject. Let me know what you think Doll.
It is hard for an old dude that still beats the shit out of young men to admit that he is known by such unmanly handles as Doodle and Doll. On the other hand, at least I didn’t submit on strikes to some dude named Doodle.
James:
Do not pull them from Amazon unless you rework your manuscript and are set to reissue it as a 2nd edition the same day.
I personally am glad to be free of an editor, as I intentionally play with the language and do unconventional things. Part of an editor's job is to make sure you do not rise above the rest of the field—no shit, it is true. If an editor does his work, your sales will go up and in the end your work will go into the dustbin of history to be forgotten. Melville, Howard, Burton, Heinlein all got loads of shit from editors and librarians. The writers that had far more success than they in their day, where are they? Look in the dust bin. But the four hardheads above are still being read. I once read an entire book of Heinlein's letters, Grumbles from the Grave, which amounted to him fighting with editors.
You did an excellent job proofing Forty Hands for me, and correctly corrected me on quite a few grammatical points, and I went against your advice 70% of the time because I am a jerk, and Yusuf is a Jerk, and Abdul speaks incorrectly just to get an angle in a conversation, and I spelled Eden as Aden to give the curious map-savvy reader a feeling for how living in a murky medieval multilingual society is less precise in word than life in our own. I know that if I sell that thing to a publisher they're going to trash all that and I'm going to let them so I can get paid—because I'm a whore—but I'm also going to keep ebook and hardback rights so that the real deal will be out there.
In a lot of way we are so much luckier than the four writers I mentioned above.
What I suggest is you do some writing on a sell-out level, just doing what editors want to maximize sales through your conventional agents, and have that professionally edited if you can afford it. Use those interactions as your classroom so that you can better edit your exclusive projects. Write a parallel stream of work to satisfy your writing soul. And you know what, those will be the works that are being read in 75 years, the stuff your grandchildren might get paid for. Also do not forget that the real money is in getting your stuff optioned for comics, movies and games, and those people are just going to tear your work apart until it looks like something you wrote when you were ten anyhow.
I'm sending a link that applies.
Just keep writing and realize that agents and editors live in a curiously porous seedbed of envy that ironically positions them to judge those they envy.
Good luck Sheri, and thanks for archiving my proofs.
The old pulp writers used to put as many words in letters as in print. Any writing is practice, and saving writing that you have done in leter or email form can be used for modelling realistic and not overly composed corresponeence between characters in your novel.
Seekers of The Sunset World
author's notebook
Beyond the Ember Star
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
taboo you
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
fanatic
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
broken dance
eBook
ranger?
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
orphan nation
eBook
triumph
eBook
wife—
eBook
the combat space
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
beasts of aryas
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
honor among men
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
predation
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
logic of force
eBook
fate
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
sons of aryas
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
on combat
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
advent america
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
when you're food
eBook
uncle satan
eBook
night city
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
hate
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
Dominick     Aug 4, 2014

This is gold! Writing about writing.

The truth is that most of what the long deceased writers wrote eventually got published to cash in, they would have been horror stricken I'm sure to see stuff they never wanted to see the light of day published.

Its almost as if you don't even control your art when you create it..like a Frankenstein's monster..takes a life of itself, literary alchemy.
James     Aug 4, 2014

Sheri would represent that segment. I suppose I'm more of an L. Ron Hubbard whore. If you can make money off of my scrapped notes after I bite the grille of that commuter bus in the sky go for it.
  Add a new comment below:
Name
Email
Message