I digress

I think I need to go camping.

Let me back up.

The submission is done. That one is. Going in, I thought that I would wash my mind of the stress, distract myself after all the triple checking and document attaching with trying to start and then to finish the next story. It is November after all, and I've avoided NaNoWriMo every year someone has asked. I was either in the middle of something, or just finished something else. I finished the submission process November 1, so it only made sense.

Except they only allowed one novel per author. I had worked on sharpening three. One fell out because they didn't want that kind of story, and another because, well, there was only one hole and I had two pegs. Instead of feeling like I was ready to move on, I felt like the task wasn't done. I finally looked up the Atlanta Writer's Conference details, and learned how many weeks I was late. They have agents, from publishers most people have heard of. And they have a finite number of slots for people to sit down and have their work critiqued. Every last slot of every last editor was full. I realized then what a lot of people already knew: getting in the door is very important and even more difficult. Never mind the money. So, I did some nodding, and made a little promise to myself not to be late next year. I thought up NaNoSubMo (the Sub is for Submission) with the intent to find homes for the other two novels I wasn't doing anything with.

That stalled when I walked face first into another story. It was one of those really obvious, low hanging kinds of situations. A haystack of needles in a forest. Or something. I talked with a friend about it, because it was through observing him that the idea occurred to me. The people in my life are kind. I got nothing but encouragement. I was with this friend to pick his brain about something else, is the irony. He's an outdoorsman and off-roader and possessor of other word salad titles, and I've known for a while that my next book has survivalist elements. There will be camping and climbing and scrounging. Squatting outdoors and filtering rain water. I cannot express to you how far the real life me is from such ideas. And I wanted to keep it that way. But the mentor I mention a lot in this space gave me the advice to write what I know, and I've found it to be true that when two authors describe pulling on a rope, the one that has actually used their back and felt the bite on their palms has a deeper reservoir to pull from. So, if I want to know what it's like to track game over land, then...

So, here we are. At the beginning of NaNoSubMo, and I'm already not doing what I decided to be doing. If I'm being honest, I don't know the first thing about finding publishers. I know that I have found some in the past, and they come in many different flavors, at varying levels of quality. What I don't know is how to find the ones I need to be looking for. I know what I want. I ever know what I don't want. So I guess this will be another one of those journeys, marked by scrapes on the palms and sore elbows from all the falling.

I really hope this isn't what actual hunting is like.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Push, and breach

The imparting or exchanging of information

Let's play a game