Thought-Drive

The work got done this past weekend, I'm proud to say. I also feel like I learned some things. Like about the idea of a brief, open-door policy to unagented submissions for a major publisher. The actual activity required some additional information which was surprising at the beginning, and understandable toward the end. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, but even as I was trying to get in things early, I could see evidence that the submission portal was under duress, trying to shoulder the load of everyone trying to access it. It occurred to me that the idea might have been something they had lightly discussed doing, then pulled the trigger on just to see what it would be like. Then, in the place of the river they expected, an ocean swelled up, threatening to crash their servers. If a publisher underestimated ebooks, I thought, it might have even more traction than anyone suspected. Then, once the portal was even accessible, it required a synopsis of the book, a query letter...

Sometimes I dream when I'm awake, about award speeches and magazine interviews. In those times, I practice the things I tell, because I don't want to regret things I might say. I don't want to leave out anyone I mean to thank. Tracing the events that led to where I am is getting trickier by the season. This, for instance , was an opportunity I only heard about because I'd been somewhat active in an online writer's group which I was only invited to because I tried to apply myself during a web party for a book release. And that's one of the shorter lists of degrees of separation. And that's where I've been over the last few days. With a two-week window, and their openness to accepting any manuscript of the genres they're looking for, I'm putting all my feet forward, and I'm doing my best to make sure they can be as good as they can be. Needless to say, work on the current project took a hiatus briefly. Submissions to agents are out, naturall...