Monday, September 04, 2006
Catching Up Plus The Great Agent Search #9
I've been a bad writer. Bad, bad writer. As in not much. I have a few excuses which I'll get to later. I won't talk too much about school. It's keeping me busy, but not overwhelmingly. So far no one is a wretched writer, far from it, so reading MS isn't anything like as painful as, say, contest judging can be. I've been engaging in avoidance behavior (as in avoiding writing) so I've been reading massive amounts. I'm not even sure I can recall all the books I've read. I did read laurel K. Hamilton
Cerulean Sins which I enjoyed a lot. I know some people miss the old style Anita Blakes, but every series needs to evolve or it gets stale. I like the new Anita because it allows LKH to get Anita and Jean-Claude together even more tightly without the series becoming about Anita and Jean-Claude only. I like her writing. I also read a couple of
meh books.
Today, I threw one away without finishing it even though it was well written, and the intimate scenes were hot. This particular story revolved about a love that began when the couple were teenagers, and that just never rings true for me. Teenage love just can't be a touchstone for adults. How can it be? How can an adult some 13 or whatever years later not think, Sheesh! I was in "love" then, but I had no idea what real life is like...? The hero was some sort of weird special forces guy, but the story just never felt deep to me. Everything was shallow. Did Not Work For Me.
Then I read a book called
Improbable which I loathed at the start. Absolutely loathed. I hated all the characters and thought they were horrible, hateful awful and depressing people. The premise of the book was a fascinating extrapolation of probability theory, special relativity and quantum mechanics. The author just flat out stuck in awkward scenes in which some character got to play a professor explaining the history, highlights and theory of the subjects above. I felt like I was being lectured to (I was) and frankly, I skimmed/skipped over those parts because I already get enough of the subjects not to need to sit through a freaking lecture on them, thank you.
BUT the writing was pretty good except for the clunker parts and there were these inklings things might improve. About half way through, things did improve and the last quarter of the book was taut and thrilling. Not a keeper, but still, interesting reading. I'd read other stuff by him.
Writing-wise, I've worked a bit on Possession. What I need to do is notebook. I thought at first that I would have my h/h intimate very quickly, but I think that's wrong now. I need to do something a little different. Tomorrow at the gym I will notebook my way out of this and be on track. I'm tweaking chapter 4 and re-doing it from the heroine's pov. I may not do hero pov in this book. We'll see.
In other news, it seems Marjorie M. Liu has withdrawn her story from the Shards of Crimson Anthology. Bummer. Hopefully they'll get the cover art redone quickly.
Agent-wise, one really nice rejection -- obviously she's just not looking for romance authors like me, since the rejection was based on the query only. And one that kind of made me raise my eyebrows and think she might want to send a different boilerplate rejection to authors who have a track record.
But, I want to sign with the agent I talked to last week. She gets me and my writing and she's what I need. So, I'll call tomorrow.
The stats so far:
14 Queries Sent
5 Requests for Material
2 Rejections
2 offers
7 No Response Yet
