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shalannaAha, I knew y'all were out there! And that if I posted about writing (which I had been restraining myself from doing, because it does seem as if in those posts, I do nothing but whine like a '64 Dodge Dart with a bum pushbutton transmission), you'd wriggle out from under the cat-quilts and answer. *GRIN*
I want to thank everyone for their thoughtful replies. I'm going to reply to everyone's comments individually, but I thought I should do a blanket answer to a couple of implied questions.
First, I need to make a clarification about those eBay auctions. The money went to the charity in each case (one a writer who had unpayable hospital bills, the other a writer whose house went up in flames when she was off visiting relatives), or at least it presumably did; these weren't registered as charities on eBay (because if you DO that, eBay takes part of the "take"), but they were run by people known in the RWA and were trusted and trustworthy . . . so we'll assume the writers got the funds. The editors didn't get any of the money. So . . . technically . . . they weren't paid at all. They donated the money that came for their critiques (it went from me to PayPal to the RWA sponsor's bank). It's probably a very iffy situation to the IRS. If I try to say I donated, since I "bought a service" in a way, but in another way I didn't, it might not fly. And so the editors don't legally/technically owe me anything, I suppose, because what they've done is tell a charity they'd do something and then not do it (or they haven't gotten a round TUIT yet). It isn't really clear whether they have any more than a slight moral obligation to deliver something. *But*, because I still really want their opinion(s) and/or requests to see more of the work, I don't want to anger them by contacting them YET ANOTHER TIME and prodding them to see whether I'll ever get a response. ANYHOW, the clarification is that they may or may not be actually "obligated" to do anything at all. I was simply hoping they'd go through with the commitment, and do it in a happy mood, if possible. (grin)
And these are people currently employed as acquiring editors (two of them, at any rate) with large well-known New York publishing houses. It would be a real help to hear what they think. Woo!
(There's also one high-powered agent who has three chapters of the book that people here liked the best--the one about the runaway with the magic toy dragon--and I won a critique from her on her website back in August. She is too busy to take a look, and she hasn't said anything about the people she awarded critiques to on that site for some time. It's frustrating, because she said TWICE on her site that she'd like to see something from me just based on my funny responses to various comment threads. If I could buy her some time to sit down with some of my work, we might be having a party here soon. On the other hand, maybe not.)
*On yet another hand*, as several of you mentioned, I have gotten some very valuable input from excerpts that I've posted right here. Sartorias (Sherwood) and Coneycat (Shelley) in particular have regularly/faithfully given detailed reactions to my horse-sisters story and to various parts of other stories (see previous entries and comment threads), and I appreciate that! Others of you have made comments now and then on this and that, and I thank you as well! Coneycat also mentions that perhaps just posting chapters on the site would be somewhat fulfilling, as our objective is to be read. This is true, and it's something I often say--that I simply want to be read, and that I don't worry much about being paid as long as I'm published by New York and taken seriously (although part of being taken seriously is getting paid for it!) The major reason I hesitate to put up chapters regularly is that it implies I'm giving up and publishing online. I think that if you do post a chapter and then revise it before you send it out, they don't kick up much of a fuss any more. It's not like in the old CompuServe days, where people were flattened by the CIS compilation copyright, and in the old GEnie days, when people were worried that it constituted first serial publication. Or at least I don't THINK things are the same now, because even Famous Authors have put up large gobbets of work to be viewed on their websites. Maybe soon I'll do some excerpting again and see what all y'all think.
However, what I'm really thinking is that I need a pro to read through the ENTIRE manuscript of a book (or as far as he/she will go) in order to know whether it's salable or what needs to change. Most of the time, when I send out a requested partial, I get the go-ahead to send the full. *That* is when communication stops and I often never hear anything back at all (or at least a year goes by without my hearing back.) This implies, to me, that they find the first three chapters interesting, but something goes wrong later in the book. HOW MUCH later in the book is the question. Perhaps something goes wrong in chapter four, or chapter six. Or is it that they feel I am not fulfilling the promise of the first three chapters as pages turn? Or they think that something's forced, or moving too slowly, or . . . what-have-you? Maybe they read all the way to the end, and there's just a lack of "oh, wow, I loved this book!" Or they read to the end and liked it, and then took it to an associate to discuss things, and decided that it wasn't the kind of book they could get behind. There could be any NUMBER of reasons. But you don't hear those reasons. At least *I* typically don't. Since I don't have an agent, I get the standard rejection letter (with the usual encouragements or comments that my prose reads smoothly or my characters are engaging, etc.) There is no way to tell where I should start rewriting or tweaking. That's the problem. Until some agent/editor finds it interesting enough to write back with a revision letter, or until I go to a book doctor who has some suggestions, I won't know where the trouble lies.
If *I* thought there was a problem, I'd already be working on it. (grin)
I mean, you can tweak forever. At some point, you have to decide it's as good as the books you read that you loved, the ones that made you want to write one like them, and you have to say, "It's finished." That's the point my books reach before they go out.
And of course you can't expect people on a LiveJournal to read the entire novel in one or two sittings. I say "in a couple of sittings" because I find that if I read a chapter a week or a chunk-per-month of somebody's book (online or in a workshop), I forget quite a lot and ask for clarification of things that happened a few pages back (and those things don't need to be clarified if you just read that page a day ago). I also find that I can't check continuity and I can't tell whether the sections tie together well. It isn't the same way a purchaser reads a novel, which is typically in a couple of sittings or over the course of a week at bedtime (if the book doesn't hit the wall, that is.) Anytime I've critiqued novels over the course of a few months or a year, I have known that a lot of stuff is getting glossed over or missed. I simply can't stay "in the groove" the way I can if I'm reading a book every evening for an hour or so and finishing it up sooner. I suspect that the agents or their assistants sit down to read as much as they want to in one sitting, and *where they're stopping* would tell me quite a bit (not that the problem would be RIGHT THERE, but that it's the point at which the problem became intolerable, and I'd start backing up from there.)
But you've all given me more to think about. Stay tuned for the latest developments. (grin) And for detailed responses to comments.
"Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."- Sir Winston Churchill
"Women, on the other hand, spot the truth from a mile away. Evasive action must be taken to avoid tripping headlong over it, if it isn't something they need to deal with at that very moment. Potshots may be attempted from behind a barrier of denial."--Chantal Fox
I want to thank everyone for their thoughtful replies. I'm going to reply to everyone's comments individually, but I thought I should do a blanket answer to a couple of implied questions.
First, I need to make a clarification about those eBay auctions. The money went to the charity in each case (one a writer who had unpayable hospital bills, the other a writer whose house went up in flames when she was off visiting relatives), or at least it presumably did; these weren't registered as charities on eBay (because if you DO that, eBay takes part of the "take"), but they were run by people known in the RWA and were trusted and trustworthy . . . so we'll assume the writers got the funds. The editors didn't get any of the money. So . . . technically . . . they weren't paid at all. They donated the money that came for their critiques (it went from me to PayPal to the RWA sponsor's bank). It's probably a very iffy situation to the IRS. If I try to say I donated, since I "bought a service" in a way, but in another way I didn't, it might not fly. And so the editors don't legally/technically owe me anything, I suppose, because what they've done is tell a charity they'd do something and then not do it (or they haven't gotten a round TUIT yet). It isn't really clear whether they have any more than a slight moral obligation to deliver something. *But*, because I still really want their opinion(s) and/or requests to see more of the work, I don't want to anger them by contacting them YET ANOTHER TIME and prodding them to see whether I'll ever get a response. ANYHOW, the clarification is that they may or may not be actually "obligated" to do anything at all. I was simply hoping they'd go through with the commitment, and do it in a happy mood, if possible. (grin)
And these are people currently employed as acquiring editors (two of them, at any rate) with large well-known New York publishing houses. It would be a real help to hear what they think. Woo!
(There's also one high-powered agent who has three chapters of the book that people here liked the best--the one about the runaway with the magic toy dragon--and I won a critique from her on her website back in August. She is too busy to take a look, and she hasn't said anything about the people she awarded critiques to on that site for some time. It's frustrating, because she said TWICE on her site that she'd like to see something from me just based on my funny responses to various comment threads. If I could buy her some time to sit down with some of my work, we might be having a party here soon. On the other hand, maybe not.)
*On yet another hand*, as several of you mentioned, I have gotten some very valuable input from excerpts that I've posted right here. Sartorias (Sherwood) and Coneycat (Shelley) in particular have regularly/faithfully given detailed reactions to my horse-sisters story and to various parts of other stories (see previous entries and comment threads), and I appreciate that! Others of you have made comments now and then on this and that, and I thank you as well! Coneycat also mentions that perhaps just posting chapters on the site would be somewhat fulfilling, as our objective is to be read. This is true, and it's something I often say--that I simply want to be read, and that I don't worry much about being paid as long as I'm published by New York and taken seriously (although part of being taken seriously is getting paid for it!) The major reason I hesitate to put up chapters regularly is that it implies I'm giving up and publishing online. I think that if you do post a chapter and then revise it before you send it out, they don't kick up much of a fuss any more. It's not like in the old CompuServe days, where people were flattened by the CIS compilation copyright, and in the old GEnie days, when people were worried that it constituted first serial publication. Or at least I don't THINK things are the same now, because even Famous Authors have put up large gobbets of work to be viewed on their websites. Maybe soon I'll do some excerpting again and see what all y'all think.
However, what I'm really thinking is that I need a pro to read through the ENTIRE manuscript of a book (or as far as he/she will go) in order to know whether it's salable or what needs to change. Most of the time, when I send out a requested partial, I get the go-ahead to send the full. *That* is when communication stops and I often never hear anything back at all (or at least a year goes by without my hearing back.) This implies, to me, that they find the first three chapters interesting, but something goes wrong later in the book. HOW MUCH later in the book is the question. Perhaps something goes wrong in chapter four, or chapter six. Or is it that they feel I am not fulfilling the promise of the first three chapters as pages turn? Or they think that something's forced, or moving too slowly, or . . . what-have-you? Maybe they read all the way to the end, and there's just a lack of "oh, wow, I loved this book!" Or they read to the end and liked it, and then took it to an associate to discuss things, and decided that it wasn't the kind of book they could get behind. There could be any NUMBER of reasons. But you don't hear those reasons. At least *I* typically don't. Since I don't have an agent, I get the standard rejection letter (with the usual encouragements or comments that my prose reads smoothly or my characters are engaging, etc.) There is no way to tell where I should start rewriting or tweaking. That's the problem. Until some agent/editor finds it interesting enough to write back with a revision letter, or until I go to a book doctor who has some suggestions, I won't know where the trouble lies.
If *I* thought there was a problem, I'd already be working on it. (grin)
I mean, you can tweak forever. At some point, you have to decide it's as good as the books you read that you loved, the ones that made you want to write one like them, and you have to say, "It's finished." That's the point my books reach before they go out.
And of course you can't expect people on a LiveJournal to read the entire novel in one or two sittings. I say "in a couple of sittings" because I find that if I read a chapter a week or a chunk-per-month of somebody's book (online or in a workshop), I forget quite a lot and ask for clarification of things that happened a few pages back (and those things don't need to be clarified if you just read that page a day ago). I also find that I can't check continuity and I can't tell whether the sections tie together well. It isn't the same way a purchaser reads a novel, which is typically in a couple of sittings or over the course of a week at bedtime (if the book doesn't hit the wall, that is.) Anytime I've critiqued novels over the course of a few months or a year, I have known that a lot of stuff is getting glossed over or missed. I simply can't stay "in the groove" the way I can if I'm reading a book every evening for an hour or so and finishing it up sooner. I suspect that the agents or their assistants sit down to read as much as they want to in one sitting, and *where they're stopping* would tell me quite a bit (not that the problem would be RIGHT THERE, but that it's the point at which the problem became intolerable, and I'd start backing up from there.)
But you've all given me more to think about. Stay tuned for the latest developments. (grin) And for detailed responses to comments.
"Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."- Sir Winston Churchill
"Women, on the other hand, spot the truth from a mile away. Evasive action must be taken to avoid tripping headlong over it, if it isn't something they need to deal with at that very moment. Potshots may be attempted from behind a barrier of denial."--Chantal Fox
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 05:40 am (UTC)I wish I was as charitable as you are, because I think they have a great deal more than a "slight" moral obligation to come through for you. If I buy (for example) a stud fee in a charity auction, then my mare had better be invited out for dinner and drinks at the very least. And since they volunteered to do this, I think they should have provided the service more promptly than, say, the editor who requested a full MS but has a desk full of other stuff, some of it agented.
(Incidentally, the terminology of "winning an auction" puzzles me. I know that's how they term it on eBay, but when you buy a horse at auction you didn't win it, you bought it. I think this Internet terminology of pretending it's a prize rather than an item/service you paid for and thus have a right to get is sneaky at best.)
I do hope you hear something back soon. And I would definitely rattle a few cages long about Groundhog Day. If I recall correctly you paid a pretty fair sum for these things. You did your bit for the charity part of the auction, now it's time for the auction part to come through for you. It's disappointing that someone would offer services to lure people to contribute to this charity and then just forget to provide them. It might also be despicable, but I'm trying to be charitable, too.
As far as posting chapters online in lieu of actually being published--well, that wasn't one of my better ideas, really, for anybody but me or for any story but very experimental ones. Let's forget I said that. ;)
It's not a bad way to get a crit here or there, though. And if you send each chapter to "Memories" under the same keyword, it's possible to pull up all the chapters in order and read them sequentially as I did with my NaNo story. (If I get around to it i'll link them all together properly some day.) It's not perfect but it helps readers go back and forth, if you label each chapter clearly. I didn't at first because I hadn't thought of the memory option as a way to pull the story together. It's not foolproof but it's something.