Sunday, May 16, 2010

The book

So I've finished the fourth or fifth or even maybe sixth draft of the NaNo novel. Who can remember? The last time I read it was sometime in December.

My sister (thank you muchly, Niblet), put her considerable editing prowess to work and wanted to get a few things across:
  1. This book would be probably be rated X for violence and maybe sex also... but definitely for weirdness.
  2. She enjoyed some of my phrases, which made me feel good.
  3. Part of the books made her sad, parts made her skin crawl, and she found parts of it exciting.
So all in all, these comments were actually pretty good, even though books like this one are not her cup of tea.

As I reread her edits and comments this week and weekend, I was astonished at my storyline. I wrote this? Huh. It's really... quite... well, dark. It's significantly darker than I remember, but written in almost a bubbly way. Some of the prose is decent, too -- I recognize that. It will never become a classic, but I can see it being a bestseller! There are plenty of published books out there that are far worse than this one.

So, now what? What steps do I take toward publishing? Do I walk into a publishing house and announce that I have a book I want them to buy, and that I want to make me a million dollars? Heh. Should I bother? Writing it was the easy part, compared to this...

5 comments:

The Clever Cat said...

Teehee. I just reread the first paragraph. Turns out I'm a poet and I didn't even know it! ;^)

Paula said...

Congrats! I too love the writing, hate thinking about what comes after, bleh. Well, not the making millions, that would be fab, but sending it off to agents, publishers, whatever, marketing, contracts, ick ick.

Alexis Clipboard said...

Try this website for long-winded but helpful info:

http://www.annemini.com/?p=3487

She has tons of posts about the different steps that go into publishing novels.

—The Niblet

Don said...

Weird, I can do the upfront plotting and research and would probably dig the shopping around so long as I really believed in the work, but the writing itself? Never can make any damn time. Plus my NaNo novels just don't compel to go back and edit. Newer ideas are so much more interesting. For example, there's this Miwok kid born in 1580 that ...

The Clever Cat said...

gets sucked into a totem! And comes out in 2010! And it's all a dream!

I had to look up Miwok, but there's a storyline... ;^)