blog on blogging

The rest of the latest scene of Cerelian Gold has been posted, and more stuff at my other blog.

I hesitated, when I first started blogging. I tried the traditional publication channels for a long time first, but my timing has never been good, and by the time I thought my writing good enough to be worth considering publication, the publishers had been inundated by fantasy submissions and many weren't accepting even proposals, so I returned to revising and writing and getting stories from hand writing into the computer where I could finish and polish them and tried again. A couple years later, many publishers that use to take proposals were only accepting through an agent, so that changed the nature of the search. Also, I have a day job, time is limited, and when i couldn’t get an agent to even try to sell my books after several tries, I went back to typing. I've gone back and forth a few times since.

I encountered may tales of stacks of reject letters even for writers who became famous, but they never tell you how much time and effort goes into every one of those rejections, and not a little cost in postage and printing and all when it is a matter of submitting fifty pages of a novel at a crack. Time and energy is still the real killer. Most of a year just researching the first time, with one real submission (the only one that didn’t have a no-fantasy sign up, and that one might as well have--they stopped doing fantasy in favor of light science fiction, and that was when I had more time available from my day job. I have to plan and set aside that kind of time and it helps if I'm not traveling, which seems rare lately.

I heard tales of succcess through blogging, though in truth those are extremely rare. But I also heard tales of networking and workshopping on line. My efforts to get a local writing group together (or keep one together that formed after a writing class for awhile) have all fallen flat so maybe online... My research in that direction hasn't been as fruitful as I hoped. I suspect I just don't get the formats or how to schedule enough computer time into my life, but blogs offered more control of my time and input and an opportunity for discussion if I could find the right audience.

I hesitated to go the blog route, still. Afterall, copyright and prepublication publication and all are fuzzy areas, blogs and bloggers successfully getting into publication rare, and my technical successes even more rare. Even when i think I’m charging in at the leading edge, I have generally found that what I was trying was already passe’ and even old fashioned. By the time I discovered modems and networks, the internet was alive and vast and searching was all on prebuilt search engines. By the time i discovered e-mail, instant messaging was already popular (and the art of letter writing already near death.)

Still, I decided to try it. If I can’t get published, at least I can reach some of the readers that might have found my books worth reading. If I can't get an editor, at least I can get feedback and maybe find out why I can’t get anyone interested enough to read past the first fifty pages. (I know the first paragraphs are weak, but so are the first paragraphs of most of the fantasy books I love to read, and somehow they got published anyway. Most fantasy readers I know will at least read the first few pages or even some middle sections before deciding the book is a dud. My books, I’m sure, have flaws, but I thought the problems would prove to be in the plots later, or in the endings (how many endings satisfy every reader fully?) Maybe the blog readership, if I can reach them, can tell me what I’m doing wrong...


I'm not there yet even on my longer-established blog (with much on writing, some on Christian Science Fiction and YA writing, and a YA novel in work--see http://home.earthlink.net/~wyverns/ --but I have a fairly steady daily audience (even though I don't post any more there than here) and on rare occasion a comment. So I still have hopes that the experience will be valuable, and can hardly be detrimental except to cut a little more into my time.

It at least makes me take a closer/different look at my writing, and the serial posting has made me more aware of the completeness (or lack thereof) of individual scenes and their potential impact on a reader. You have to have a perfectly polished start for the agent and publisher, but for the reader, and for future hopes of publishing sequels or other books, every scene needs to be as well polished. When I finally get an agent or publisher, I want my novels to be as print-ready as I can get them. Blogging seems to be helping me with that regardless of the yet-undiscovered issues of being online, in the supposed public eye (a dozen hits, or fifty, are hardly the supposed millions, but still, it's out there for more to see later). so, for now, I continue, and hope you enjoy.