Rejection count: 3.

I'm feeling pretty good about it, though. Over a year ago, I pitched OtherWhere to three people at the Surrey International Writer's Conference, and none of them so much as responded to my email. Since then, I've reworked it heavily, and now I've received three personalized rejections.

I probably have a good number to go, but it feels like...progress?

It still sucks, but I kinda feel like my many, many years of fanfiction writing has given me a fairly thick skin to constructive criticism.

Onwards and upwards!

I've been working on writing pretty regularly lately, however, I decided against doing NaNoWriMo this year. Usually, I set aside whatever I'm working on to throw myself into a new (or in-progress) draft and get some good, solid work done on it in November. That's worked pretty well towards me getting a bunch of drafts finished, but since I haven't been as productive in other months, it hasn't done a whole lot towards me getting anything edited.

That doesn't mean I don't want to work on my draft, but I had a more compelling reason to keep it in the drawer for now - I've been asked for a full manuscript of OtherWhere by an agent. So instead of working on new words, I've been working on getting the last few changes done on that manuscript so I can submit it.

This past week, while my beta readers read the manuscript, I've been reading it out loud. It's a piece of advice I've heard a lot, but have never had the courage to actually implement. And you know what? It's working.

There are a lot of small changes I'm definitely making that I never had noticed before. Word repetition and run-on sentences are big ones. I'm also noticing some issues with character voice - people sounding very similar to one another - that I'm trying to work on a bit more.

All in all, it's been a great exercise. I expect to be finished it within the next few days, and to get my manuscript submitted to the agent by the end of November.

I often have a hard time thinking of things to say here. Often things just seem like same-old-same-old, and I'm just poking along at the things I've been poking along at for months. But at the same time, I'm happy with the progress I'm making. I guess it's time to do an update and round-up.

I'm working on my fifth draft of OtherWhere, doing line edits, tightening the language, obliterating adverbs and unnecessary, redundant wordiness. I'm really happy with it, though I totally don't understand how people can finish this kind of thing in a month or two. After an hour of this stuff, I start skimming and have to stop.

Once I get this part finished, I'll be sending it out to (more) agents and also beta readers. Maybe that'll happen in March. I HOPE it'll happen in March.

I'm also poking around at various other projects without a tonne of focus, just doing whatever I feel like at any given moment. I expect to release my Motivation course by the end of February, though I'm eyeing the date right now and wondering if that's realistic. If not, then it'll be the first or second week of March.

I've been doing a lot more reading as well, which I consider to be really important. I started reading the collected works of Sherlock Holmes, because I've gotten really into Elementary, BBC Sherlock, and the RDJ movies as well, and I had gotten very interested in connecting with the source material, which I had never read. I remember picking it up once when I was probably 12 years old, saw Sherlock shooting up cocaine and went "Hang on, this isn't what I thought it was", but this time I've been really enjoying it.

Thing is, I had to interrupt because I needed to read some short stories. I've written a story I intend to submit to Crossed Genres magazine for their April deadline (Theme: Time travel!), but I haven't read a lot of short stories in recent years. I picked up Dangerous Women, which is an anthology of short stories that cover many genres, by many of the giants in speculative fiction - we're talking Jim Butcher, George R.R. Martin, and Brandon Sanderson. I figure I can learn some things from them. I'm enjoying the stories very much, and learning a lot about structure, and when that's done I'll be finishing off Sherlock Holmes.

Unless I get distracted by the three books I bought today, whoops.

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, between work and novelling, but I have finally reached a point where I feel I can write about it, so...yay!

I am taking a couple of courses, which is sucking up some of my time. I'm also continuing my cut of OtherWhere, which is going fabulously. I'm 115 pages in, out of about 350 pages of manuscript and I'm really feeling as though it was a better book to start with than Mortis Unbound, which means that it's a lot easier to cut and fix.

I've also put together a new website, which is at http://www.jessicasteinerbooks.com (Unfortunately, someone else named Jessica Steiner has the url I wanted o999)

It's pretty bare bones right now, but if you head over there you can see that I've migrated my mailing list over to a new provider. I'm going to be giving away stories and doing fun little things on the list, too, so I'm excited about that. I'm also excited by the fact that soon there will be the ability - through my website - for people to give me money without giving any money to Amazon or Smashwords. That'll be really cool! Over the next few weeks I'll be cleaning up this blog and migrating some content (like the sticky post) over to the website and fixing things up.

Next weekend I'll be going to VCON. If the universe aligns, Dan Wells and Mur Lafferty will know my name by the following weekend. My goal is to contain my fangirl and instead be totally awesome and professional. We'll see.

Between now and then, I have to finish critiquing three stories for the workshop I'm doing, and finish organizing my website. I also hope my new business cards arrive. They're supposed to show up by Wednesday.

If you head over to my website, please let me know what you think? I'd really like to hear feedback and/or suggestions

For all sections in this series, check out this post. I recommend reading them in order, but if you want to go straight to a particular concept, you can use the Table of Contents to find the right post.

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After completing the first readthrough, it's time to read through the book again, but this time with a fine-toothed comb in hand (metaphorically speaking).

For OtherWhere, I actually did one read through and completed the next five steps all at the same time, but I strongly suggest that you do these one at a time the first time. It's difficult to learn these skills and do them all at the same time. Even for me, who had done this once before with Mortis Unbound, it was a challenge and a hell of a slog.

But anyway, on to the next step.

Step 4: Scene Cards

Get yourself a bunch of simple index cards - lined or unlined, depending on your preference. I punch a hole in the top right corner of each card, and get one of those little metal rings to keep them all together in order. A keyring would work, or a big paperclip all unbent and made into a circle. You'll definitely want a good way to keep them in order.

As you read through the book, create one index card per scene, and put it on the ring. For each card, you want to include the following:

1. The scene number, in order.


2. The point of view of the scene.


3. The pages of the scene.


4. One sentence, describing the elements of the scene.

I put the first three elements at the top, so for example, the first scene card for OtherWhere looks like this:

1

POV: Omnicient

1-3

The sentence requires some additional explanation. I don't just describe what happens in the scene. The purpose of the sentence is to make sure that all of the elements of a scene are present, namely:

• A protagonist


• An antagonist


• A conflict


• A setting


• A twist

Ideally, your scene should contain all of these things. Someone should be trying to do something, and something or someone is resisting them or making it difficult. All this should happen in a place. And at the end of the scene, something should change or be revealed that changes the circumstances in a significant way.

If you ensure that every scene has all of these elements, your readers won't be bored, that's for sure.

If your scene is missing one or more of these elements, note that on the card, and move on to the next scene.

Next time we'll examine the setting of your novel in detail.

It's the last day of May, and I'm exhausted after a very long week at work, so I thought I'd do a recap.

This month, I edited, formatted, and released two stories for 99c. I designed the covers for both of them, though I did have help from friends. One of them is a book of writing tips, and the other is a short story. The latter is actually selling quite well, especially considering I've done almost zero promotion.

I worked on my edit of OtherWhere. I'll be doing more posts about my editing process in the future, but right now I'm in the middle of a long slog that's not much fun. I'm about a quarter of the way through this particular slog. Once I finish it, I'll probably do another set of tips about what I did. So... hang onto your seat.

Most of my work this month was involved in finishing a 20,000 word novella that will be released...at some point. I've also written a bit of fanfiction this month.

Now wish me luck. June is coming, and it's going to involve me clinging to sanity by the fingernails.

Since this series is going to be very long, and managing all the links is going to be a pain, I've decided to do one catch-all post for all the sections, which I will update as I go.

I'm generally following the process in Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course, which you can purchase by following this link over here. I followed it strictly for Mortis Unbound, but now that I've done it once, I'm making changes and putting my own spin on it. I'll be describing it generally as best I can; however, I won't be reproducing the worksheets that I'm using here. If you want those and the full detailed instructions, go buy the course.

If you don't want to or can't afford to buy the course, my plan is to make these posts detailed enough to help teach you how to edit, either way. I hope these will be useful to people, in themselves.

The Posts

1. Preparation


2. Recapturing the Magic


3. The First Readthrough


4. Scene Cards

For all sections in this series, check out this post. I recommend reading them in order, but if you want to go straight to a particular concept, you can use the Table of Contents to find the right post.

---

I've decided to do periodic (not necessarily regular) updates as I go through the editing process with OtherWhere. My experience is that people have a hard time with this editing thing. This is not my first time going through the editing process for a full novel in a structured way, so I'm hoping if I dig in and describe my process, it may help people who are flailing around, changing sentence structure and fixing typos and staring at their novel, with no idea where to even start with tackling the big problems.

Yesterday I finished my first read-through on OtherWhere, so this seems like a good place to start.

For full disclosure, I'm generally following the process in Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course, which you can purchase by following this link over here. I followed it strictly for Mortis Unbound, but now that I've done it once, I'm making changes and putting my own spin on it. I'll be describing it generally as best I can; however, I won't be reproducing the worksheets that I'm using here. If you want those and the full detailed instructions, go buy the course.

If you don't want to or can't afford to buy the course, my plan is to make these posts detailed enough to help teach you how to edit, either way. I hope these will be useful to people, in themselves.

Now then. So far, I've completed three major editing steps, which I will describe over the course of the next three blog posts.

Step One: Preparation

Preparing Your Novel

First I had to reformat and print out my entire novel. Yep, the whole thing. I'm a fan of the digital form, but I have found that it's just not as easy to do editing without a paper copy. Though it may seem like a lot of paper, I recommend that you do the same.

To format my novel for editing:

1) I made sure the whole thing was in a single electronic file, and turned on the "page numbering" function, so every page was numbered in the top right corner. You will be glad you did this. When I edited Mortis Unbound, I wound up manually numbering the pages, which is dumb.

2) I double-spaced the entire book. This sure uses a lot of paper - believe me, I sympathize, OtherWhere is nearly 380 pages printed out - but it really helps you read and notice mistakes, and also gives you more space for writing in changes. It's worth it.

3) I also formatted it so that the first line of each paragraph was indented, just like published novels, instead of having a double-return between each paragraph like a blog post. I tend to write my books and stories as if I'm intending to post them online (legacy of many years of fanfiction writing), but I fix that formatting before beginning a proper edit. This is optional, but it's sort of a page-saving measure to help counterbalance the double-spacing.

4) Finally, because during my first editing experience I cursed and wished I'd done this, I put a page break at the end of every scene. During the editing process, you may find yourself rearranging scenes, and it's a lot easier to do this if each scene is actually a self-contained series of pages rather than having chapter and scene breaks in the middle of a page.

Preparing Your Space

The rest of the editing preparation involves getting your space ready and gathering the tools you're going to need.

I like to do my editing at my desk in my office. I turn on music and I can spread out the worksheets and the binders. I just find that having a table is pretty important, though if you want to do it on the sofa, it's not impossible.

As for the tools, even if you're not going to go whole-hog with purchasing the worksheets, it's worthwhile starting a binder so you can keep notes in a self-contained place. You will want a place to keep all the little things you think of, not to mention all the problems you will find.

Get pens you like and which are fine-tipped, and don't run or smear.

I actually have one of those cheap plastic boxes they sell at Staples, which is large enough to hold all of my tools: pens of at least four different colours (most of them my favourite fine-tipped blue pens, but also a couple of other colours will be needed eventually), white-out, small sticky-notes, a tiny stapler, a small pair of scissors, and a roll of tape, and probably some other things that I can't think of right at the moment. I also have a package of basic index cards, and a container of those rings you can run through a hole-punched piece of paper to hold several of them together.

Also, having a 3-hole-puncher handy is helpful. And you'll definitely want a ream of lined paper if you're not going to buy the course and have the real worksheets.

Get all that together and I'll see you next time for the next step.

Yesterday I had an internet outage at my house that lasted the entire evening (and in fact, it's still not fixed, and the tech is due on Monday morning. Sob).

I wrote a great deal more than usual, and I finished the first draft of Dale.

...There may be a connection here.

I've already got a lot of things that I want to change and improve, including adding an entire sub plot. Unfortunately I have no idea what it'll be about. However, I'm overall very pleased with how it turned out in a general sense. I'm letting it sit at least until May, I expect, when I'll pull it out again for the first polish.

In the meantime, I'm editing OtherWhere. I've also started writing a short story which I plan to submit to an anthology.

And that's the State of Jessica Steiner's Writing for tonight. Good night!

Mortis Unbound is now up online and rolling and I'm working each day on trying to get reviews and get the word out without being utterly obnoxious about it. So my plan was to get back to The Dreaming and get that draft finished.

I'm about 80,000 words into the novel and it's about 3/4 done. But I've been trying to get back into it for about two months, and it's been a struggle. Part of that struggle has been life-related - the stress of buying a house and some work-related stress of trials and craziness that took a lot of energy. It's hard to keep up on writing every day when all you want to do when you get home is collapse on the couch and watch Lost. (Yeah, I'm a bit behind on pop culture).

But after a lot of thinking, I've come to the conclusion that there's more going on here than life stress.

Last week, I listened to an episode of Writing Excuses, a podcast I've kept up with pretty religiously over the last four years. Dan Wells was talking about his new novel, Hollow City, which has a lot of things in common with Dreaming. As I was listening to what he was saying, I realized that there's quite a few things about the novel that just aren't coming out the way I want them to. A lot of things that are making me dissatisfied with how it's coming together.

Now, I could plough through and get the last quarter finished, then go back and edit, but I feel like until I figure out how to fix the problems I want to fix, I will be wasting my time, writing a lot of things that I'll just throw out later. I've been struggling through this novel for two years already, and I'm fearful that if I stick with it right now, it'll be another year before I finish the draft.

So I've decided to put Dreaming on hold and work on a new novel that I'm more excited about, edit the hell out of OtherWhere, and then come back fresh to Dreaming and rework it from scratch.

I feel a bit bad about the decision. I don't want to be the kind of person who drops projects when they get hard and go with the next shiny thing - professional writers are not like that - but I talked it over with my wife and she agrees that this is the right thing to do. So hopefully there'll be more frequent updates as I set this project aside and free up my mind to work on something new and fun.