Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Tuesday Book News!

Not a lot of news to report about The Deathday Letter. I finished the huge revisions and turned them in. Now I'm just waiting for the feedback. My beta readers liked it and my agent seems to like it. He's been a little stingy on his comments since we sold it, so it's a little tough to judge where he really stands, but he's got good reasons. If he likes something my editor hates or vice versa, it might confuse me, and we all know I'm easily confused.

Have I mentioned today that my agent pretty much rocks?

Now that the major revisions are done, my focus is turning to what comes next. Truthfully, it's been weighing heavily on me. I have so many ideas it's so often difficult to choose one. Since I wrote Deathday, I've written a few chapters of a terrorist thriller, half a book about an invisible boy, an entire book that would rather be a graphic novel, two wiki's full of info on stories I'd like to start, and 3/4 of a book about a dead soldier and his brother. They're like bodies strewn along behind me of stories I fell out of love with.

Perseverance is part of the game, and if I didn't have 4 finished books (one a 140k word YA Norse adventure I hand wrote) I'd worry about my ability to finish work, but for me it's more about finding the right idea. But it's like dating. Sometimes you have to date a lot of bad ideas before getting to the good one. So that's what I'm doing. Dating ideas. That's where my agent is awesome. He let me know that I'm definitely a freak, but that I have time to figure this all out.

Continuing book news, I'm working on an idea that I'm tentatively calling Project Revolution. It's a mixed media thing that I'm fleshing out. I haven't got any more news on it than that, but I wanted to put it out there. Project Revolution. Because it's time for one.

2 comments:

  1. Your agent does, indeed, rock. (Except he eats his tacos with a fork, but I won't tell anyone if you won't.)

    It'll be interesting to see if you eventually go back to any of the stories you've dropped. Speaking of, what program do you use to make wikis?

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  2. I always like to believe I'll go back to certain ideas. Some, like my invisible boy story, are ideas that I love but I think could be better written by someone else. I keep trying my hand at MG lit, but I think I need to spend more time reading it. Others, like my dead soldier story, just failed to really hold my attention. I got bored writing it so I can't imagine someone not getting bored reading it. Maybe I'll go back to it if I think of a new spin. Poor Chris. I'm totally ADD so story ideas never really leave me.

    I use DokuWiki. I write on a Mac. That won't matter for the DokuWiki, but it's got to run in a server environment, so I made my laptop into a server by installing MMAMP.
    I only started using it a few months ago on a particular story. I've always been more of a notebook and fountain pen guy, but the story I want to do is really complex, and DokuWiki has a lot of amazing features to help me keep things organized. There are all these plugins. My favorite is one called Backlinks that creates a page that shows me all the links I created but haven't created pages for. I still use my notebook but I transfer everything to the wiki. I'd be lost without it.

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Keep it clean, keep it classy, and jokes are always appreciated.