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Well, the insurance adjuster declared my sister's house too unsafe for us to empty it ourselves--snapped rafters, etc.--so while we waited for professionals to do that job, Dan and I spent the weekend moving things from my parents' house into storage. Yes, Pru is moving her family into my old bedroom, even though the insurance would pay to put her up in an apartment while her house gets rebuilt. Her ulterior motive: to save my parents from their hoarding behavior. We're all hoping that, when she moves back out in 6-12 months, she'll leave a more livable space behind her.
We unearthed some wonderful stuff: my father's love letters to my mother from basic training; disturbing 19th century jewelry made of woven human hair, which entirely fails to commemorate whatever dead relative it was supposed to remind the living of; a handpainted scroll from the Shinto shrine at Tagata, home of the infamous fertility festival, with detailed illustrations.
( In Which Little Six-Year-Old Sarah Writes a Book That Elicits Censorship )
I have mellowed out a bit since 1976.
Anyhow, the Bob manuscript is ready for beta readers. Anyone who reads it to the end will see why it absolutely cannot keep its current title, "Bob and the Black Head of Atho." I'm having difficulty getting past my affection for the title it can't keep. Proposals for alternative titles will be greeted with glee. Proposals for cuts will be greeted with gratitude. Proposals for additions to the ms will be greeted with weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, because it's 37,000 words long at the moment.
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matociquala, who was very encouraging about the storytelling when she read the first few pages in the workshop session at the conference, sighed when I told her the word count--people are always sighing over my word counts--and said, "Don't bother cutting it down to 25K. It won't be any easier to sell at 25K than it will at 35K." She knows her stuff, and her advice is always worth listening to.
I suspect that, in my place, a sensible person would have resigned herself either to cutting it back even further than 25K, or to pumping the story up to 80K (the low end of the novel range), in the interest of appeasing the market, which is not especially welcoming to novellas. Novellas are problematic. Some magazines still buy them, but they eat up a lot of pages, and no editor is at ease dedicating a quarter of an issue to a totally unknown writer.
But do I have any sense? Judge for yourself. I received her advice with relief, because it meant that, instead of spending my energy on a desperate effort to cut the story back by a third of its length, I was free to concentrate on making the story good. If Bob is doomed to be trunked, I might as well please myself.
Probably this ms will finish making the rounds of the very few markets that publish novellas in my genre right quickly, and sooner rather than later will get trunked indefinitely. Let it be a lesson to me: if I need to carve miniatures, I should start with smaller blocks of marble. Read it now, if you're curious. It'll be a long time before I have the kind of name that makes a magazine editor want to look at a 37K novella.
We unearthed some wonderful stuff: my father's love letters to my mother from basic training; disturbing 19th century jewelry made of woven human hair, which entirely fails to commemorate whatever dead relative it was supposed to remind the living of; a handpainted scroll from the Shinto shrine at Tagata, home of the infamous fertility festival, with detailed illustrations.
( In Which Little Six-Year-Old Sarah Writes a Book That Elicits Censorship )
I have mellowed out a bit since 1976.
Anyhow, the Bob manuscript is ready for beta readers. Anyone who reads it to the end will see why it absolutely cannot keep its current title, "Bob and the Black Head of Atho." I'm having difficulty getting past my affection for the title it can't keep. Proposals for alternative titles will be greeted with glee. Proposals for cuts will be greeted with gratitude. Proposals for additions to the ms will be greeted with weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, because it's 37,000 words long at the moment.
matociquala, who was very encouraging about the storytelling when she read the first few pages in the workshop session at the conference, sighed when I told her the word count--people are always sighing over my word counts--and said, "Don't bother cutting it down to 25K. It won't be any easier to sell at 25K than it will at 35K." She knows her stuff, and her advice is always worth listening to.I suspect that, in my place, a sensible person would have resigned herself either to cutting it back even further than 25K, or to pumping the story up to 80K (the low end of the novel range), in the interest of appeasing the market, which is not especially welcoming to novellas. Novellas are problematic. Some magazines still buy them, but they eat up a lot of pages, and no editor is at ease dedicating a quarter of an issue to a totally unknown writer.
But do I have any sense? Judge for yourself. I received her advice with relief, because it meant that, instead of spending my energy on a desperate effort to cut the story back by a third of its length, I was free to concentrate on making the story good. If Bob is doomed to be trunked, I might as well please myself.
Probably this ms will finish making the rounds of the very few markets that publish novellas in my genre right quickly, and sooner rather than later will get trunked indefinitely. Let it be a lesson to me: if I need to carve miniatures, I should start with smaller blocks of marble. Read it now, if you're curious. It'll be a long time before I have the kind of name that makes a magazine editor want to look at a 37K novella.
