Author Notes, January 2024
Jan. 3rd, 2024 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3I've been postponing a full-on resumption of querying until it should seem I was no longer dipping in to make little edits to the manuscript. I guess I forgot that that never happens, really.
One reason forprocrastinating postponing -- aside from the obvious sense that one should get one's book into final form and then query -- is that I keep an array of snippets of the sort that lit agents ask to receive: 50 sample pages, first 25 pages, a sample chapter, first 5 pages, etc. Any of which might be out of date if I'm continually editing the actual manuscript.
That's a bit of a headache, actually. For American lit agencies in particular, sample materials are nearly always requested to be either pasted into the body of the email or else pasted into a web form such as QueryTracker. Either way, you can't depend on anything but plain text to go through and land intact. No tab stops or first-paragraph indents, no bold or italic.
So periodically I have to refresh all my snippets. Open the actual manuscript, select the relevant chunks and copy, paste into a plain text editor (I use BBEdit), replace all returns with double returns so there'll be a white space between paragraphs (since there's no paragraph indent), then comb through that portion of the manuscript looking for italicized passages and setting them off in the plain text with *asterisks*.
I've switched to keeping the snippets in a database, so that I've got a modification date on each one. Version control!
I'm seldom doing "deep edits" these days; the manuscript really is pretty stable. I mean, it's rare at this point for me to insert a scene or append another paragraph to a dialogue.
My most common edits are individual sentences I'm reading for the ten zillionth time and realize that it sounds slightly awkward or unclear and that I reacted that way last time and the time before that, so yeah, how can this be improved?
I confess I woke up the other day sitting bolt-upright in bed, convinced I had kept the same nurses on continual shift for 24 hours. That's the kind of error that can bounce an alert reader out of the flow of the story, so that would be bad. (I hadn't, though -- the scenes in question are rather long scenes measured in words and pages but despite all that takes place, no nurse ends up being in the story for over 12 hours of chronological time -- whew!)
Those are the sort of errors I have to watch out for. Sequences of events that read well and feel plausible until some little discrepancy catches your attention and makes the whole scene unravel. Like having everyone sit down for supper on page 137 and then you get two characters discussing what they want for supper on page 139.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
One reason for
That's a bit of a headache, actually. For American lit agencies in particular, sample materials are nearly always requested to be either pasted into the body of the email or else pasted into a web form such as QueryTracker. Either way, you can't depend on anything but plain text to go through and land intact. No tab stops or first-paragraph indents, no bold or italic.
So periodically I have to refresh all my snippets. Open the actual manuscript, select the relevant chunks and copy, paste into a plain text editor (I use BBEdit), replace all returns with double returns so there'll be a white space between paragraphs (since there's no paragraph indent), then comb through that portion of the manuscript looking for italicized passages and setting them off in the plain text with *asterisks*.
I've switched to keeping the snippets in a database, so that I've got a modification date on each one. Version control!
I'm seldom doing "deep edits" these days; the manuscript really is pretty stable. I mean, it's rare at this point for me to insert a scene or append another paragraph to a dialogue.
My most common edits are individual sentences I'm reading for the ten zillionth time and realize that it sounds slightly awkward or unclear and that I reacted that way last time and the time before that, so yeah, how can this be improved?
I confess I woke up the other day sitting bolt-upright in bed, convinced I had kept the same nurses on continual shift for 24 hours. That's the kind of error that can bounce an alert reader out of the flow of the story, so that would be bad. (I hadn't, though -- the scenes in question are rather long scenes measured in words and pages but despite all that takes place, no nurse ends up being in the story for over 12 hours of chronological time -- whew!)
Those are the sort of errors I have to watch out for. Sequences of events that read well and feel plausible until some little discrepancy catches your attention and makes the whole scene unravel. Like having everyone sit down for supper on page 137 and then you get two characters discussing what they want for supper on page 139.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
