A good friend of the site kindly put me in touch with a published author this week and I had a very edifying and encouraging discussion.\u00a0 He provided me with the kind of practical advice that I\u2019ve been looking for.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not that his information differed from some of the things I\u2019ve been reading but rather that he provided reinforcement for some of the things I had been leaning toward but agonizing about.\u00a0 I will take a page from Camera Girl\u2019s book and as she famously said (and as she claims Nike plagiarized her by saying), \u201cJust do it!\u201d<\/p>\n
So, I spent a couple of hours doing a clean up of a copy of the manuscript that I want to send out to a medium sized publishing house that I know is friendly to folks of my political and cultural leanings.\u00a0 Who knew that em-dashes are not welcome everywhere?\u00a0 Well potato\/puhtatah.\u00a0 When in Rome do as the Romans do.\u00a0 Tippecanoe and Tyler too, I guess.<\/p>\n
Yes, I\u2019m now on the manic climb of the manic\/depressive roller coaster and all things are possible and everything is easy.\u00a0 Soon I\u2019ll be crashing down into the abyss of hopelessness and despair.\u00a0 Well \u2026, actually not.\u00a0 There\u2019s a medicine in actually finishing anything.\u00a0 The whole \u201cbeginning, middle and end\u201d thing is not just a concept.\u00a0 It\u2019s a part of human nature and there is salvation in typing that last word and hitting the period key. Bang!<\/p>\n
So, tomorrow is work and maybe more work.\u00a0 There are new systems at work that have to be learned and used.\u00a0 And people to train and all kinds of boring and stupid things to do.\u00a0 But even that doesn\u2019t daunt me right now.\u00a0 So, I\u2019m looking ahead to sending the manuscript out in the next few days and then I\u2019ll see if there are any agents that I might want to contact.\u00a0 For that I\u2019ll have to put together a query letter which sounds like a goofy thing.\u00a0 It\u2019s a kind of sales pitch to inspire the agent to want to handle your book in discussions with publishers.\u00a0 I imagine Don Draper of Mad Men standing up at a blackboard pointing at a sketch of something inspirational and gesticulating wildly while saying incredibly persuasive things about my creative genius.<\/p>\n
But from what I\u2019ve heard it won\u2019t be Don Draper because most agents, editors, publishers and probably everyone else in the publishing business are all women.\u00a0 And probably not fun women like Camera Girl who has a great sense of humor (most of the time) but serious and really annoying women who say \u201cthey and them\u201d instead of \u201cshe and her.\u201d\u00a0 Well, what can you do?\u00a0 The world is made up of all kinds of folks and as that famous philosopher Rodney King once asked, \u201cWhy can\u2019t we all just get along?\u201d\u00a0 So, I must do my best to struggle and survive regardless of my instincts and early training.\u00a0 I will put on my best smile and put my best foot forward and step into the future.\u00a0 But no matter what, there will be no girl-boss in \u201cThe Sniper.\u201d\u00a0 Bogey cannot be Bogita!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A good friend of the site kindly put me in touch with a published author this week and I had a very edifying and encouraging<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[1290,4484],"class_list":["post-34522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-my-fiction","tag-the-american-archipelago-book-1-the-sniper"],"yoast_head":"\n