The Daily Rejection

I've made it below 90,000 words on the NF, with a completely rewritten ending. I'm now going to go through to polish and trim even more if I can. (To give you perspective, my last draft, the one I queried, was 110,000 words. My first draft was 130,000. This wasn't all verbal diarrhea -- I've taken out a number of topics that are tangential.)

But first, anyone care to join me?

I'd party it up with you, Hathor. But I'm busy clawing my way out of a mountain of laundry

I always figure the laundry will still be there tomorrow. If it bothers my husband, he can do some himself. (I suspect he knows how, although he professes ignorance. I've shown him enough times. And it's not that difficult. Yeesh.)

Edit: in all fairness, he's been doing the cooking since I've been writing. And he said he'd bring home some wine to celebrate my achievement. Although he probably would have been willing to bring home wine to help me mourn an inability to cut my word count. Or a decision to ignore my book altogether.

Hathor said:

I always figure the laundry will still be there tomorrow. If it bothers my husband, he can do some himself. (I suspect he knows how, although he professes ignorance. I've shown him enough times. And it's not that difficult. Yeesh.)

Edit: in all fairness, he's been doing the cooking since I've been writing. And he said he'd bring home some wine to celebrate my achievement. Although he probably would have been willing to bring home wine to help me mourn an inability to cut my word count. Or a decision to ignore my book altogether.

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My husband doesn't care about laundry. He'll happily wear dirty clothes and add extra cologne. My boy child, however, would probably have some objections to going to school naked. He will NOT wear dirty clothes. Ever. Damn kid used to make me change his clothes in the high chair if he dribbled.

Sounds like someone's child needs to be introduced to the fun of doing laundry ASAP

I wish some of your son's persnickety attitude could be transferred to my son. He does laundry, but the concept of hanging or folding clothes promptly is beyond him. He works as an engineer; I guess they make allowances. What he needs is a girlfriend. He's sweet, cute, and has a nice job. He's just a little shy and more than a little geeky. Anyone here live in or around Austin?

Hathor said:

Sounds like someone's child needs to be introduced to the fun of doing laundry ASAP

I wish some of your son's persnickety attitude could be transferred to my son. He does laundry, but the concept of hanging or folding clothes promptly is beyond him. He works as an engineer; I guess they make allowances. What he needs is a girlfriend. He's sweet, cute, and has a nice job. He's just a little shy and more than a little geeky. Anyone here live in or around Austin?

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Hathor said:

Sounds like someone's child needs to be introduced to the fun of doing laundry ASAP

I wish some of your son's persnickety attitude could be transferred to my son. He does laundry, but the concept of hanging or folding clothes promptly is beyond him. He works as an engineer; I guess they make allowances. What he needs is a girlfriend. He's sweet, cute, and has a nice job. He's just a little shy and more than a little geeky. Anyone here live in or around Austin?

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I'm a lot like your son. I will wash and dry, then pile, pick from the pile until it gets run down and dirty again, then wash it all again, and start the picking...

Hathor, I'd kill to get my problem book trimmed down to 110K from 140K.
I can do it, but it will be painful. I keep finding things to add.

But this poor mms has already gone through dozens of agents and two editors, amazing triumphs and crushing setbacks. This is the last chance I have to impress the one agent who might take it on, so I have to do this right.

Good luck, Filigree. Cutting is hard work.

I found cutting my fiction to be harder than non-fiction. With the non-fiction, I could tell myself, "Oh, I'm repeating myself," or "This part is available in other books." Or even, "no one will care." (How I organized my special education and homeschooling files -- yeah, Hathor, inquiring minds want to know. The world awaits every last, tiny jewel of your insight and experience.)

With the non-fiction, so far, I've cut passages, places I know I was repetitious, and my pet ways of taking more words than necessary. (I posted my personal list earlier. I found it easier to cut when I used the "find" function for each instead of just reading through.) Now I've got to go through it line-by-line to see if each might be shorter or even eliminated. For example, I say, "due to the fact that" instead of "because." Or I've made my point and I need to move on, already. (Yes, they said my daughter had a learning disability for written language -- to her face -- based on a test I later learned involved doing jigsaw puzzles. That's so stupid, it's memorable. I don't have to keep bitching about it.)

Have you read your work out loud? I caught things with the fiction that way I didn't ever see no matter how many times I silently read. Dialogue in particular was easier to trim if I was speaking the lines. Also, I seemed to be able to cut more easily (ruthlessly) from a hard copy, for whatever reason. I'd tell myself I had to cut a few words at least from each page.

Again, good luck. (There I go, being repetitious.) But I'm sure you'll be able to do it -- because you have to. Necessity has a way of focusing your mind.

Form R today on a QL I already closed out NR. At least it didn't hurt.

Taking kidlets to the dentist. Boy child is hoping dentist will say it's okay to drink from a straw again. Wish us luck. Please. We need some luck.

I actually find cutting easy (though there's some things I had to cut I felt very sad about cutting). So what if the novel's just 54 K... more stuff must be cut! Haha, sigh. The project to Make It Longer is going all right though, I've come up with lots more stuff I can get into in more depth, places to add more detail, etc. Let's hope I don't end up cutting more in return...

I feel like I'm the person who needs to gain weight in a world where everyone else is focused on losing weight (which I've been too, actually). People are like, ah, cool, I WISH I had to gain weight... except it's just as damn hard as losing it. We'll all get there, though!

Anyway, yeah, woke up to a lovely rejection letter. It's a bit of a relief in a way, since I've decided the novel needs more work, but also, well, it's a rejection.

Must go and get ready for work.... damn day job!

Oh and P. S. Good luck to you and your son, Carleree!

Good luck, Carleree. I feel for you. Have some luck. *hands luck over*

flapper - I knew you could do it.

Now I wish I knew I could do it. I'm actually beginning to see the points some of the agents made to me. I discovered that my book's lack of chronological order is trickier to fix than I thought. Some of the stuff I thought was great, I now read and think, "Blah, blah, blah." I'm trying to add more anecdotes, like they suggested. But, yeesh, this was a long time ago. My memory is rather foggy.

I guess I shouldn't have tried to revise my book yesterday, an even-numbered day. It didn't help that the damn formatting is getting screwy again. Like, why would centering the chapter title cause a later paragraph to suddenly center itself? Fix the latter, and the chapter title becomes left-justified again. Back and forth, back and forth, until I finally have it right and save. (But then later I look and it's all goofy again.) My indentations keep disappearing, as do my bullet-point designations. Oh, and periodically, Word insists that a new paragraph should be in Arial (which I never used in the book). Or some of the endnotes decide on their own that they're so important they deserve full-sized numbers, not superscripted ones. Aargh. The thing is afflicted by evil spirits, I tell you. Sometimes I think it would be easier to retype it all from scratch.

Oh, well, back to it. Maybe things will go better today.

Set your indents with the ruler to begin with. If I want to center anything, I press enter a couple times to go down, then click on the line I want, select centering, and type.

Have you tried turning off auto-format?

Carleree said:

Hathor, thanks for the luck. I should ask for some more often. Both kids are cavity free and boy child's teeth have stabilized enough to proceed with treatement. Woot!

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Yay! Time for a straw party!

Analog rejected my short story. No real surprise there.

Sydneyd said:

Yay! Time for a straw party!

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Absolutely. Straws all around.

K. Taylor said:

Set your indents with the ruler to begin with. If I want to center anything, I press enter a couple times to go down, then click on the line I want, select centering, and type.

Have you tried turning off auto-format?

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Indents set with ruler already. I type things as centered and they are. Then they switch to something else on their own.

However, you may have figured out my problem. I turned auto-format off for my previous draft. I created a new file for my next draft and that didn't get translated over. I still don't understand why they think my preferred style is to randomly switch to centered text or a different font, but the problem may be solved. My fingers are crossed, anyway. I was finding the only way to permanently fix things was to use format painter.

I think things got squirrely with my original draft long ago when I was learning Word2007 and flirted with Styles temporarily. Also, cutting and pasting from other people's documents (websites, journal articles, etc.) sometimes pulled in their formatting, best I can tell.

Thanks! This may work better than swearing at my computer.

Sorry Shadow_Ferret. An R is hard even if expected.

Yay, Carleree. Feel free to send over any cupcakes you have to help keep your kids cavity-free. I'm feeling all nostalgic about my kids now. My husband and I went to a coffee shop and brainstormed recollections of them when they were young. Some stuff fits into my book, other anecdotes don't (I love the leprosy medicine story, but it doesn't tie into anything).

Well, tonight's game seven, your highness. Are you going to watch? And, by the way: Holtby, Holtby, Holtby.

I can't watch the game tonight, so the Caps should be fine.

Have you ever sent yourself an e-mail, just to check that it still works?

Carleree said:

I can't watch the game tonight, so the Caps should be fine.

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Uh, is that how it works?

From what I can tell, there are a variety of curses involved. The Caps have lost a multitude of game sevens in recent years. Boston sports fans generally seem to feel the sports gods are fickle. Now there's the factor of your attention. It's getting complicated.

Drachen Jager said:

Have you ever sent yourself an e-mail, just to check that it still works?

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Nope. Guess you're a weirdo.

Hathor said:

Uh, is that how it works?

From what I can tell, there are a variety of curses involved. The Caps have lost a multitude of game sevens in recent years. Boston sports fans generally seem to feel the sports gods are fickle. Now there's the factor of your attention. It's getting complicated.

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Yes, that's how it works. My mother says I'm not all powerful like I say I am, but she doesn't know me that well.

NOTHING IS HAPPENING. YES. I AM SHOUTING.

Well, except for the Caps just winning in overtime...