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Saturday, November 17, 2012

How Long to Write a Book

From a Recent Kindle Forum Post



How about 20 years? lol No It hsn't taken me that long to wriite The Road to Astroworld. What has taken a long time is getting to this stage of almost ready to send to a prof Editor. The book was written by hand in 1989 or so. I dealt with my Mother's illness from 1990 until 1992. In around '93 or '94 I went to a writer's conference in Austin and met an Agent who worked for Jean Naggar. She loved the novel and some of my other short stories. She shopped them around. She had modet success with the stories getting them into anthologies. She shopped Astroworld until she dropped (hence the term shop 'til you drop--no not really) But She did shop it around for four years until she exhausted all of her avenues. In the meantime I wasn't putting anything out saleable, so I lost her services. I put it away for while. I didn't know how to read the clues in the rejection letters. The clues didn't say the writing was horrible or mention grammar and spelling errors. The overriding theme was "we don't know how we can sell this, or it's not right for us." Let me also say that it made it to an Editor at a major house, but she couldn't convince "the committee." In the meantime liffe goes on. I get a huge case of writer's block. I don't want to go through the daunting process of getting another agent or shopping the novel around, So i forget it for spells. I take it out and decide it needs some major rewrites. I spend some time trying to make it all first person--bad idea. Forget it some more. So here we are in 2012. I've grown somewhat in my skill and see that the novel does need some major tweaking, but not a rewrite. Thanks to this new publishing era, I expect The Road to Astroworld to make it's debut in early 2013--if the Mayans are wrong.

Now thanks to NANOWRIMO one can write a novel in a month's time during the month of November. However unless you are a literary genius, what you will produce at best is a gibberishy 50,000 word outline that should take you a couple of months (at the very least) to polish into a decent novel. I've written two books using this intense method. Are they ready for prime time? Not one bit. But it focuses you to the task and you can say you wrote a novel.

Free Excerpt from Road to Astroworld
http://bit.ly/S1EVCe

Free Excerpt from The Butterfly Killer (Written during NANOWRIMO 2011)
http://bit.ly/RvqCFt

NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month)
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
Of course it's too late to start now unless you drink coffee by the gallons

Harvey on Amazon
Christmas in The Bottoms
http://amzn.to/W4ZMbF
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