Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Musings

Musings

Today I got an E-mail from a publisher wanting to see the first 3 Chapters of Habit of Despair. I suppose this is a step in the right direction however, I am not going to get my hopes up. I am sure there are many writers at Writing.com that have been asked to do the same thing and it came to naught.

Anyway, I consider it a milestone of sorts….I guess the next one is being asked to submit the whole manuscript. I only submitted to one publisher so I guess that isn’t too bad. I think the first three chapters are pretty good.
It’s a pretty good story actually and I don’t really feel I did it justice. It reminds me in some regards of the Mini-Series, Deadwood and Pillars of the Earth. I don’t think my antagonists are that evil or that my protagonists are all that good, however my wife says the antagonists are pretty bad.

I cleaned up to Chapter 12 today and am putting the chapters into a separate word processing file. I bought a couple of Word 2010 books and am really amazed at the capability of the program. In the Dummies book is a chapter on Writers and how you go about linking the chapters together rather than trying to cram them into a humongous single document file…..I haven’t tried it but it shows how to write an outline that links the chapters and when you print it brings them up in the same format with age numbers….Doesn’t look that difficult. I bought another Word 2010 book that didn’t even mention how to do the linking thing….. Perhaps it was included in an earlier edition and this one just covers the new stuff. Just goes to show you can never have enough good references.

The grammar and spell checker in Word 2010 is amazing. I am pulling files back off Writing.com and running them though and there are all kinds of new mistakes showing up. It’s a good program and something to consider as a candidate for a Writing program. I took a college course on Word several years ago and it was a semester long….and it just gave an overview of the integrated word processing, graphics, spread sheet and data base capabilities.

I had a reader tell me she had read the whole novel and recommended that I go to straight 3rd person….She said the First Person didn’t fly on the narrator….I had already come to the same conclusion and was changing it on the second draft. That was her only comment….I guess if it held her interest long enough to read the whole thing that is saying something. What amazes me most is that whole is greater than the sum of the parts….Whether or not it is successful it is fun for me to read how the chapters flow together when I am used to just seeing them as a collection of parts. It’s the same feeling I get putting a car together and seeing it come together or assembling an engine and hearing it roar to life.

I seem to be attracting the same readers to this blog…..I hope my readers have fun with it… the reason I do it is more for my benefit than anyone else’s. The more diversity a writer has in their writing the better the quality of the work…..Sometimes you have to get away from a project and do a couple of contests or write some short stories….Yes it makes it harder to get back into the harness but once you do you realize how important a breather can be.