Wait, What? Er... I Still Have a Blog?!

Yeah, I know. I am a horrible, horrible blogger. There's not much I can say to vindicate myself, but I'm going to try like hell anyway.

Not Much to Talk About (until now)
The main reason is that I don't have much to promote at the moment. A few short stories, sure, but they've been out there for several years now. The other reason is that I figure any time spent writing on here would be better spent on my novel -- 'Walk a Web of Spiders'.

Yep, that one. The one I've been working on for forever. Well, it's not for a lack of discipline or motivation. I've maintained the same writing schedule every day since I started writing it -- 2 - 3 hours every morning (holidays, weekends, vacations be damned!) But on the weekdays, I have to stop and go to work. On the weekends I stop when my kids and wife wake up so we can hang out and do stuff.

But I'm updating the blog now. So there must be something worth writing about, right? Yaasss! 'Walk a Web of Spiders' is so close to done it's ridiculous. In fact, I'm giving it one more spit shine and then it'll be ready for querying. I'm really excited about it. Just to get it to this point is amazing to me. I've learned a lot in the rewrites/drafts since.

The biggest thing I've learned is that so much time is required AFTER you think it's ready. Ready, to me, was the state it was in in November -- a 140K suspense story that had gone through 5 drafts, followed by two read-throughs by me on my Kindle to fix glaring mistakes,  followed by a beta read by 20 or so people, and then followed by another draft to fix the mistakes found by my beta readers.

I then tackled the query (took a day or two. not bad). And the synopsis (a week, and man that was a sucky week... but I did it). Feeling smug with myself, I sent my query to queryshark, expecting Janet to tell me how great it was. NOPE. Not only was the query shredded but, more importantly, Janet told me what I kinda already knew but tried to ignore anyway -- 140K is too long for a suspense story. So I cried got out the ax and started chopping. Let me take a second to say how great the queryshark website is. The advice is invaluable. For as bad as my initial query was it would have been twenty times worse if I hadn't gone through the queryshark archives. So anyway, yeah. My query sucked. My novel was far too long.

Stephen King has a quote that I latched onto during that time: “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”

Oh it hurt, but it felt right too. November was basically dedicated to this process and by the end I was down to something promising -- a 108K suspense novel that flowed a lot better. Still not as slim as I wanted, but (at the time) as slim as I could get it.

Then the query. I rewrote it and tried again. QueryShark also offers a paid service, where she'll review not only your query but the first five pages and help you revise it up to two times. I took her up on it and holy hell... Janet cut about 350 words of fat from the first five pages. And I saw it. I saw what she did, the tone she set. So what I did next was carry it on throughout the rest of the novel. Guess what. I am now staring at a 98K word suspense novel that freakin' hums, and it's accompanied by a kick-ass query.

And now? Well, again, I thought I was done. Stupid me. I threw the MS on my Kindle and started my reread. I'm about 60% done with the reread and so far have marked over 200 separate things to change -- little things like removing passive voice and random bits of clunkiness. I'm hoping this is the final pass. I'm actually pretty confident that it will be. Then onto querying for realz.

Wish me luck!



-- Tim