Reading and rejection

Perhaps I should catalog what I've read recently. Just yesterday I finished In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle, which was part of a two-person book club I am part of. It's a novel about tragedy and redemption set in a Wisconsin forest. While it's well-written and very evocative, it's not the type of book I normally read, and therefore I was left feeling kind of blasé about it.

I had another rejection in my inbox today. The email began "Dear Author," and when that's the case, you know right away which direction the message is headed.

Queries for Christmas

This Christmas I received a premium membership to querytracker.net/, courtesy of my mom. It's a website that allows you to search available agents and submit queries to them based on the types of books they represent. You can search by how often the agent responds, how often they ask to see a full manuscript, etc.

I used it throughout 2011 to submit a dozen or so queries for my sci-fi novel. Form letters were the norm and sometimes I received no reply at all, but I did get one full and one partial request. Though both agents declined to represent my manuscript, the fact that they liked what they saw is encouraging. Since I have already declared 2012 to be a year of success, I plan to use this membership as much as I can. I will be published!

Novel stuff

Last month I sent out queries to about a dozen agents, hoping they might be interested in my 400-page novel. I didn't hear anything from most of them--one said they were not accepting anything from new authors at the moment, and another said they were not interested in my work.

A few days ago, an assistant from a fairly well-known agency asked to look at the first 50 pages of my manuscript. My first partial! I barely had a weekend to ride high off this validation before I was contacted again by the agency and asked to submit the full manuscript.

Wow! I'm starting to think those six months of writing will actually pay off. Stay tuned to this blog for further updates.

The Best Books of 2010

Happy New Year!

According to Shelfari, which I use to keep track of my reading, I read 45 books last year (holy crap!). In recognition of this fact, I am going to move away from the zoo for just a moment and list my favorite books of 2010. These are not necessarily books that came out in 2010, but books I read in the calendar year:

1.) The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. (Incidentally, the book that convinced me to write my own novel)
2.) Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer.
3.) Monster of God by David Quammen.
4.) The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold.
5.) The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi.
6.) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
7.) Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday.
8.) Apples Are From Kazakhstan by Christopher Robbins.
9.) Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky.
10.) The Spy Who Died of Boredom by George Mikes.

And now, for a little reading analysis: of those books, only three are fiction (Chabon, Diaz, and Mikes). This is roughly in line with my own reading habits, which involves mainly nonfiction (especially history). According to Shelfari, I read 19 fiction books and 26 nonfiction books.

I think this also aligns with the American public as a whole, which tends to favor nonfiction. I'm not sure what the reason for this is, but I think it has to do with people preferring subjects they already know something about, and not having to get invested in a book with unfamiliar characters, plot, and symbolic imagery.

Finished!

Yesterday, a little before 4pm, I finished my novel! I started it in May, though the exact date escapes me (the Word document was created in January, so that wouldn't be of any help).

What an incredible feeling! Now I'll sit on it and work on something else, ready to look at it with fresh eyes in the future.

I broke Microsoft Word Again

Mere weeks after causing Word to stop spell-checking my novel, I've once again upset the internal workings of this program. On Monday I reached the magic number of 100,000 words. As soon as I passed 99,999 the "word count" indicator at the bottom of the window disappeared, as you can see in the screen shot below:


This is merely a glitch with the indicator on the window, because the number of words is still counted by the program:
I imagine this isn't a big problem because, let's be honest, who ever reaches 100,000 words in a document? Ah, what a magical number.

I broke Microsoft Word

I am currently writing a science-fiction novel, which has ballooned recently to 250 pages and 70,000 words (two-thirds done!). The other day when I was typing away on it a Microsoft Word error message popped up:

"There are too many spelling or grammatical errors in (document name) to continue displaying them. To check the spelling and grammar of this document, choose Spelling and Grammar from the Tools menu."

What this means is that I won't get anymore red squiggly lines under words unless I break up the novel into smaller documents. There are so many made-up words (alien names, planet names, etc.) that Word has stopped counting them--trust me, I'm not that horrible at spelling and grammar.

I have taken this error message as a compliment, since it shows I've written so much that even my computer can't keep up!

And I have

I'm back after a year. Sorry it's been so long, but I was recently recalled to Washington over my controversial comments in Us Weekly.

Where will I take this blog? If possible, I may change its title to a clever, punny one not related to English poets. I may also use it as a place for ruminations of my life and the world. Right now I'm working at the Milwaukee Zoo and also writing a little bit of sci-fi.

Stay tuned.