I’ve been reading about how bad the market is and how hard it is to get published right now.

I don’t particularly care.

If the market or my writing style or a smudge the mailman left on my query envelope keeps me raking in the rejections….

Fine.

I’m working on the prequel to the series, and I can try my hand querying it when the economy’s better.

But just because the economy is bad, it doesn’t mean I’m going to use that as an excuse to give up.  I’m not going to stop querying and deathgrip my agent list in the hope that the recession will end.

Suck it up, people, and get back to your keyboards.  These stories aren’t going to write themselves.

There are two modes of publishing.  The traditional publishing house and the more modern “do it yourself” variety.

Some people, like my dad, take “do it yourself” to the extreme and print the book themselves on an actual printer and ship it out per order.  This can work, as my dad has proven to me.

Most self-published books are through vanity publishing houses, print-on-demand, or pay-to-publish services.  You pay them and they give you a nice book all bound up to do with as you will.

(more…)

I need to get more queries out.  I know this.

I’m being lazy.

It’s not that I’m discouraged, it’s just that I have a very very long list of agents and it’s a daunting chore.  And, yeah, it’s definitely a chore to get this stuff out.  I just need to find time, energy, and willpower.  Willpower most of all.

Alex agreed to nag me to get more done this weekend.  Wasn’t that nice of him?

This is very interesting.

Glass says that when you start working on creative projects, you have excellent taste but your work isn’t as good as you want it to be.  It takes years to bridge that gap, but a lot of people quit in that period.  The only way to get past it is to keep putting out work until your creations reach the level that your taste expects.

I think this is the “horrible first book, decent second book” thing.  Every writer has projects stuffed away that suck.

Ira Glass is the host of the national radio show, This American Life.

I just finished A Stranger to Command and am in the middle of Crown Duel, and these books make me feel like an incompetent hack with a computer full of childish scribbles.

It’s not that they’re so similar to my work, it’s just that they make me feel so strongly, and I love them so much, I can’t help but think I’m not good enough when I read them.

I am in the midst of a bit of writer’s block.  I can’t start anything new without hating every word.  I’ve been working off and on toward completing a third book in the super hero series, but I’m also still shopping around for an agent for Frostbite (now titled Cold Snap) and trying to flesh out that world in general — I’ve created five new characters to use as background noise in another story, one that actually predates Frostbite/Cold Snap in the general chronology of the series.

I figure if I can’t get F/CS up and running, I can just work on the prequel until it’s ready to shop.  It’s a little darker, and a lot of the agents I’ve looked at seem to want dark and edgy.

I’m about as edgy as bunny slippers, but I’ll see what I can whip up.