Words
I wrote more words of the Character Stains novel and now consider the first draft finished. Of course there is still the tricky job of checking it over before I send it anywhere, but still. It feels finished, essentially. I added a few thousand words in the middle and tied up a few loose ends using relatively few words. It is amazing what a few extra sentences can do.
It is shortish (only about 62,000 words) but it takes up quite a few pages - 314 pages in Courier New, 12 point on US letter paper. Obviously it will be submitted on A4. Does anyone have any idea of good, readable fonts for submitting things? Courier looks rubbish and Times New Roman is not to everyone's taste. Maybe I should submit it in Comic Sans Serif, on green paper with pink ink or something (at least then the inevitable rejection won't be anything to do with the quality of the writing).
I do wonder whether it would have been better as a screenplay. Though the chances of getting anything on TV seem even more remote than getting a novel published. Not that many dramas getting commissioned, especially when they are neither historical, police procedural nor written by someone already well known.
Apart from Character Stains and the novella (still available on Kindle, iBooks and Lulu - do go and buy - just search for "Elise Harris" and "Over the Underground" - and, no it isn't about Wombles or Andy Warhol, sorry) I still have at least four partially completed manuscripts that I should probably do something with.
There a Victorian-set gothic horror with automatons, and possibly demons (only about 20,000 words of that so far)
A modern (though also slightly gothic) lad lit mystery at almost 60,000 words. That needs a lot more work and is not finished. I suppose it broadly comes under the category of "crime", so might be the most likely to sell if I ever do finish the thing.
One set in medieval Italy and France (probably for the young adult market) at just over 50,000 so far and probably not even half done. It seems to have turned into a road trip. A medieval road trip - not sure why. It features pirates, refugees from the inquisition and a very young Lucrezia Borgia, in disguise in a sort of Twelfth Night way.
Another sort of gothic thing that is partially set in the present day and partly in the late 1930s - that one is finished but would probably work better as two separate novels. It's also semi-linked to the novella and has a few themes and characters in common. That's at about 60,000 too.
I seem to run out of steam after that many words. Maybe because there seems little point in finishing them when there is so little chance of publication.
I also have about six full and partial length screenplays which are probably all too odd to produce. Plus poems, short stories, sundry stuff that I will file under "probably shouldn't have written", journalism... and tweets. Oh and a paper diary from my teens to fairly recently.
And another other partial novel that is so very peculiar I am not sure it's even worth revisiting.
I have said it before, I think, but I must have written millions of words in my lifetime (I know I have - I worked out that I had produced more than that on this journal alone.) What a shame it has produced so few concrete results.
Good lord, I have been writing these things since I was about 15. You would think I would have got somewhere of given up by now. I must be a masochist or something.
I think I might have started writing a novel when I was 11, actually. It was called Jinny and the Gobbledygook. I didn't write very much of it because people (parents, school friends, teachers) kept telling me what a stupid title that was.
I am not sure if I give up too easily or if I should just give up altogether. I do either stick at something for too long or give up just before I get somewhere. That can't be healthy.
Ah well, at least I have almost, sort of, maybe finished this. Now to actually send it somewhere, I suppose.
It is shortish (only about 62,000 words) but it takes up quite a few pages - 314 pages in Courier New, 12 point on US letter paper. Obviously it will be submitted on A4. Does anyone have any idea of good, readable fonts for submitting things? Courier looks rubbish and Times New Roman is not to everyone's taste. Maybe I should submit it in Comic Sans Serif, on green paper with pink ink or something (at least then the inevitable rejection won't be anything to do with the quality of the writing).
I do wonder whether it would have been better as a screenplay. Though the chances of getting anything on TV seem even more remote than getting a novel published. Not that many dramas getting commissioned, especially when they are neither historical, police procedural nor written by someone already well known.
Apart from Character Stains and the novella (still available on Kindle, iBooks and Lulu - do go and buy - just search for "Elise Harris" and "Over the Underground" - and, no it isn't about Wombles or Andy Warhol, sorry) I still have at least four partially completed manuscripts that I should probably do something with.
I seem to run out of steam after that many words. Maybe because there seems little point in finishing them when there is so little chance of publication.
I also have about six full and partial length screenplays which are probably all too odd to produce. Plus poems, short stories, sundry stuff that I will file under "probably shouldn't have written", journalism... and tweets. Oh and a paper diary from my teens to fairly recently.
And another other partial novel that is so very peculiar I am not sure it's even worth revisiting.
I have said it before, I think, but I must have written millions of words in my lifetime (I know I have - I worked out that I had produced more than that on this journal alone.) What a shame it has produced so few concrete results.
Good lord, I have been writing these things since I was about 15. You would think I would have got somewhere of given up by now. I must be a masochist or something.
I think I might have started writing a novel when I was 11, actually. It was called Jinny and the Gobbledygook. I didn't write very much of it because people (parents, school friends, teachers) kept telling me what a stupid title that was.
I am not sure if I give up too easily or if I should just give up altogether. I do either stick at something for too long or give up just before I get somewhere. That can't be healthy.
Ah well, at least I have almost, sort of, maybe finished this. Now to actually send it somewhere, I suppose.