The Tale of Two Calendars

 Let me introduce you to two calendars. My writing calendars. This first calendar was my planned writing schedule for the past three months. I take Sunday's off, and the other six days of the week my schedule requires at least 1000 words of new writing each day and, on editing days, five to ten chapters cleaned. The color blocks are each a project I'm working on. Gray was the family reunion.

This second calendar is what actually happened. Notice the large chunks of white space. Notice the holes in my schedule. Notice the lack of coherent theme. It's depressing, isn't it? 

This is what happens when you have too many projects and not enough focus. Or perhaps not the right priorities. 

You see, juggling multiple projects at once is a required part of writing for most young authors. We have short stories, novellas, and multiple novels all in different stages of development so that no time is wasted. You can't spend a week writing a 10,000 word short story and then six months twiddling your thumbs and watching cat videos on Youtube waiting to find out if the story was accepted by a publication that's going to pay you five cents a word.

What you need to do is spend a week writing the 10k short story, another week editing it, and then kick it out the door so you can go back to work on a novel or novella that will definitely get published in the next 12 months. And as soon as that project goes off to your beta readers, or editor, or agent, you need to open up the next thing on the list and get writing.

This can be a very smooth process if you're somewhat smarter than me and have a plan for both success and failure.

What happened to me in mid-July was I had a crisis of faith. 

After sending off my latest novella to my editor and my revised novel to my (soon-to-be) agent I was worried that both of them would come back with rejections. The longer I waited, the more I was convinced my writing career was over. I didn't have anything ready for publication, and when a short story rejection came in I started making a plan for escaping the publishing madness.

I started looking for graduate programs that taught what I was interested in. I made budgets and a five-year-plan. I talked to my family to see if they'd support another parent in grad school. Luckily, my husband's experience had been fairly decent and the kids didn't see anything wrong with mom doing homework. If anything, it was divine retribution.

Then, a few weeks after I started planning to bury my dead career, my agent called to make The Offer. My editor sent me a contract for EVEN VILLAINS HAVE INTERNS (Delilah on the calendar), and mentioned that the press was considering expanding to print and audio books. Suddenly my world was flipped upside down and I floundered like a frog on a hot skillet. 

Instead of having vague, self-appointed deadlines I had two hard deadlines with more coming. I had contracts. There were people waiting on me to get things done. A lot of those white days were planning, but quite a few were days I curled in on myself because I had no clue what I should be doing. 

Indecision paralyzed me. 

And I wasted most of August and September panicking over what to do next in between rounds of edits with both my agent and my editor. Finally my good friend Kait Nolan sat me down and made me figure out what I needed to actually do.

Now the problem is getting back in the habit. It's painfully obvious from my calendar that I'm out of the daily writing habit I'd developed back in May. Vacation is murder for good behavior. October and November will be spent remedying this lapse of behavior. October is the month for finishing everything. LADY OF THE LAKE and EVEN VILLAINS SAVE THE DAY need words, about 20k apiece which is just a few thousands words shy of the 50k everyone aims for in November.

November will be the month I tackle JANE 2 and let LADY and SAVE rest with the betas. And then in December I'll kill all my good writing habits by moving to Alaska and dying of frostbite. But at least I have a plan! 

Friday Snippet!

Because I have nothing interesting to blog today and you deserve something after all those long posts earlier this week. Short, sweet, to the point... the Lady of the Lake talks to the only nun in Camelot. 

“Is it truly him?”

“Aye.”

She sighed breathily. “They still tell tales of Robin and his men at the campfire. So romantic!”

“Didn’t ye take an oath of chastity?”

“Yes, in the year of Our Lord seventeen eighty-seven. Mais il n'y a aucun dieu dans Camelot.”

“No gods worth mentioning,” I agreed.

Youthful Hijinks

Let's end the week on a high note. How about a snippet from LADY OF THE LAKE?

He stopped walking. "Where are we going?"

"We? Nowhere. I'm walking away. There's a hotel somewhere nearby where I can pass the night."

"Why not return to Camelot?"

"Because I'm tired?" I dropped the glamor that kept me looking winsome at this misbegot hour. My hair fell in muddy black corkscrews over the ripped dress. "I cannae use magic powerful enough to move meself between worlds again tonight. I'm not sure I could survive." I held up my hands in defeat. "If ye want me dead this is the time to attack."

"Will ye tell me where Excalibur is?"

"Nay."

"Then I cannae let you alone for a dark mage to find. And I will not strike at ye in cold blood." His lips quirked into a thoughtful grimace. "There is a third option, if ye trust me."

"I trust ye as far as I can throw ye, knight."

"Ye've thrown me between worlds at least once."

I snorted. "Youthful hijinks. That was centuries ago."

"Still." He held out a hand. "Let me take you home. To Camelot."

Dragon Farming - A Lady of the Lake Snippet

This snippet is taken from the unedited rough draft of LADY OF THE LAKE. Colina is one of the freemen of Camelot, part fey and part human, she's trapped between worlds until the return of Arthur. It doesn't seem to bother her.

"I brought ye dragon scales," Colina said reaching for a bag at her feet. "Enough to finish yer armor I thought. If not, I'll bring ye some from the next drake we kill."

"It's unlikely we'll see another anytime soon."

She smiled. "This one laid three eggs afore we killed it. I have them safe in a warm fire until they hatch."

"Colina!" I stared at her aghast. "Why in the name of Arthur's empty throne would ye try to hatch a dragon?"

"It's called farming." Her lips twisted in a smirk. "Ye keep the old ones alive until they give ye a new generation. These younglings will grow and lay eggs and then we shall have meat aplenty."
"We'll have fire drakes burning croft and field."

"Ye worry too much. Drakes are wee things, a couple of cows weight at most. It's nay as if I'm breeding great dragons on beds of gold."

"Only because ye don't have a recipe ye daft lass!" 

New projects, old projects, and queries... Oh My!

I like keeping a couple pots on the fire so I can have something to fill the down time on books (what little of it there is) but this week it seems several projects have home to roost. Eek!

The first round of edits on EVEN VILLAINS GO TO THE MOVIES has come back from my beta readers which means I need to edit and write the query this weekend.

I'm slowly writing a new novel, LADY OF THE LAKE, for fun and amusement and to give me head space to plot the next couple of projects.

I'm writing outlines for Heroes and Villains Book 3 and Jane Book 2. Both plots hinge on crucial scenes of the previous books so I'm a little leery to write and polish these before the other books are set in stone. Regardless, I'll start writing Heroes and Villains Book 3 in the next few months and Jane 2 shortly thereafter. It may mean massive rewrites come winter time but that's okay! Right? Please tell me it's okay.

So, when do you get the next book from me? Unless things speed ahead with the anthology that doesn't have a pub date (but does have a short story from me!) the absolute soonest anything would come out is June. And then only if I move at the speed of light through edits and rewrites. October-ish is probably more realistic.

The first snippet from LADY hit Tumblr last week but I'll share it here as well.

The black knight thumbed through it. “There’s a picture here of the Lady of the Lake.”
My cheeks heated. I’d seen that painting. “It looks nothing like me.”
“Having never seen ye naked I cannae comment.”
He was waiting for eye contact when I turned to face him. “Yer a bastard.”
“So I am often told.”
—- The Lady of the Lake and the Black Knight

When Math Makes You Happy

I didn't fail math in high school. I failed to remember it after I left the class, but I did technically get a B in calculus. To this day it's a mystery how I passed the class. Some things aren't worth dwelling on, are they?

Most days math makes me angry. I don't use it for much more than balancing my budget these days and with the cost of fresh fruit during winter, well, that would make anyone frustrated. Still, math has it's uses.

Math gives us data points.

There is never a time when you can have enough data points. Especially when you are a control freak scientist on query where you have nearly no control over what happens next. You write the best darn book possible and pray to all the gods you can name that the right agent sees your query on the right day and in the right mood and will write you a cheerful note about how right this manuscript is for them.

In a panic over my query stats after seeing another "How I Met My Agent!" post (which I love - don't get me wrong - I find it very inspiring) I went to consult some cold hard numbers. There is something of a statistical pattern to the "How I Met My Agent!" stories. A certain number of queries, a certain number of rejections, a certain number in general. Are these statistically significant numbers? I didn't check. I noticed a general trend and ran to do the stats.

The Vague Breakdown

Number of Queries Sent: 30-70 ... the lowest number I've seen recently is 12, the highest was still under 100
Percent of Positive Response: 25% ... this is a pretty steady number even amongst the uber savvy querying authors. One quarter of the queries sent out garnered something other than rejection.
Percent of Full Requests: < 10% ... again, this is a pretty steady number. Out of a bath of 40 queries an author might see full requests from 3 of the agents.
Average Length of Query Time: 1 year... the quickest "first query to agent!" number is 6 months.This makes sense if you assume authors query biweekly in batches of 5-10 agents at a time. With a 3-4 month turn around on responses a year of querying is very sensible.

Looking at those stats I have roughly two more batches of queries to send. I'm doing better on my percent of positive responses (i.e. requests for materials), but then I cheated and about half my requested pages are from pitch contests not directly from queries.

This math makes me happy. I haven't heard anything about JANE DOE this month and that makes me twitchy. It would make any author twitchy. But I think it's going to be okay. JANE DOE is going to find an agent that loves her soon.

In the meantime, Book 2 of the Heroes and Villains series is headed to my betas this weekend and in March I'm writing a brand new novel. You can find some hints to what my March WIP is about by checking out my Top Secret Tumblr and searching "Lady".

Have a great weekend!
- Liana