Gideon Zhi wrote:
Wildbill wrote:
Did you ever try to do anything commercially with the novel?
Not really, no. I'd like to get it published one day - hell, I'd love to make a living writing books, if I could - but I haven't really looked into pitching it to any agents or publishers. This again is partly a function of job-related burnout, but it's also partly a personal insecurity that I need to get over. I *know* it's a quality tale, but I never feel like it's good enough, you know? Like there's always something I can improve, and that I shouldn't send it off until it's perfect. "Art is never finished, only abandoned," as the saying goes.
Professor Bickham put it this way. "You can tinker with it endlessly and rewrite it over and over, but there comes a point in which you never improve it, only change it."
Yep, fear of rejection is a powerful disincentive, but I imagine I'll throw a few more copies the editors' way when I run out of things to do.
Someday....
My first manuscript really pissed off my prospective agent fifteen years ago, but most of my predictions have come true anyway, including my most controversial positions that the agent said no publisher would touch unless I toned them down, made the speaker an object of ridicule, or eliminated certain prognostications altogether.
Yes, he loved my writing but dismissed my premise as scare-tactics [even though my plot was] based upon demonstrable facts backed by precedents in recorded history. The title of this 300,000 word unpublished manuscript is:
The New Dark Ages: A Tale of the Twenty-first Century. As I said, it's more fun to write games than [fictionalized accounts of how unprecedented threats will deliver] a death knell to my country. I wrote this more than 10 years prior to 9-11.
[Edited to remove factual political content in the real world, agreeing with Garrett this is not the proper forum. I have left the bare bones that describe one of my unpublished novels, appropriate to a storytelling forum, as all of our RPG themes address threatened societies, albeit of a fantasy nature.]