A Good Use Of Time – The Climb #833

Friday 4^th June 2021

I joined an online conference talking about SFFH publishing today, and there’s part of me that wishes I hadn’t. First, let me say that I think all the speakers were excellent and presented well. I know all too well how nerve racking it can be talking to a crowd, especially on such a subject.

But, I just don’t think I was the target audience for this, and as a result I’ve been left wondering if I could have better spent those three hours writing.

I did about 3000 words today which isn’t bad considering that most of my afternoon was taken up by the online conference, However, I was pretty spent by the end because I’d run out of things to say.

This is an interesting novel. It has a lot of scenes, most of which – in my more cynical moments -seem to be about characters standing around and talking. Each of these scenes is around a thousand to fifteen hundred words long.

This is interesting as this project was initially an idea for a serial novel where the daily episodes were small scenes of 500 – 100 words.

With previous novels, I’ve usually sat down at the start of each chapter and worked out the narrative flow. But with this novel, each scene is so singular in aim, I’ve pretty much gone in with a one sentence brief to myself.

The problem is that if I have those briefs for 3 or 4 scenes and manage to do them all in a day, I then find myself needing to work out the following scenes. I’m still following the outline, but I don’t have a breakdown of what this next scene is trying to accomplish. On a micro level, I have absolutely no plan. On a macro level it’s sticking very much to it.

There will need to be a lot of work done when it comes to redrafting. I can often be very guilty of omitting the description in the first draft. A lot of scenes are just dialogue.

I figure I can go back come the next draft and flesh them out. I could see me consolidating the scenes as there feels there’s a lot of repeated material (just from different POVs) and I’m not sure that’s always needed. I’m not hating on this novel as much as I did when the act changed (but then I’m like that for all novels) but I don’t feel the first draft is anywhere near as polished as others I’ve written.

But there was one thing from the conference today that has me worried. It was said, in general, that US audiences are fine with gore but hate books with sex, swearing and religion. This book starts with a blow job and has a whole holy empire.

It’s got me wondering if this project is going to have problems finding a market. I hope not. Whilst I plan to jump from this straight into another project, I’m not sure I can deal with having to mothball this as well.

So I suppose, the conference did have some nuggets for me, and wasn’t a bad use of my time. I still think it might have been better used for writing, even if I didn’t have the scenes lined up