Monday, September 23, 2013

Progress Report -- September 23, 2013

Well, this month has been wet. I live in Longmont, Colorado, which is one of the towns that got a pretty high dose of the recent flooding. There are rivers running through Longmont, you see. This is usually something of an exaggeration. The mighty St. Vrain river is the sort of waterway that rarely threatens to wet the knees of those who might wade across it.

This month, it temporarily became the Amazon. It's as if the river got hit with gamma rays and became the Incredible Hulk version of itself. And like any good Hulk, it did some smashing.

Other towns got smashed worse. We live very close to Lyons, which is a town that really did take the kind of damage you'd expect from a battle between superhumans. It's going to take some time to figure out how to fix things up. Meanwhile, we're all a bit jumpy every time a few drops come out of the sky... not without reason. The ground is still kind of saturated, which means that more rainfall tends to slide right off the mountains and into those flash flood channels. It'll be nice when this stuff starts coming down as snow, I think.

Although a blizzard of equal intensity to the rainfall we just had would've left about 10 feet of snow, which is a bit much. Anyway...

I can't even talk about the near misses that I've been having with Dragon Waking. Well, I am talking about them, or rather writing about them, but it's kind of agonizing. Three different publishers claim to have been millimeters away from signing the book, only to take a pass on it due to some painfully obscure criteria or another (my favorite being "We've got too many books with dragons in our upcoming list right now." Aaargh!). And these are all still responses to the older version, not the leaner new cut that is currently in circulation.

I don't know the publishing world nearly well enough to lay down any kind of codex of laws or principles, but here's one that seems to hold true so far. If you get an instant response to your query, that's bad. It'll be a rejection. The longer that someone holds onto your manuscript, the better your chances are--it means they're thinking it over. I imagine this axiom no longer holds true for someone like Stephen King, but for writers at my current altitude, no news does seem like good news. Up to a point.