I'm Scaring Myself

I have been researching and writing and reading and writing and looking and writing for my Little Bits of History, Volume 3 for almost eleven months. I know this because when I put in the references formatted at Wikipedia, they come with a date and time stamp. I started volume three on October 30, 2007.

I finished up the researching, topic finding, and Monday, Wednesday, Friday writing last week. I edited the months of November and December. I shortened the essays and selected which quotes were to go to RGQ. I put all that into Dreamweaver and then sent off the various things to the people I need to send things to. I'm officially finished with the year.

Now I can start on the Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday essays. I was waiting for a new week and going to begin. Instead, last evening I was too energized to just watch television or play computer games. I began writing up the intervening essays.

I wrote two more this morning and will continue to write more this afternoon. After I finish this. I have so much energy and so much drive. If I can get this finished, I can get on to another project. Maybe fiction, maybe humorous essays.

I know part of this is just the euphoria of finishing up part of the project. But part of it, I believe, is from being physically active. No matter what its origins, the feeling of being excited about anything is wonderful.

I need to look into learning how to write fiction with a lighter hand. Apparently, my style isn't what publishers are looking for in today's market. They want story-tellers to not tell the story. We are supposed to "show" the story. I'm told if I show it, I will improve my writing and marketability. I don't know if I will improve the writing. I'm not all that impressed by the whole show mentality. But I do want to be published.

When I asked about this at MWC, someone scoffed at the novels of only 50,000 words, saying that isn't enough to show a story. It probably isn't. It was enough, however, for Rex Stout to tell me a story. And Nicholas Blake, and Peter Ellis, and Anne Perry. Even Sue Grafton, before she got too far into the alphabet and became unreadable.

That's my whole issue. The stories on the market today aren't any more complex than these older writers. They are just packaged in 70,000-80,000 words or more. They are still 200 page stories wrapped up in 375 page books.

I need to see if this is the only way to write in today's market. I need to find out if babbling about, eschewing adverbs and even adjectives while trying to describe something easily summed up with the appropriate modifier, is really the way to write today. Maybe that has something to do with the print on demand market.

But first, I have to finish Little Bits of History, Volume 3, and get it ready to see print as Volume 1. Print is good.