My boy-centered medieval-era novella THE SHIELD OF ENOCH made it through a second round of reading and review at a legit publishing company. The larger editorial group asked for revisions before they’ll bring it up to the final decision-makers. I’ll work on those after I finish HLP.
A literary agency liked what they saw of ORDINARY LIFE from my query and the first ten pages, and they asked for the first fifty pages next. Instead, I sent them the whole thing and they are now subjecting it to their review process, whatever that is.
HLP is humming along. I am more than 50,000 words and fifty chapters in. I’m hoping for it to come in at about 75,000 words, so perhaps a month more. I can now see the end, all of the plot strands moving toward resolution. Nothing entirely new needs to be introduced. The exception to this would be if an elevator character suddenly appeared. An elevator character is one who appears later in a story and lifts it to a new level. An example from Wedding Crashers is the Will Ferrell cameo. Just when you might be thinking the idea of living it up at other people’s celebrations is all played out, Ferrell’s character takes that to a whole new absurd level. “Ma! The meatloaf!”
In the past, I had plenty of writer’s block, basically brought on by mental exhaustion after working all day at something else. Now I can and do just sit down and write.
If any aspiring writers are out there, I can add two practical recommendations to the simple trick of sitting down and writing. Don’t fall into the trap of saying to yourself, ‘before I start, I’ll just check this or that.’ Sacrifice that juicy little thing you could do first and start your writing for the day. One thing I’ve discovered to make the blank chapter easier to approach is to reread and somewhat edit yesterday’s completed chapter.
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