After what seems like many, many months with little to no personal internet access, it has finally happened that my husband and I have finally found a phone plan that is in our budget and gives us internet on demand. For me, this has become both a blessing and a curse. Both the phone, and the internet have been somewhat distracting, along with just the normal stresses that life has a tendency to throw at us.
For about the past month, I have been dilligently pecking away at the keyboard on my computer to finish what. I feel are the final edits to the manuscript of my first novel. The reason I have been doing this is so that I could print out the entire thing and mail it to a publisher I have decided to attempt a direct submission to. I’m pretty proud of myself, because I have manged to do this amongst all my various other responsabilities – keeping house, entertaining my husbands best friend for two weeks, and then caring for my step-daughter on top of maniging my still fledgling manicuring business – and resisting the urge to be online 24/7 after such a long period of time with only a cell phone and an unlimited data and texting plan coupled with infrequent trips to either Starbucks or the local library to hop on for an hour or two with my laptop to pimp my writing. Now, with a Droid smart phone and way to tether my unlimited data to my computer, I feel like I have a much more flexable control over how and when I make blog posts, post stories, and any other thing I might happen to need to do to further my career as a writer.
All that being said, I became incredibly frustrated over the submission process I have been going through reccently.
Here’s the situation: before my family got our new phones, I had a very basic, messaging phone that had limited internet, and I did a search on the site for the publisher I have chosen, finding their guidelines called for a printed copy of the full manuscript with a queery letter. When I went back to the publishers site to double check that I had everything I needed together before I hit print, I discoverd their guidelines had changed – now, instead of the entire manuscript and a queery letter, they want the first three chapters or 10,000 words accompanied by a detailed synopisis of the book – which I probably should had expected in hindsight – It’s more along industry standards. At this point, I’m pretty sure a tree somewhere in the world was thankful I had yet to print out the almost five hundred pages of my manuscript – on a side note, my husband was very appreciative off this too once I informed him of the change - but this left me incredibly frustrated, if only because of the fact that a synopisis is nothing more than a detailed outline. Problem is I just wrote what came to me. I HAVE NO OUTLINE WHAT SO EVER FOR MY FIRST BOOK. Oops, my bad. Time to fix this.
Now, I have a somewhat detailed outline for the rest of the series, but not for my first book. So now I have to back it all up to the beginning, and outline my book. A task I failed miserbaly at when I had to write synopsis for my literature classes in high school and college. I’m finding myself not only frustrated by this task, but also very intimidated by it.
I am over the initial shock though, I have to pick myself up off the floor, brush off my knees and get back to work… I am not going to become an award winning author by sittting around and letting ever little stumbling block that crosses my path get me down.
I will succeed at this.
