Agent Update

Still waiting on six agents, but another turned me away. Not exactly a rejection, but just a notice saying they're full up and can't even read my query.

Agent Searching

I chose eight agents to start with and have queries out with them for TKQ. It's been awhile, but not that long. So to have a rejection come in already was a little disheartening. The worse thing about it was that this came from the agent at the top of the list. The one I REALLY wanted.

But I am glad I know for sure now. If, by chance, I had gotten an offer from one of the others, I would have been tempted to drag my feet hoping for his response before giving my final decision.

Not that I am too saddened by this. I know how this business works and how the market is right now. There's a good chance that no one will pick me up - unless I just happen to hit them at the right time. Can we say "wheel of fortune"?

I do have back up plans - and I'm going for it rather than just wait and wait on agent searching. If those eight turn me down, I will go to the next step. Not self-publishing. That's not the route for TKQ.

Create A Clinic Review

Holly Lisle's Create A Character Clinic is a very valuable resource for the fiction writer. Her exercises flesh out the characters and story in amazing ways.

I decided to use it to create the main character for a newly formed novel idea. This idea was very small. I only knew my inspiration -- how the world of online gaming connects people together -- but no idea of how to pull it off.

Through Holly's techniques, I found my character. And a load of surprises. Instead of a male character, as I imagined in my preliminary idea, my character turned out to be a young female in her twenties named Muriel. Also, instead of owning just one or two of the possible life and personality traits from my list of inspirations, she has nearly all of them now.

How could I possibly show a character with so much going on? At first, I balked when she developed so many traits. This was stepping out of my comfort zone with characterization. Holly's exercises and techniques not only show me how a character could work with so much going on, but also how the story itself could evolve out of those traits. I now have pieces of the beginning, middle, and end of my novel, and I know how to connect them.

What's really amazing for me is the fact that this novel is outside my normal genre.

The surprises Holly's clinic brought didn't stop there either. Characters around Muriel leapt out of the exercises and into my story. Her exercises not only fleshed out my main character and the story, but also brought life to the secondary characters.

Holly Lisle's Create A Character Clinic is one resource I'm going to use over and over again.

Click here to try Create A Character Clinic, by Holly Lisle for yourself!

The writing workgroup

I'm currently getting the new writing workgroup's forum ready. We've decided to call it The Claw & Quill Writer's Guild. It will be a multi-genre forum, with a lot of references, discussions, and an area for exchanging crits on full novels and stories.

New idea

A friend made a comment about something being out there for people just getting into the publishing phase of their writing.

Has spurred many thoughts in my mind that may become a short newsletter course that I'll offer people.

Sorry, being cryptic about this because I'm still working on the thoughts for it.

I am working on my writing newsletter also. It'll be weekly. For the first month, it'll be a combined Whispering Spirits and writing one. I'm going to start with my old newsletter list, create a sign up page for new signers and go from there.

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Building Characters

This week, I've been working with a product about building your main character. I've ended up with a whole new novel planned out because of it. I'm really more excited than I thought I would be about this novel. I've had it in mind for a few months or so, but didn't know how to write it. Now I do. I'll be writing a review article on the product and will post it soon.

Fan Stories

I wasn't much for fan stories myself. I do have a friend who created a complete set of fan stories based on the characters of a tv show during our teenage years. Recently, I became interested in it for a storyline within the game URU.

As a member of Friends of the Fissure, I am a key character in our own storyline. Elpis is my character and mainly my part is taking care of her journals. I'm also working on ideas for an Age Creation to go with it. The loss of URU's publisher is a blow to our plans, but it has also made us that much more determined.

This is not an easy venture. We hope to tie this into the storyline that Cyan created, while respecting their creation. The plan was to work this slowly over a span of two years. May not take that long to do the part we slated for that section.

I did have Elpis take out extra linking books from the cavern that the DRC hadn't discovered yet. URU will live again. Somehow the game will be back. In the meantime, we'll keep making our own Ages for the game.

The progress of various multi-player games over this past year and some of the future advances planned for these games do make me think. Game writing may become another broadspread venue for writers. Many games are encouraging fan creation. Whether we participate for play and something outside our own fiction-writing 'jobs', or if we do create storylines officially for the game creators, it shows promise for writers.