Out of my hands, for now

Last night my lovely and talented wife, Ann, finished looking through my manuscript for Big Chief's Gold. This morning I went over her suggestion (and the obvious typing errors, more about that in a minute) and sent it off to my lovely and talented beta-readers. Thanks guys *waves*.

Now a thing I figured out about my word processing program. I had a character named Pat. Pat is a boring name and I needed to change it. I hit the select all button, changed the name (it was supposed to use exact case only) and it changed every word with Pat in it, like PATh, aPAThy. . .not good. I didn't think anything of it. I told it to use exact case, nothing else. I will never do that again, nor will I ever name a character Pat again. I was glad my wife caught it. Although she said it confused her at first to have a proper name in the middle of random letters like aDerrickhy, that made no sense in the context of the sentence. Lucky for me my wife is smarter than I am.

Now I am going to go off and continue writing other things. Happy weekend everyone.

Monday :P

So I got in about an hours worth of writing this morning and I think it was all for nothing. I don't think I can use any of it. Garbage in, garbage out.

The good news is that I might have a new angle on the story to work out. I will see how that pans out over the next couple of days.

After I take my wife's suggestions (I have already taken her up on the character's names thing) I would be wondering if any of you would like to beta read a 26K MG story. It is not horror but adventure. If you liked My Side Of the Mountain and just about anything by Gary Paulson then you might be interested. You can e-mail me at jeyberg74@gmail.com. I would be happy to have all the input I can get before I start sending it out to agents and publishers.

I know, a lot of you are already looking at that and going "26K. that is way too short. There is no way you are getting a publisher for a book like that." I beg to differ. Because of Winn-Dixie came in at a very short 110 pages (about 25K) for the same age group. It was a Newbery honor book for 2001. I believe all you need is for the story to be complete. I hope mine is. I believe it is. I would like a second (or 25th) opinion.

hope everyone is having a more productive Monday than I am. Until next time.

Reading

Many of you have noticed that I volunteer to be a beta reader for many of your stories, if you put a request out I will usually take you up on it. This not by accident or or always for your benefit. It stems from my college days. Back then as a complete unknown, internet unknown or in its infancy, type writer you had one option for submission- postal service.

Needless to say, if you spend a lot of money on stamps you are going to send out to only good paying markets and I didn't really know of any FLT markets. I am sure they were out there, but they at least paid in copy. Stick with me, this is going somewhere. You edited and proofread and if you thought it was junk there was no way you were going to waste the stamp on it. Needless to say I got a lot of rejections and remained an unpublished writer. My circle of writer friends all went their separate ways after college and, while I keep in touch with a couple of professors, it isn't quite the same. They had all been published, in prestigious magazines and most had won awards for their work. I missed reading other peoples work, both in the classroom and for the literary magazine (now defunct) that the college ran. It was a good time and it gave me a chance to see how I stacked up to what else was being put out in the market.

Flash forward to today, I am now published. Granted I have never had a story in Redbook or Playboy like my professors had but I have been published. In the meantime I missed the thing that college gave me. I missed seeing 'what else was out there.'

Here come the read requests. You betcha I will read what you send me. While I consider each and every one of you my friends, you are also competition (it is a friendly game). We are all vying for the valuable spaces that the magazines allot. I celebrate your victories and mourn your losses. It is all part of it. I like to think that by reading your unpublished works it is making me a better writer. I like to pick apart, see where I would change something, what I would cut out and where I would add. It is part of my training. So go on, send me your unpublished works jeyberg74 @ gmail.com (take out the spaces). Let me rip them apart. Don't take it personally- I am training for a marathon here.

Just a warning, I will read everything that comes my way. It may take me a couple of days to get to it. :)