It looks like I'll have revisions for the Duchess novel in early May, which means at that point I'll have to drop the werewolf manuscript to complete edits for the beginning of June. I had a hope of finishing a draft of the current manuscript by the end of May, but now I don't expect to be able to manage that. Oh, well, life will go on. And the Duchess will be that much closer to publication!

I'm carving out more time for writing where I can. I already had given up watching television and DVDs. Soon choir will be over for the year, and I'll have an extra evening per week to work. And I've been scheduling meals with friends and the like for evenings when I was pretty sure I wouldn't be writing anyway. The main lack I feel is time to be silent, alone, and doing practically nothing. I do manage to get some reading done, usually weekend afternoons when my brain is empty from my morning writing session, and won't be fully operational again until the evening.

Revisions will be a nice break, I think; a different kind of mental effort than pounding out a zero draft. I like to edit. I will have to remember that.

I was reading in a forum about story hooks.

My thought on hooks is that sometimes they are way too hooky, if that makes any sense. If I start reading and the first sentence seems twee or cutesy, it makes me fear the rest of the novel will be the same.

I also don't like opening sentences that are too long and descriptive; if I have to stop and parse it, and memorize those character names which may or may not be important later, I might put the book down.

What I want as a reader is to be pulled to the second sentence. For me, the first sentence doesn't have to be a whale-sized hook. A gentle tug is enough. Then another tug. Then another, until the story closes over my head.

There's something about being past 50,000 words in a manuscript that makes it seem so much more real. With that much text, I'm getting a good idea of my themes and starting to get ways to reinforce them. I've got a good idea of the characters and how they work into the themes and vice versa, or however it works. And I'm beginning to get an idea of how the pacing might work in the novel as a whole--probably a wrong idea, but an idea all the same. Best of all, it feels like an accomplishment to pass 50,000 words, because it is.

The Tale of an Erotica Writer Part Two, also at Circlet Press, on making your stories stand out from the crowd.

I'm not sure what brought this on, but I was thinking this morning about how people sell their first stories. First, the sure way to not be bought? Is not to send the story. Don't make the editor's decision for her.

After that, it doesn't always depend on the story being well-written and nothing beyond that. The overall market's an issue--your story might be the latest of its kind, but all the markets have five stories on the same theme already. The specific market is an issue; maybe your story isn't quite right for what they publish, or their editor can't stand vampire stories, or they've already bought one like yours and you were too late. Maybe the length of your story was wrong for the last gap left in that anthology, so they bought a shorter one. You can control these things somewhat by keeping up-to-date on potential markets and editorial tastes, but not always.

Another issue, I think, is much more difficult to define. I think there's a range of space between competent fiction and between salable fiction and skilled fiction. Some markets buy a larger range than others; this doesn't necessarily correlate to their circulation or pay rate, incidentally; I think it's more related to specific qualities the editor is seeking for their publication, like "nifty-keen idea" or "emotional immersion" which may be accomplished better by a competent story than a skilled one. That sale, or lack of sale, is up to the editor.

I feel that every writer, though, has a turning point at which their craft skills turn a corner, or drop off a cliff and then fly upwards, or insert cool metaphor here. After that point, you're more likely to sell. It's as if various skills coalesce into a story that is almost always salable if you find the right market. The only way to reach that point is to write, and to challenge yourself when you write. I don't think it happens, or it happens much more slowly, when every story is essentially the same. Writing has to stretch, and fail, and limp along, and then leap to grow. I suspect that before that point, a lot of people stop trying.

Learning plateaus, so then you have to put in extra effort to go even higher, aiming for a higher plateau. This never stops. It's why writers who sell regularly still complain. Writing is hard.

That's the point.

Periphery includes my story "Silver Skin," along with ones by authors such as Gwyneth Jones and Nicola Griffith. I never imagined I would be sharing pages with them, years ago when I first read Jones' White Queen and Griffith's Ammonite and Slow River!

I feel just a little bit sad that I won't have time to write short stories for a while. I know some writers write short pieces interspersed with their novel-writing, and I've done it myself, but I don't think I can manage it while I'm on deadline. Particularly for a novel that's already bought.

That just sank in last night. The WWI werewolf book is already sold. So long as it's pretty much what the publisher wants, I don't have the nagging worry of grabbing an editor's attention in the first few paragraphs, the first page, etc. to stand out of a pile. She will read it. They trust me to write it. All I have to do is write the thing.

I'm following a friend's advice of long ago, which was "don't research it to death." For this reason, I'm keeping track of questions that come up while I'm writing, or while I'm thinking about a scene.

For the idea I had Wednesday night, I needed a reason why my English nurse character would be in Germany or Austria-Hungary when the borders closed and trains became unavailable. She's a nurse; could she have been taking a course of some kind, or visiting someone who worked in medicine?

A few minutes on the internet reminded me that pre-WWI Germany was a major player in the pharmaceutical industry. I want to know more, but don't need more for this scene, as it's just a pretext to put the nurse in a certain place at a certain time. So I avoided further research; I don't even need the name of a plausible place where she could be visiting; I can take details from many appropriate sources (in my head, from previous research reading) and combine them to make a fictional town that feels real for the time period. The anchor will be the fact that Germany plus pharmaceuticals is true.