A Week in Writing #7

Sometimes I feel like I'm not reaching an audience. This past Friday, I posted a review of Freaks (1932) on Trophy Unlocked as well as on the TCM Classic Film Union or CFU. After spending several days researching the film, watching the film and writing a review about it, you hope for more than 5 people to read it on Trophy Unlocked and only 44 on the TCM CFU. Not really rewarding, but that doesn't deter me from wanting to write them. I also know that it's hit and miss as far as getting page views.

Usually a big review gets 70 to 80 hits on Trophy Unlocked and a 100 on TCM, but I've had a couple that seem to have taken off. My Robocop review on Trophy Unlocked has, at last count, 846 hits and Peter Pan has 840. On TCM, two reviews, Godfather and Things to Come, have 1.6K views each. Why? I don't know. I write these because I enjoy writing them, but knowing someone is reading them is rewarding and getting a comment is the icing on the cake. And comments are really rare. Godfather and Things to Come only have 3 each, which is like 1 comment for every 533 views. Seems low to me.

On a good week, this blog only gets 5 hits, so I guess I should be used to writing for the void of the internet, with no response or feedback. This leads me back to querying agents. While the hit rate is slightly better, it seems to be the norm nowadays for an agent to only get back to you if they're interested. That really sucks. You don't know if the agent ever really saw it and read your query. Worse is the too quick answer, like within minutes or hours within submission. Even though the query is basically a form letter, you can feel that you've put more effort in the query than the agent did reading it. And finally, there's the feedback which is not helpful in the least. Not being right for an agent's list tells you nothing about the quality of your own writing. And the well wishes at the bottom of the letter, the one wishing you luck finding representation, only reads as a hollow gesture. But still I send them out hoping against hope that mine will get through and find the right agent for me.

As for writing this week, I completed a review of Lost in Translation (2003) which clocked it at about 2500, almost 2600, words. As far as fiction, I'm still retracing my place in Familiar Stranger, the book I've been editing on my own. Over the week, I've moved the story forward by about 2000 words. While I was struggling with moving that forward, I started working on a screenplay, an adaptation of one of my earlier books, A Killer Blog. I've gotten about 24 pages in and 3480 words. All told, I managed to squeeze out my thousand words a day.

Would love to hear about someone else's writing journey, but that would mean someone would have to leave a comment.