A Week in Writing #14

Sometimes when I'm doing rewrites, I feel like I get caught up in the same few pages of the manuscript, going over and over the same territory, sort of like trench warfare. One change here makes for changes a few pages back, etc. So I can't say I've made much real progress on my rewrite of Familiar Stranger.

No new queries. Doesn't seem to be much point of querying between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think it makes it too hard to calculate their 4 to 6 to 8 weeks to reply. Are they in the office the week before Christmas? In between the holidays? When do they get back to work? So for the next month or so, I'm going to cool my heels as far as sending out query emails. Still four more queries moved to the Did Not Respond pile, which is always disappointing. It's always nice to know your query has been at least looked at.

I did take a shot at PitMad, a Twitter-only query free-for-all. I'm following someone on Twitter, who is behind PitMad, but still I really stumbled across it this time on the 4th. Takes a lot to summarize a book in 140 characters. Per the guidelines that I read, I sent out three versions of Past Present. I chose that one, since the agent who has A Killer Blog was a visible participant on PitMad. Didn't want to offend. Well, no worries there. I sent three different versions several hours apart. Three up and no response, or in the case of PitMad none of the tweets were starred, which would mean someone was interested in reading more.

So, it's not been a banner week for the mystery writing. This next week, I'll get back at it. This is also the week I should be able to follow up with the agent with A Killer Blog. I'm always wary of having to write to an agent to follow up. I hope it means they're not done looking at it, rather than they thought the reject email had already been sent. This whole process has been going on for over 7 months, which means there's been a lot of waiting.

Published two reviews on Trophy Unlocked: Stubs Goes Blu(-ray) - Yankee Doodle Dandy and
Remember the Night (1940). The former was retweeted by the Warner Archive, which really increased the view count on the blog. They had sent us a review copy so that we could compare it to the DVD we had reviewed in July 2013.

The latter is a kick-off to Christmas movie review season on Trophy Unlocked. I also wrote another review of a Christmas-themed movie for next week. The holidays, as I wrote last week, make it a little harder to have the time to write. There are gifts to buy, trees to purchase, lights to put up; and we're still three weeks out.

Well, back to it next week. If you're writing too, it may be hard to find the time, but you have to stay focused.