Hope everyone is staying safe, getting vaccinated, and, of course, writing.
Took a couple of vacation days this week. My sons were having their birthday on Tuesday. As it turns out, I had one of those really good days of writing on Tuesday. To begin with, I finished my review of The Case of the Lucky Legs, wrote over 1500 words on Skylar, wrote up a 577-word feature for the Hound Dogs' Howl newsletter, and made some minor updates to Mission Istanistan, the next script for Powers Squared. These kinds of days don't happen all the time, so I really appreciate them when they do.
It felt good to get back to work on Skylar, so I kept working on it all week, I don't have a word count but I think I made some good progress, a combination of rewrites and new passages. I'm toying with the idea of changing the name of the book at some point, and I might even change the character's name, too. I'll keep you posted.
The work I did on the newsletter was good to get out of the way. Even though the newsletter is only once a month and fairly standardized, it's still a couple of hours of work, not including the feature on twins that we would do. If you want to see what we put into it, you can read it here. If you do, and like what you see or just want to be encouraging to a struggling writer, you could always sign up here.
So, the high I was feeling from Tuesday came crashing down to Earth on Wednesday, which was query rejection day as it turned out. Received a negative response from one of the agencies I had queried back in the middle of August. "Thank you for sharing your work with us, and for your patience as we reviewed. While we enjoyed the idea behind Broken People, it doesn't seem like quite the right fit for our list, so we've decided to step aside."
Not sure what to make of that. Most likely a form letter. I really doubt any agency sends out a "you suck" email, so I'm guessing this is a form and they drop the name of the submission into it. Sounds encouraging but non-committal, the best of both worlds, from a rejection email for the agency to send, not to receive. Always disappointing no matter how much they sugarcoat it, a rejection is a rejection.
While I was updating my query list, I decided to call another one, sent the week earlier than this agent. It's been more than the 6 weeks they claim to need so another DNR for me. So that makes three "active" queries and only time will tell if I hear back from them.
I usually try to query on Thursday, but this time it got pushed. I believe I was working on Skylar and maybe on some other project but not a query insight.
No new review this week. We ended up watching a couple of documentaries on early animation on TCM then something I feel like I could review. It's not that I haven't reviewed documentaries before but somehow the review would have been more about the animation shorts and I didn't want to get into reviewing all of them.
That doesn't mean that I won't be represented on Trophy Unlocked this week. This is going to be James Bond Week on the blog. The idea was to do some reviews leading up to the new film. Even though we're not going to be going to the cinema to see it this week, it will still be a tribute to the character. Even though we went to a restaurant recently for the first time since before the pandemic, I don't think we're ready to be theater-goers just yet.
We did kick off our month-long salute to Halloween with Trevor's review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This past GameDay Wednesday was Paul's review of Antichamber.
Well, that about does it for me. Keep writing and I'll see you back here next week.
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