In Full Swing

Wow! It's been a while. Exam time is CRAZY! Days go by when I don't so much forget to post on Twitter, but I just can't find the time. And even when I do, I am so exhausted, that I can't muster up the energy to set up  my computer, boot it and post.

I never realized how difficult writing a Twitter novel could be. The time commitment is but one aspect of the difficulty. The other (and perhaps most difficult aspect) is in crunching down a tapestry as rich as a novel into a series of short posts. The challenge (as I've said before) is to get the story told, not only in 140 character bites, but in  few enough posts per day to avoid spamming your followers.

Gaining followers is another enigma of Twitter I have yet to figure out. I had 4 at one point and I'm listed twice, but 2 of my followers were businesses. Two of them have since left. I realize that those following my story are not exclusive to my followers, that there could be any number of people following me (please, God), without actually "following" me.

On the brighter side, I think I've mastered hash tags. I've begun to post updates to my FaceBook site. I think I've also figured out a fix for the pieces of writing of which I am proud but got cut in the planned postings. I have started posting additional prose to my web site. I'm hoping that, when I get the time to print and marked Phase Shift, that the site and the "twovel" will help to make me seem interested, devoted, and help to market me and my manuscript. In addition, I'm getting up the courage to volunteer to present a workshop on writing a Twitter novel at next year's YRDSB Writers' Symposium, which might help with my resume and to market me should I feel like putting myself through the ordeal that is the transfer process next year.

At any rate, no matter how many readers and/or followers I have, I'm having fun and trying to get my head into my writing space to continue with The Revenant. At one point I thought I might have Zulu enroll in school to get nearer to the Alma reincarnate, thought that might be too much like TV's Vampire Diaries. In a twist, maybe the Alma reincarnate isn't a reincarnate but Alma herself. I wanted to keep it inside the backdrop of high school as I'd hoped to cash in on the youth fiction craze, but maybe it would work better if it were in a University millieu as then Zulu wouldn't have to register. He could vet all of "Alma's" classes and get to know her that way. Look at all of the high school vampire series anyway. Most of them join high school to blend in. I need a hook. Something to set my story apart from all the others. Though I have to admit, that would give me a frame in which to write about some of my brain-numbing experiences being a high school teacher.

Writing Molly's World

Almost 4 years ago now I went to a detective fiction convention. I was able to get an exclusive interview with an agent during the convention, with the hope of being "discovered". Unfortunately, they matched me with an agent who admittedly didn't like science fiction. This put me at a disadvantage to say the least.

The next day there was an agents' panel. I listened to one of the agents speak of how she was interested in archaeology (I was an archaeologist), and wanted to be a Forensic Anthropologist when she was younger (one of my characters is a Forensic Anthropologist). I mustered up enough courage to approach her after the panel and tell her about Molly and Palmer (my main characters). She was interested and said I should send her my work once I was done the revisions.

Flash forward to almost two years after that and I finish "Phase Shift", my second Molly novel. I send her the chapter that got me past the first round of eliminations in that year's Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Awards (ABNA) Contest and waited. Almost 2 months of nail-biting suspense later and I finally got her response:

"...while you're a good writer, I was not sufficiently enthusiastic to feel that I would be the best advocate for your work."

I hate this part. Searching for publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts (i.e., without an agent), making copy after copy and securing enough postage for the package of 300 plus pages to travel to and fro (no mean feat finding US stamps in Canada, by the way) - it gets so costly after a while.

With my Twitter novel, I'm banking on the "if you build it they will come" axiom, that people will want to follow me, I'll get read, and prove to the next publisher that my work really does have an audience.