Dear Thomas,

Thank you for your recent e-mail and for reading my blog, I appreciate it. I regret to say that I don’t feel that I’m the most appropriate agent for your work.

However, opinions vary considerably in this business, and I wish you the best of luck in your search for representation.

Best wishes,
Nathan

This is exactly what I expected. Only about a fifth of queries result in a request for a full or partial manuscript, and considerably less than that results in an offer for representation.

Actually, this makes me kind of happy. First because I was prepared for it, and second because it represents an important step: I’m no longer someone hoping to be published one day, but someone that’s doing something about it.

Onward to the next list of potential agents…

Well, I’ve finally done it.

After more than a year of work, rework, stalling, and even more rework, I’ve finally decided to try and get published. This evening, I submitted my first query letter to a literary agent.

The odds of being asked for a manuscript are small, and the odds of receiving an offer are even smaller, but as they say, you can’t win if you don’t play. So, with fingers crossed and breath held, I hit “send”. I’ll let you know – hopefully within a few days, given this agent’s reputation – what happens.

And if you’re reading this, NB, thank you for your time.

If you’re a technophile – or just a very, very creep person – you may have heard that some guy created an animatronic sex robot. Well, sorry Pal, but Barnes & Noble has outdone you with its twelve ounces of distilled sex called nook.

I absolutely love this thing, because it takes something I already love – reading – and makes it even better. Like many people, I was initially skeptical of the whole e-reader phenomena, because I thought nothing could replace the feel of a book in your hands, or the smell of the pages.

I was wrong. The nook isn’t cheap or flimsy, and it really feels like you’re holding something when it’s in your hand. The e-ink display is sharp and easy to read, and lacks the eye-straining flicker of a computer screen. The momentary lag when the screen flips to a new page isn’t long enough to be a bother.

I had also worried about losing the ability to feel how far into a book you were, but nook has a nice feature that replaces that physical feel; the bottom of the screen has a little ‘1 / 200′ page indicator, and a progress bar that shows you how much more you have to read.

And the little annoyances that books provide are gone. I don’t have to worry about a book being too unwieldy to hold in one hand, or a too-stiff spine slamming my book closed in the middle of a sentence. I don’t have to debate whether or not its worth trying to cram a five-hundred page tome into my messenger bag. I’ve only had my nook for a couple of hours, but it already feels like the way reading is supposed to be.

I charged my nook by hooking it up to my laptop’s USB port, the same way I charge my phone and my iPod. That hookup also let me set custom screen savers and wall papers, and import a PDF of a story I’m working on, so I can read it on the go.

The touch screen is bright and responsive, and the digital QWERTY seems at least as accurate as the one on my HTC Hero, though I wasn’t trying to double-thumb it, so your mileage may vary.

I only have a couple of minor complaints. One, it wasn’t immediately clear to me how to actually start reading the book I has selected; the little circle inside of a rectangle on the right side of the touchscreen looked like a placeholder to me, not an actual UI element. Two, you have to create a sub-folder under “My Wallpapers” to get nook to recognize your photos. I understand why this is true, but it’s annoying. Finally, the layout of an imported PDF is a little bit wanky – newlines and occasional characters are eaten, which throws off the formatting a little. I’m told that this is true any time you try to convert from PDF to ePub, but it still bothers me.

On the whole, I’m totally sold on nook. This isn’t a surprise, since I played with one in-store before ordering it, and knew what I was in for, but it’s still nice to be validated.

If you aren’t a reader, nook is (obviously) not for you. And if you’re only a casual reader, you can probably give it a pass, too. But if you love books, you’ll love nook.

Jay Lake has published an open letter to fans of eBooks, particularly the Kindle, about Macmillan’s dispute with Amazon over the cost of eBooks. It’s a good read, so you should do so now. But the high points have convinced me that Macmillan is right:

No one that follows my blog – nor anyone that’s gotten spammed with a couple of hundred Thomas Posted a New Note messaged on FaceBook – will be surprised to hear that I write a lot.

Communication is kind of an interesting thing for me. I’m really not good at small talk; I don’t have the conversational skills, or sometimes the patience, to fill a whole lot of dead air, so if you want to talk with me, you’re probably going to have to do a lot of the lifting. But when I do have something to say, and when I can control the conversation, I excel.

That’s why I like giving speeches and writing; it lets me craft my message, to frame things just so, to set the tone and the temp. Everything works together when you’re writing. It’s usually much more elegant.

So, I write a lot, and I post a lot of what I write. But there’s a lot more that I don’t publish. I’ve got quite a few blog entries sitting around waiting for the right occasion, and a few ideas sitting around, waiting for the right motivation.

I also have a few longer pieces. I have one novel that’s essentially finished, and that I’m in the process of revising. I have notes and plot sketches – some fairly extensive, some fairly brief – for at least seven more. I really don’t know what I’m going to do with all of that, but at the very least its served as good finger exercise.

I’ve tried following the suggestions of various professional writers, tried to mimic the process that they say they use when they write, but I’ve learned that my brain just doesn’t work that way. When I write, even when I’m writing something that will stretch across two hundred pages or more, I do a lot of daydreaming, and have a lot of plot points and arcs in my head, and I’ll write myself little notes as inspiration strikes me, but sitting down and actually hammering out a complete outline is just about impossible for me.

I’ve recently changed the way I write my long-form fiction. I generally like to use the third person when I write, because there’s usually not one single character that sees everything I want my readers to know. The problem with that is that all of the sections, and therefore all of my characters, end up having the same voice – mine. Here’s Thomas describing how Sarah feels about her boyfriend. Here’s Thomas describing how Michael prepares to meet his enemy. And so on.

While first-person writing is excellent for developing a character’ voice, and also excellent for pulling the reader into the story, it’s just too limited for what I want to do. So what I’ve been doing – and this is sort of an experiment, so I’m not sure how well it’s going to work – is writing a draft from multiple first person perspectives. Each section, or chapter, is from a particular character’s point of view, which gives the reader access to their voice, their thoughts, their emotions, et cetera. But the next section might be from a totally different character’s point of view. Then, when I revise it, I’ll re-write all of those sections as third person narratives, but keep all of the internal dialog and such. The technical term for that is deep third person. It might end up sucking, but so far, I like what I’ve seen.

Joss Whedon, who does character-driven fiction better than pretty much anybody, once said (something along the lines of) “the key to writing good fiction is to hate your characters.” Drama arises from conflict. There won’t be any conflict if you’re too nice to your characters. So, if you want to write good stories, figure out worst thing you can do to your heroes, and then do it.

It can be hard to view your own writing objectively. There have been times when I’ve been sitting at the keyboard, staring at the words on the screen, and calling myself the worst hack on the planet. A few days later, though, I’ll go back and be pleasantly surprised by how those words turned out. There have been other times when I thought I was writing gold, but later realized that I was too tired, too drunk, or both, to have been at the computer at that moment, and should have just gone to bed.

Taking a few days, or even a few weeks, away from your work is essential. When you step away from your work, when you forget what you’ve written and why, you can look at it more objectively, like you’re reading it for the first time. When you’re looking at something you wrote a long time ago, and it makes you gasp, or want to weep, or pump your fist in the air, you can be pretty sure that what you’ve put down is worth reading.

You can also learn a lot about yourself by the things you write. Your sense of humor, your romantic streak, your hopes and dreams and fears, all have a way of coming out on the page. There have been a couple of times when I’ve looked back at some of the things I’ve written and said “Damn, that was cool,” followed almost immediately by “you know what? I think I need help.”