Hiya, writers & frenz! Good to see you back for practice.
Cheers to all our NaNo and NaNo-adjacent writers this third Thusday of the annual marathon! Please comment a <small>BLOCKQUOTE</small> as clear and brief as possible of your current progress, so I can update our chart accurately. (Iâll check back through Sunday in case late commenters add more.)
In 1968 or so, I wrote a radio play for the college broadcasting station. Hadda if ya wantida pass the radio writing class. Iâd read dozens of radio plays in earlier years, just never wrote one. To my surprise, it came out not bad. Kind of a childrenâs-style tale for adults about the diff between what is and what people cling to believing when the âisâ doesnât make sense toâem. Something like that.
On first read-through, the acting students âinitially dragging their asses in just to meet requirements in their own classesâ had a good time with it! The sound engineer then only put us through a coupla rehearsals â somehow the natural pacing fit the allotted time just right. Then we sat around with snacks until time to go live, smooth as silk, everyone got good grades, everyone happy. Especially the station manager.
It went so well that I thought, maybe this piece has legs? Letâs see about turning it into a short-story, or childrenâs book. To my further happy surprise, that seemed to go nicely, too. So, I began pounding Writersâ Market to find where to submit it. And sent and sent and sent.
And sent.
Back then, youâd get a reply within pretty few weeks, sometimes as quick as three! If usually just your ms back in the big manilla SASE youâd enclosed, as required, with a note from someone in editorial, saying, âThank you for letting us see your ms. We regret that it does not fit our current publishing needs, but good luck in your endeavors.â They were kinda nice back then! (Supply was far from exceeding demand, I guess.) A few editors âor their readersâ also said things like, âWe hope youâll think of us for your next project.â Exciting!
But across about a year, no takers. Eventually I put it in the âtrunkâ.
Over a decade later, rifling through said âtrunkâ âactually, a file cabinet, bright yellow! Still got it. :) â I found the ms again and thought Iâd give it another go. But by then, you could no longer submit directly unless âsolicitedâ. (Or unless you went there and tried to find a transom to toss it over.)
You hadda first send it to an agent and hope it would interest her or them. And probably another and another. Back to Writersâ Market! And others. But similar results. Sâokay, as a story, it really was neither fish nor fowl, if semi-both. Nice recalling the radio days, back in the trunk?
Unfortunately, an inopportune relative visiting my apartment uninvited, spotted the ms and envelopes on the desk or something, and began badgering me to let him show it to a friend of his whose mother, he said, was a literary agent. I said no. My parents then began badgering too, saying this relative was deeply in need of a success, even just for morale. As a person with a real job and my own apartment and everything, I âowedâ it to him to give him what help I could: let him have a copy of the ms to show his friend, and if his friendâs mother signed me, I would only owe nosy relative a tiny commission of my âtakeâ for having made the connection for me. (My âtakeâ?⊠Tiny commission? ⊠What happened to the âjust for morale?â...)
Eventually, I caved. And heard nothing for a coupla months. Figured the relative had lost it, tossed it, attempted to sell it as his own work (yep, that kind). Then I get a letter on friendâs motherâs stationery, asking if I had a book ms to pitch too, and that since relative said I had to travel to that area in a couple of weeks, how âbout we meet? Well, that sounded promising! Makes sense an agent might want to know whether a writer is just a one-trick pony or has staying power, before she puts a lot of effort into trying to find a publisher.
This was back when they still only looked at things on paper. So, I added a briefcase to my luggage and lugged the book ms along with everything else on the plane.
Never met the agent. Not even her son. Relative âexplainedâ that his pal had sent the letter on Mumâs stationery âhad I âthoughtâ it was from her? No, a misunderstanding on my part, he saidâ after relative and pal had marked up the short-story ms with all the changes they thought would make it good enough to show mother-agent (proof of whose existence had yet to materialize, I belatedly realized.. Yeah, yeah, I was an idiot, what can I say?)
In the process, pal and relative eliminated the central logic of the plot, without which there was no story, Yet Rel insisted they were sure if I made the specified changes (on what wordprocessor in mid-air?) then the mythical agent-mother would definitely wanna meet with me, once sheâd seen it. ...except she happened to be out of town right now ⊠so it would need to be some other time. (On whose plane fare?)
At least I got the ms back. And some weight-training/strength-resistence long-distance exercise.
Undaunted, as long as I had made a new start anyway, I decided to give it another once-over (my version, not the asshatsâ), and take another run at submitting.
...not sure how/why, but seemed like everything I did only made it worse. And I couldnât find the original radio play to start from scratch with!
Thatâd been typewriter days. Manual typewriters at that! The ss/bk ms had been wordprocessed, so thatâs what I worked from.
Today, I dunno even whereâs those floppy disks. The first disk was a 5-incher and it might be on one of the half-doz of those I saved from various work-related and other projects. No program or drive for that now, Oâcourse. I think I musta later put it on a 2Âœ incher in wp5.1, but if itâs among the 4 dozen or so diskettes like that, each with four to fifteen other pieces on it, too...
Munged until no good.
<big><big>For Tonightâs challenge:</big></big> letâs mung it up right from the start!
- A narrative at least 200 words in length; can include some dialogue but doesnât hafta...
- in which every sentence must contain at least one flaw,
- and no two consecutive sentences can contain the same flaw.
- Examples of flaws to have: misspelling, mispunct, bad sentence construction, grammar disagreement, lame dialogue tags, space gaps, plot disconnects, whatever!
Well, mung it almost from the start â the easiest way to do this, as long as weâre in Nano and conserving brain, is just pants a buncha paragraphs quickânâdirty, and then go back and ruin them but good! :D
Points OFF for valid logic, effective sequencing, interesting story idea, believable characters. and everything damn thing else that might contribute to quality! Nothing good shall pass!
Ready? GO!
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (5pm leftkost, 8 pm Eastern) until it isnât.
Before signing a contract with any agent or publisher, please be sure to check them out on Preditors and Editors (&/or critters.org/c/pubtips.ht), Absolute Write, and/or Writer Beware.