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Hello, everyone. This is Bev Vincent, author of the upcoming book The Road to the Dark Tower, which will be published by NAL, part of the Penguin family (which also includes Viking, Signet, Plume and Dutton imprints) in November 2004.
Every now and then I will update this thread with my experiences and thoughts about both the writing process and the road to publication. Feel free to comment and ask questions here or on other threads. I'll try to check in most days.
The Road to the Dark Tower is an overview of and a critical look at Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
Someone once asked me if I have a day job to support my writing. It was a question that made me stop for a moment before replying. I've been writing seriously for three -- going on four -- years now, but only intensively for the past eight months or so. I get up between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. and write until it's time to get ready to go to my day job at 7:30. I get home around 5:30 p.m. and usually put in two, maybe three hours in the evening. Weekends are writing, mostly. That's because I have a deadline that is about five weeks from now.
So, I would say I currently have two jobs. But I don't do my day job to support my writing. I enjoy both jobs immensely. I've worked at Rigaku/MSC for coming up on fourteen years. If it was just a source of money so I could write, I think I'd grow to resent the time it occupies during my week. I don't. I like both jobs and neither one supports or threatens the other.
Five weeks, as I said above. I haven't started panicking yet. I have one chapter to finish up, an introduction and a conclusion section to write and I'll have a decent draft finished, much of which has been extensively edited and revised already. My plan is to have that done by the end of June, which gives me all of July to go over it and tweak it up, fix mistakes, etc.
Submitting it doesn't mean the work ends. There will be revision requests from my editor, I'm sure. Changes in the final drafts of the last three Dark Tower books might also have implications that I have to address as well. We plan to have the book essentially frozen by February, after which point we'll fix typos, but that's it.
I'm reading a book called Publicize Your Book by Jacqueline Devlin that explains what happens next and the things authors can do to make sure their books don't fall between the cracks at the publisher. Fascinating stuff, and immensely useful.
These days, my writing has been pretty much limited to working on THE ROAD TO THE DARK TOWER. I had a list of short story markets that I wanted to try to get in on, but most of them have slipped on by. I've managed to keep my twice-monthly book reviews (and the required reading to be able to do them) going and my Cemetery Dance columns once every two months. By a lucky happenstance, CD decided to do an all-fiction issue whose deadline was a few days ago. That gave me one issue off right in the heat of the project. My next deadline is a few weeks after I turn the manuscript in to my editor, so I will have something to turn to immediately after I finish the book.
However, I haven't been idle in the short story market. I have a briefcase full of stories that I keep in circulation, sending them off to new markets when inevitable rejection letters come in. I've been slowly winnowing this collection of stories down, much to my surprise and pleasure. Some of them had been out to over a dozen markets before being picked up. I look forward to getting back to some fiction writing in a month or so.
Some mornings (I get up at 5 a.m. to write) I just can't get motivated. I get to my writing desk -- a lovely roll-top my wife got me for Christmas several years ago (read more about that here) -- play my ritualistic game of Freecell, and then stare blankly at the computer. I know what I have to do, I just don't have the energy to do it.
On those mornings, I find other productive things that have to be done. Busy work. Pore over a stack of reference material for tidbits that I sprinkle throughout the text. Bits of trivia or commentary that enhance, I hope. All this requires of me is enough attention to read and some fairly straight-forward decisions on where to add the bits of information as I find them. At the end of two hours, my research pile is smaller and I've done something to the manuscript, so I don't feel like I should have stayed in bed that morning. (@)
Every now and then I will update this thread with my experiences and thoughts about both the writing process and the road to publication. Feel free to comment and ask questions here or on other threads. I'll try to check in most days.
The Road to the Dark Tower is an overview of and a critical look at Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
Someone once asked me if I have a day job to support my writing. It was a question that made me stop for a moment before replying. I've been writing seriously for three -- going on four -- years now, but only intensively for the past eight months or so. I get up between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. and write until it's time to get ready to go to my day job at 7:30. I get home around 5:30 p.m. and usually put in two, maybe three hours in the evening. Weekends are writing, mostly. That's because I have a deadline that is about five weeks from now.
So, I would say I currently have two jobs. But I don't do my day job to support my writing. I enjoy both jobs immensely. I've worked at Rigaku/MSC for coming up on fourteen years. If it was just a source of money so I could write, I think I'd grow to resent the time it occupies during my week. I don't. I like both jobs and neither one supports or threatens the other.
Five weeks, as I said above. I haven't started panicking yet. I have one chapter to finish up, an introduction and a conclusion section to write and I'll have a decent draft finished, much of which has been extensively edited and revised already. My plan is to have that done by the end of June, which gives me all of July to go over it and tweak it up, fix mistakes, etc.
Submitting it doesn't mean the work ends. There will be revision requests from my editor, I'm sure. Changes in the final drafts of the last three Dark Tower books might also have implications that I have to address as well. We plan to have the book essentially frozen by February, after which point we'll fix typos, but that's it.
I'm reading a book called Publicize Your Book by Jacqueline Devlin that explains what happens next and the things authors can do to make sure their books don't fall between the cracks at the publisher. Fascinating stuff, and immensely useful.
These days, my writing has been pretty much limited to working on THE ROAD TO THE DARK TOWER. I had a list of short story markets that I wanted to try to get in on, but most of them have slipped on by. I've managed to keep my twice-monthly book reviews (and the required reading to be able to do them) going and my Cemetery Dance columns once every two months. By a lucky happenstance, CD decided to do an all-fiction issue whose deadline was a few days ago. That gave me one issue off right in the heat of the project. My next deadline is a few weeks after I turn the manuscript in to my editor, so I will have something to turn to immediately after I finish the book.
However, I haven't been idle in the short story market. I have a briefcase full of stories that I keep in circulation, sending them off to new markets when inevitable rejection letters come in. I've been slowly winnowing this collection of stories down, much to my surprise and pleasure. Some of them had been out to over a dozen markets before being picked up. I look forward to getting back to some fiction writing in a month or so.
Some mornings (I get up at 5 a.m. to write) I just can't get motivated. I get to my writing desk -- a lovely roll-top my wife got me for Christmas several years ago (read more about that here) -- play my ritualistic game of Freecell, and then stare blankly at the computer. I know what I have to do, I just don't have the energy to do it.
On those mornings, I find other productive things that have to be done. Busy work. Pore over a stack of reference material for tidbits that I sprinkle throughout the text. Bits of trivia or commentary that enhance, I hope. All this requires of me is enough attention to read and some fairly straight-forward decisions on where to add the bits of information as I find them. At the end of two hours, my research pile is smaller and I've done something to the manuscript, so I don't feel like I should have stayed in bed that morning. (@)