Well, where are we at?
My time travel flash story is now up at Critters. People seem to think it's funny, which is good. I haven't seen any negative criticism so far, but I've only glanced at the critiques. One thing I was concerned about was how funny it was. Because I was concerned I was being too conservative. But it's also a situation where I could keep going and going forever, making the fish as big as a whale. Got to know when to get off the treadmill.
Old Dragonslayer story is going fine. No major structural problems, and the changes I'm making are being nice and letting me insert them flowfully. All writing should be this easy.
My biggest beef is trying to get Black Hole Son's query letter just right. I realize there's no such thing as the perfect query letter, but it seems so difficult to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that get you the form rejections. Then comes cliched things, like starting with a rhetorical question, unidentified characters, and meaningless authorial experience. Then the hard part--not giving enough of the plot, being too generic, awkward paragraphs--these are things that are so hard. Not because it's too hard to condense my plot to 250 interesting words, but because the narrative structure and storyline makes it hard to format the query into "When Character A finds himself in situation B, he must C. But D, E, and possibly F are seeking to stop him from C." Black Hole Son doesn't work like that so much. Which might be why it's not so marketable. Ah, well, I've still got plenty of agents to go.Labels: Black Hole Son, old dragon slayer story, query letter, time travel flash