The Gaven

It’s nearly time for the semester to end and for me to take a two week break from my job.  I’m looking forward to it.  My plans are the following:

1. Find any spelling mistakes on my websites and fix them.  I’ve already been working on this, so it should be a short job.
2. Send out more query letters.
3. Gather my hand written pages and type them up.
4. Organize my writing for my next book.  I’m not giving up on writing, but I can’t sit and wait on The Gaven to be published either.  Maybe the next thing will be picked up first.  You never know.
5. Sleep.  A lot.

As I get some more writing finished, I’ll post some of it here for all to see.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season.  Let’s hope there’s more to say in the new year.

I’ve received another comment from someone who read the book.  They only left their email, so I’m going to leave that out of my cut and paste.

Feedback:
The Mayan Long Count Calendar (I assume that’s the calendar you refer to in Chapter 1) ends in December 2012, not in 2015.
Otherwise, I like the book, I’m sure I’ll buy it when it comes out. (when–not if.)
Good luck!

Yeah, I knew it was 2012. I don’t know why I did that, but I’m blaming the keyboard. I use the number pad and the 2 and 5 are close together. So, yeah, it was the keyboard’s fault. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I’m also glad that someone else likes my book. I just have to convince potential agents of that.

I had read about this sort of thing way back in 2004 and incorporated it into The Gaven.  Now, Toyota is making a good effort at making it real.

Toyota Motor said Monday it was developing anti-drunk driving equipment that would lock the ignition of a vehicle if high levels of alcohol are detected in the driver.

The system features a hand-held breathalyser, equipped with a digital camera, that detects alcohol consumption and photographs the driver’s face for identification, a company statement said.

If the driver tests positive, the system either warns him or her, or locks the vehicle’s ignition depending on the level of alcohol detected, Toyota said.

Nissan Motor is currently developing similar equipment. In the United States, certain states earlier this year passed legislation requiring drunk driving offenders to install breathalyser ignition locks in their cars.

I find it a little bit funny because, in one of my rejection letters, I was told that such things are not possible and could never happen.

I’ve gotten back all of the queries to possible agents that I had sent out, all rejecting myself and the novel.  While the rejections were polite, it’s discouraging as well.  I’ve been trying to find an agent for two years now and, at the moment, it seems like it’s going nowhere.  I’m sure that, in a few days, I’ll feel a little better and get back out there looking again.

If you notice some strange characters on the site, it has something to do with the Wordpress upgrade and I have to go and change it all manually.  I haven’t had a chance to do this yet because I’ve been sick with an upper respiratory infection and have been hanging out on the couch.

On a side note, the torrent is still running and several more people have downloaded The Gaven and read it.  Those that have read it have given great, positive feedback and everyone seems to have enjoyed it.  So, that always puts a smile on my face.

In the past, I used to keep a very detailed, very personal and private, handwritten journal. I had them in several books that I thought I’d keep forever. Then, one day a couple of weeks ago I was flipping through them and though, “Holy hell! There’s no way I want anyone to ever know that.”

I decided that shredding them wasn’t good enough. They had to be burned so no one would ever be able to put them back together. Yeah, I’m paranoid like that.

This morning, I set them on fire, one at a time, in the kitchen sink. They burned rather easily and the flames were quite high. It was a marvelous site to see and I should have taken pictures, but I was too enthralled with the flames licking the sky.

When I was finished with my pyromaniac episode, I dowsed the ashes with water and tossed everything in the garbage.

The problem with all this is that now my hair and my clothes smell like I’ve been hanging out with arsonists and the townhouse reeks of smoke. We opened every window in the house, turned on every fan, yet, 12 hours later there is still a hint of smoke in the air.

Yes, I’m an idiot. I should have burned the stuff outside. I probably also shouldn’t be so paranoid as to think anyone would want to read anything I’ve shredded. Lesson learned.

Since the junior high school started back up on 24 August, I decided to put my down time at work to good use.  Due to the fact that my husband has to be at work sooner than me, I have 30 minutes in the morning and about 20 minutes at lunch to get some writing done.

I figured that, since I have a bunch of stuff in my head I need to write down, as well as a lot of shorter stories I’d like to tell, I’d use this time to keep up on my writing and get things written that I’ve been putting off.

The only bad part is that I have no computer access at work so, from 650am until 5pm, I am out of touch with just about everything going on in the world.  It also means that I’m tired as hell when I get home and certainly don’t want to do any writing.

If I don’t take advantage of my two times to write per day, I’m afraid it would be Christmas before I got to writing anything.  I think it’s important to keep on writing so that you can stay sharp, but also so that you can get your rough drafts finished and work on polishing them when you have more extended times.

Okay, so I had a pity party for myself the other day and it was great.  Of course I felt real sorry for myself and told myself that I was really cool and screw it if publishing agents and agencies don’t like me.

Then, I went back to work and sent out another two queries.  Now, I have to get back to my job that pays me in actual money.  Classes actually start on Friday, so we’ll see what this year’s crop of kids are like on Monday.

I spent the day writing two query letters.  That’s right.  Two.  I absolutely hate writing these things.  They are difficult for me to do and I would rather do anything else than write them.  As a matter of fact I did.  My day went a little bit like this:

Sit at computer and open up Open Office.  Stare at the blank screen.  Open Firefox, go to reddit, see if there’s any new news.  Write three blog posts for Loss of Privacy.  Switch back to Open Office.  Stare at the screen some more.  Read, re-read, and read again, the literary agencies’ websites.  Make sure that they would be a good fit for you.  Try to figure out how to fit in that the owner of the agency and myself are Mets fans.  Decide that’s not appropriate for a query letter.  Switch back to Open Office and write my return address and the address of the agency.  Take a two hour nap.  Play with the cat.  Eat lunch.  Finally, write the query letter.  Check, double check, and triple check for spelling mistakes.  I’m sure I still missed one.  Print up query letter and synopsis.  Start to feel sick (This is normal and happens every time I print a query letter).  Drive to the post office (we no longer have mailboxes we can drop them in) and mail the letter.  Feel a little more sick.  Wait for “thanks but no thanks” rejection letter.

The reason I hate these so much is because there has to be a balance between suck-up, parting information, and selling your book to people who have never heard of you before.  The whole process feels, to me, to be a bit of a crap shoot.  So, the negativity seeps in and I’m always sure that the rejections will come.  However, it always helps when I get an email from some other stranger telling me they liked reading my book.  I love bittorrent.

Let me write at random or give me a topic and I’ll write until the cows come home.  Make me write a professional letter and I’d rather stab my eyes out.  But, it has to be done.  Wish me luck and let’s hope I didn’t make any typos.

A friend recently recommended is my website online to me and I thought I’d give it a go. So far, I’m liking it because I can get notifications immediately if something goes wrong and sort the problem out ASAP. If you have a bunch of websites, like I do, or servers it’s also handy because I don’t have to constantly run from site to site to make sure everything is working properly.

Is my website online supports ping, website, HTTP(s), DNS, SMTP, POP3, SQL, and more stuff I don’t even use. So, yeah, this is a bit of a shameless plug, but I thought I’d pass along some helpful info to my readers.

I really wanted a way for other people to keep up with what’s happening with the novel, as well as myself, and, since I don’t update things here often enough, I’ve gone and taken the plunge at Twitter.  I’ve been trying to keep this place as professional as possible, but some people still want to follow what I’m doing from day to day.  I figured Twitter is the best place to do this.

I’ve also had a facebook account for nearly two years, but I rarely log into it because I really don’t like the layout and a lot of the crap that goes on there.  So far, it’s pretty easy to use and allows me to be more relaxed than maintaining this site.

You can find my Twitter account here and the rss feed here.