3 for 3

Yep, three pitches, three requests for pages etc. It isn't my pitch, it's the concept. Don't believe me? Here's the logline from the back of my business card:

Greasing the Wheels

Meet a man who's paid by the brewers, distillers, pharmaceutical folks and shrinks to lead a team into rish-hour traffic and make sure we're all properly frustrated. But don't be mad at him: he's got problems of his own.

**

So now I've got to come up with a decent short synopsis (I hate writing synopses) and make sure I've got twenty or so decent pages to send off. A problem everyone should have, I realize.

An interesting thing about New York people: they don't get the joke right off. If you live in LA you're saying "Hell, that's just a day on the freeway." In Vegas, too, or Denver, or Chicago. But in New York, nobody drives, or at least nobody sane drives. I told one person to ask a cabbie. Still, they bought the pitch, so I'm happy with that.

2007 Las Vegas Writers Conference

The 2007 Las Vegas Writers Conference is being held this weekend at Sam's Town on Boulder Highway in Las Vegas. Sam's Town is the original "locals casino" developed by Sam Boyd and hugely popular. Among other things it has banquet rooms and meeting spaces, and they do a good job for a conference like this one.

I went primarily in order to make a few contacts, and I did. Yesterday I got a request for more information from Sheree Bykofsky, an agent from New York. Today I will be meeting with two more New York agents: Jim McCarthy and Katharine Sands. Why New York agents? Because that's where books get published. There will be another Las Vegas Writers Conference in 2008. If you're looking for a potentially tax-deductible trip to Vegas, you should consider it. The food has been good, and I've made some potentially useful contacts. The sessions are mostly excellent as well.

And, by the way, the advice given by every member of the eight-author panel as last-night's dinner? Write something every day. I'm starting to see a pattern.

Literati, Meetup, and Vicki Pettersson

That's three things in the title. Here are the details. Meetup.com is a site where you can start a group of people with similar interests from your area who wish to meet both on line and in person from time to time. One such group in Las Vegas is the Literati. I belong to that group, which consists of published and shortly-to-be published authors. I mention Vicki because she was the featured speaker on Thursday evening. She is under contract to write a series of books, and since I've mentioned that, here is her website. She writes paranormal romance set in Las Vegas.

Her advice was simply to write every day, and she handed out copies of her successful query letter (the one that got her the multi-book contract) which is, as you might imagine, a very good query letter. I've been invited to sit in with a critique group within the Literati, which I'll be doing starting Tuesday.

Greetings and Long Explanation

This is not my first blog, but it is a blog about my first published novel. Oh, it's not published yet. But it will be. It is written, or at least drafted. I wrote it during the 2006 National Novel Writing Month. To "win" that competition, which is only with yourself in the end, you must write fifty thousand words during the month of November. It happens every November. I did it. My official word count for the month was 50,001. Okay, some of them were redundant, and even more of them were poorly placed, but the story is good, and now I'm revising a novel, not thinking about writing one.

If a month of forced novel writing sounds good to you, then by all means click here: NANOWRIMO. You can sign up right now and be all ready and rarin' to go come November. This year my goal is to write at least 50,002 words of a different novel. So that gives me until October 31st, Halloween, or Nevada Day if you will, to revise the one I wrote last year.

Some personal history might work here. I wrote my first story in the fifth grade. It sucked big-time. Oh, well, it was a story. Every time I have a job doing whatever I end up somehow mixing writing into it. It isn't easy mixing writing with babysitting computers, but I can do it. The only exception, interestingly, is when I teach. Heck, let the students do the writing; that's what they paid for, right? For years I've banged out movie scripts, but they sucked too. Last November I took one of those ideas and re framed it as a novel. The first draft su . . . well, it isn't all that great. But it is a complete novel, a good story, and I'm revising it chapter by chapter. As this goes along I'll describe some of the other things I'm doing to get the thing ready for publication. The first chapter is, as of now, the only part that isn't totally awful. It's awful, but not totally.

This story is a comedy mystery. It's about a guy who works for a company who hires groups of people to go out into rush-hour traffic and make life miserable for the rest of us. You always knew that was true, didn't you? Well, it is, and I managed to get the story of one group, and that group's team leader and his family and loves and hates. Not a bad concept is it? You will find a link to that first chapter, in HTML format, in the links list of this blog. I'll update it as I revise it. Right now it's lacking humor. Not that long ago it lacked any showing rather than telling. It had a lot of telling. Passive voice, even. Yowch! Well, that's the story. Whenever I revise the book, or do anything related to writing it, I'll post a report here. Tomorrow, for instance, I'm off to a local writers' conference. Should be fun and informative.

So stay tuned (I have no confidence whatever in the feeds, so check back often.) And feel free to contribute if you can. Writing is quite a hoot, isn't it? When the book is published I'll give one away on this site. (There, that oughta keep 'em coming back.)