As the title should tell you, there was an attempt!
The moment of downtime from yesterday was taken up by the reason for the title’s question, which I will get to. Instead, I went about my traditional writing time, late in the evening and struggling against the exhaustion of being a late-30s guy with a manual labor career.
This is to say: I got another page of story before my sleepiness started influencing my typing, resulting in an additional two pages of incoherent babble. This means, unfortunately, that my late-evening awake period was spent cleaning up what I had worked on earlier and deleting the word salad.
Maybe I can sell the latter parts for political speeches. They’d probably make more sense than what those folks keep trying to promulgate.
In regards to developing the Lightspear Forms, I’ve come across an interestingly frustrating snag. I’ve been trying to find an artist who could help me with visuals to those Forms (who hopefully will understand that payment arrangements would be made; I support artists, but I am also poor and could never pay a full commission right off the bat) much like the Lightsaber Forms do.
The snag was when I realized I couldn’t find the artist of the above illustrations in order to credit them or seek them out for possible work/references. I’m going to find out who made this artwork eventually, but the initial searches proved fruitless. That’s irritating to me; no artist should have their work up without their name attached to it. If any of my readers knows who created these illustrations, please let me know.
In the realm of the day-job, I was shown some kindness by my customers and presented with a gift: a new hat!
We postmen complain about bad customers, but I have to say that I have good people on my route.
And finally, a moment of startled embarrassment. I’ve been learning what I can about the business end of being a writer, limited as I am without a higher education in the field (or any field, really; learned more math through my work than ever did in a classroom), and I was told by several folks that “I need an agent”.
‘Why’ was my first question. I’ve known of writers having agents and that doing so could help the writer with selling a series, but that’d make sense for an established author. For someone like me, who’s been writing for 20-odd years and hasn’t had a single response to his submissions, it strikes me as wasting the agents’ time. But I looked into it, nonetheless.
After a morning of research and not really finding any definite answers (ah, the internet; so vast and full of information, but dammit does need a library system to sort that information into ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ essays), I came across an agent who had some big names on his list. Terry Goodkind, Mercedes Lackey, Harry Turtledove, and what caught my full attention: Timothy Zahn.
I managed to find the firm and agent who represented authors I was a huge fan of (and vaguely interact with online; Turtledove is very polite to his fans), so what do you suppose I thought to be a good idea?
I wrote him an email. After reading his page and seeing how he went about taking on clients, I thought he’d be the person to ask for advice on the world of literary agents. I wrote about my personal science fiction story I was working on (I won’t be putting it up here, as there is a slim chance it could be publishable) and asked what I’d need to make it presentable.
That’s all par for the course with me, understand. I’ve gone to people seeking advice before, and thought nothing of asking questions of high-level writers (and when they respond, they’re genuinely helpful), but I’ll admit I was nervous about writing to someone like this individual. It wasn’t until after I hit “Send” that I realized something: my email has this blog’s address attached to its signature, as I write emails to current and prospective players.
I basically wrote a fan letter to a high-level literary agent, asked him for advice and what I needed to gain an agent, and sent him an invite to read a blog. My best case scenario is that the email was deleted before being read. At worst, he’s read it and come here to look my fan-fiction over, and that’d be the end of my writing career. I need a very deep hole to hide myself in from the sheer embarrassment.
So, with that story-time finished, I’m off to sling letters and hope for a few moments to whittle away more at the Sidewinder Stories. To the agent I inadvertently invited over here, if you’re reading this: I apologize.
Stay safe out there, readers, and check your email signatures.
-JB Swift
Swift's Corner 