Still no title

[igenlode]

After several days of fiddling around with the last three sentences, I think I have finished the Swedish story now. I probably ought to be rejoicing, but I don't feel like it...

Estimated length: 8½ x 525 + 82 x 500 + 97 x 300 + 98 x 500 — about 124,000 words as it currently stands.

I still have no idea what a suitable title is, and since I've had no flashes of blinding inspiration in the last two years I expect it may as well make do with an unsuitable one.

---

Edit: Started 14 Nov 2017 — 826 days in total.
Oddly enough, that makes an estimated average of 150.12 words per day, which is extraordinarily close to my earlier graph results!

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

You may not have a title, but you still finished it. You did it. You made it.
Congratulations.

[erimia]

Congratulations! It was a joy to witness the bits of the creative process through your posts. 124,000 words is a huge accomplishment. I can't promise that I'll read it, unfortunately, because it seems I all but lost my interest in POTO, but I'll probably give it a try one day.

[igenlode]

Unfortunately 124,000 words is too long for a finished novel -- we're talking doorstop fantasy saga territory here -- and the more I look at it, the more depressed I get...

I spent an evening looking up the whole process of getting an agent, etc., and the only reassuring thing it confirmed was that self-publishing, for me, is a complete non-starter. The only people who do at all successfully out of it are those who can produce several books a year that will sell in series format, and who are able to do massive amounts of publicity, get free review copies to well-known book bloggers and persuade them to feature them, take out advertising promotions on Amazon, etc. You need colossal self-confidence and conviction, a talent for salesmanship, and endless energy. I'm utterly lacking in any of those.

If you've got a one-off book that's mainstream fiction, then you need an agent to get it anywhere near publication.

But along the way I also came across long discussions of the way to edit a book, the multiple reasons why manuscripts fail to sell (the principal one, naturally, being that they're just not good enough), how vital it is to get your readers invested in the characters within the first page, how brutally obvious the quality of a written text can be the moment you ask the author to stand up and read it out in public... and I tried reading out my first page, and, well, it's hopeless.
The first line is all right -- that's a nice starts-with-a-bang opening, rather than a long meandering backstory of the type you're supposed to avoid -- but then the whole beginning that I was so pleased with turns out to be reams of flashback that positively shrieks 'fan-fiction', all about what Christine feels for Raoul and how they got to where they are now and where this story diverges from canon; it was written with no intention of being anything other than fan-fiction, and it really shows.
But then you need that in order to explain who these people are and how they got here... but can we really get away with a detour in the very first page into Raoul's resourcefulness in buying Mme Valerius new underwear when neither of them speaks German? Who is going to sit through this stuff? And I was so happy with that passage :-(

We've got Christine referring casually to 'a mongol girl' in the opening paragraphs when talking about Greta -- which she would have done; I can't possibly write about 'a learning-disabled servant' or refer to the character as 'living with Down's Syndrome' -- which they're just going to reject out of hand, never mind that Greta is based on someone I actually knew personally.

And then there's that chapter all about Philippe's past, which I enjoyed writing but which -- as I've long been aware -- has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story at all, other than giving Philippe and Raoul a brief paragraph of bonding. The whole thing just feels like a complete non-starter.

So it needs editing down; fair enough. (I did a massive edit on "Afterwards", and managed to reduce it by about a quarter of its original length to fit the competition rules.) But... it feels so hopeless overall. It is fan-fiction. It reeks of fan-fiction. It was written for a small in-group, without any intention (at that stage) of general appeal, and I just have to imagine showing it to my relations and acquaintances to picture how it's likely to go down as an agency submission.

---

And even as fan-fiction it's likely to go down with a hollow thud; the fandom on FFnet is pretty thin these days, perhaps as the last of the 2004 contingent have finally grown out of Gerard Butler or perhaps because it has moved to AO3 or Tumblr. There's not a lot being published, and few or no reviews on most of what does get put up there, including some reasonably sophisticated (even if not great) R/C material. I'm not reviewing. Nobody else is reviewing. The fandom's pretty dead, I think.

About all I've got to look forward to is months of typing followed by a general echoing silence; it's one thing to say that you have written a book (and hard enough to do even that), but entirely another to get anyone else interested in reading it.

[erimia]

I doubt that fanfiction feel would automatically be such a huge letdown for a book. If anything, it may be an attraction for some readers, considering how popular and common fanfiction is now. (The book I've recently read, Carry On, is basically a mediocre Harry Potter slash fic in a very thin desguise, and it is one of the main reasons of its popularity).

It's sad to hear that editors may reject historical accuracy for the sake of not being offensive (If I understood correctly the reason why they would not accept "mongol girl"). If anything, it does the opposite of the intended, whitewashing the past and forgetting its injustices.

[igenlode]

Yes, I saw you had been looking at reviews of "Carry On" -- "Fangirl" is one of the books I've been meaning to review for a long time (along with "To Ride Hell's Chasm"), and I was actually shocked to gather that the improbably-named author had gone so far as to *publish* her Simon Snow fan-fiction, which seemed when I heard it to be the ultimate rip-off.

(Also, the actual quoted text of the 'original' Simon Snow books in "Fangirl" -- not so much Cath's fanfic -- struck me as toe-curlingly mediocre, which I assumed was deliberate parody of that style of writing. Endless descriptions of eye colours, etc...)