童裝批發

童裝

童裝

酒店喝酒

酒店消費

喝花酒

粉味

酒店小姐

ktv酒店

台北酒店

酒店經紀找茵悅

酒店上班

酒店經紀

禮服酒店

酒店兼差

酒店打工

酒店經紀tw

酒店

台北酒店經紀

酒店打

酒店正職

酒店類型

酒店午場

酒店規定

酒店行政

酒店資訊

酒店藝名

酒店日保

When I finished the first draft of my new novel, American Zen, it weighed in at a modest 120,000 or so words and roughly 360 pages. When I began the first draft this past March, I was envisioning a novella-length book of maybe 280 pages and 80,000 words. I honestly didn’t think it would ever be a full-length book.

Now that the rewrite’s almost complete, my little novel about a hard rock band reuniting 30 years after their breakup under very dramatic, even tragic, circumstances, is now up to just over 400 pages and close to 145,000 words.

I was lucky enough to see that the excellent concept and infrastructure of my story was able to support the dozens of additional pages and tens of thousands of extra words so I could, through internal dialogs and a couple of more flashback chapters, make some comments on the human condition in general (and all worthwhile novels, IMO, ought to comment on the human condition).

The rewrite’s been inspired and this is coming from someone who generally loathes the revision phase of a book. In fact, it’s been so inspired and I keep thinking of more and more and more ways to improve the ms that sometimes I fear the rewrite will never end and that I’ll never get it in the swim.

But the length of American Zen, while I may have originally predicted 80,000 words, was never a matter of concern. The Bridges of Madison County, again, was a short book and look how successful that was. I never considered the nonexistent agents’ prejudice against short mss.

This is my first time on this blog, but I’m looking forward to being back.

I’m glad that agents have a sense of humor about prank submissions, although I’m sure stuff like that would be really irritating after awhile.

And no, I’ve never sent one… although it’s possible that in my earlier writing days my writing was bad enough that agents wondered if it was a prank…

We all know that single-spaced, double-sided pages in goofy fonts is worthy of nothing but the trash bin. We all know you need double-spaced copy in a 12-point font with one inch margins all around, but when it comes to anything more specific than that, the experts seem to disagree.

I am seeing alarmingly different suggestions from editors, agents, and published authors.

First,there’s the great font debate — should a submission be in Courier or Times New Roman? Is one preferable, does it just not matter, are similar fonts permissible if they’re easy on the eyes? Some sources say Courier’s the only way, while others say that TNR is now the norm.

Then there’s the italics issue. Some sources say that these words must be underlined, while others say you’d better use an italic font or your submission won’t be read. Ditto for writing a letter in a Times Roman type font but sending a manuscript set in Courier.

Headers? They’re all over the top of the page, from left-aligned only to far right to those in the center, who put some info on the left and page number on the right.

One novelist told me the other day that a pro manuscript should look the same today as it did 20 years ago, Courier and underlined and right-flush headers. But in an article in a writing and publishing magazine this month, an editor said that “the industry” recognizes manuscripts done only in one way now, and it was the opposite of what the novelist had told me: TNR, left-flush headers, and so on.

I’m no stranger to publishing but I’m finding this great disparity in standard format to be absolutely maddening.

Can you help?

While post-graduate qualifications do have their place and valuable uses, my preference would be for an agent who follows their “gut feel” over and above any theory that an MBA can teach.

I wonder how many MBA’s there are on Wall Street?