It’s been a much more productive week. For one thing, I finally got up to the little castle above Los Llanos. I’ve seen it for years and wanted to get closer, but the hill is very steep so it takes time to walk up. The roads are narrow, twisty and often one way or indeed suddenly turn into steps, so it’s not simple to drive up either. But on Thursday I finaly got there. It’s a nice little castle, and I plan to write about it on the oter blog on Tuesday.
I persisted with pushing myself to produce 10 ideas a day, usually for the novel. It might be “10 murder methods” or “10 things you might accidentally find while looking for a missing cat.” On Friday I started reading through all the novel ideas I’ve produced since the end of January (220 of them) plus all my many other ramblings about what I might do, and I think it’s actually starting to fall into place at last.
This is a huge relief. I started scribbling down ideas for Murder by Starlight in 1998 and I didn’t start writing until 2004. I really wanted to get an outline done in fewer then six years this time! I also want to be clearer about my minor characters this time, in hopes of less rewriting. I still have a lot of planning to, not least making sure than the exciting bits happen where they’re most effective, but I already have a rough plot that makes sense. Something to improve on. I hope that next week I can get clear on the characters asnd their backstories (the stuff that happened before page 1 of the novel)
Meanwhile I sent off two more submissions to literary agents for Murder by Starlight That’s a total of nine submissions so far: one rejection and eight not replied yet. I hope to do another submission or two in the coming week, so that I’ve got ten submissions out at once. Agents typically take three months or so to replly, so approaching them one at a time is a recipe for dying of old age before you get published. There are about 150 agents in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, so I won’t run out of people to approach any time soon.
Onward and upward, or at least sideways!
