To continue an off-topic sidebar from the Tulsi thread:
All good points. But here's what's kept me from putting serious effort into this First Stab:
It's unsaleable.
Ergo, it's the PERFECT Writing Lab.
In the past, would-be writers might, as they get to my age, crank out their Trunk Novel. Never intending it be read, or published. Do it because they're driven.
But I read, long ago, the history of 50 Shades of Grey...not that that's the kind of novel I'm intending; but it started out as a series of free web postings. Not sure of the veracity, or even of my memory of it - I came across it in passing, and it's not worth researching.
Stephen King...drunken hack that he is, he had his youthful brilliances. He got started writing filler for girly books...not Playboy, but the real swill, that should have been titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users. Thirty years later, the publishers he sold those stories to, long gone...he pulled many of those stories out, published them in anthologies, and rewrote a few into full-length novels. Shawshank Redemption was one such.
Not saying I'm right, or you're wrong, or declining your services, Walt. In fact, we may be talking further on this. But it's a long way before I have a large, long selection to publish, or post, or edit or hang out.
Goldie -- I have never met CJ -- He was "Just Passing Through" 20-odd years ago. And for at least half that time, having read perhaps 15,000 of his posts (TINS) I have been at him to seriously write. Why? Because what I recognise as an author is his unpolished talent.
So, at the moment, I am both pleased and appalled.
VERY pleased he is going to start.
Appalled because he plans to write/publish "raw". <-- C.S. Forester hisself couldn't do that. It is a sure way NOT to give your work a snowball's chance to be seen, remembered, discussed.
A practical point to the above -- Please take note, CJ -- this is important:
You write a chapter, and you are three chapters later in writing, and you remember an anecdote that would triple the interest in that previous chapter. Or you made a grievous, dumb-ass mistake in that previous chapter. Or you regret the fargin dead-end that chapter sticks you with. Or a hundred things yer Unca has already fargin experienced!!
If it is already out there when you discover it -- warped, crooked, "oh shit" flat wrong, potentially poisonous, somehow awful to the bone... you cannot touch it -- even if it costs you every reader you ever had. The Internet is forever. Got that?
Jack Kerouac did that. (Unedited stuff) Other than nutcases, does anyone know what he wrote?
The guy whose novel I am now editing (as he writes/adds gems/re-rewrites it) humbles me. And when he first started a few years ago, I saw his talent with words. We worked together, and his first novel was great.
This will be his second, and it is ten times better than his really good first.
That's where I want CJ -- Not out panhandling day to day.
All good points. But here's what's kept me from putting serious effort into this First Stab:
It's unsaleable.
Ergo, it's the PERFECT Writing Lab.
In the past, would-be writers might, as they get to my age, crank out their Trunk Novel. Never intending it be read, or published. Do it because they're driven.
But I read, long ago, the history of 50 Shades of Grey...not that that's the kind of novel I'm intending; but it started out as a series of free web postings. Not sure of the veracity, or even of my memory of it - I came across it in passing, and it's not worth researching.
Stephen King...drunken hack that he is, he had his youthful brilliances. He got started writing filler for girly books...not Playboy, but the real swill, that should have been titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users. Thirty years later, the publishers he sold those stories to, long gone...he pulled many of those stories out, published them in anthologies, and rewrote a few into full-length novels. Shawshank Redemption was one such.
Not saying I'm right, or you're wrong, or declining your services, Walt. In fact, we may be talking further on this. But it's a long way before I have a large, long selection to publish, or post, or edit or hang out.