Process

Day one of NaNoWriMo went well with a total word count of almost 3,600. Once the organizations widget-ry is up and running, I'll put up some kind of statistical thingy (technical term) to show progress.
 

In the meantime, here is a YouTube video of a band my sister plays in called The Slighted. As is typical of music videos, the drummer doesn't get sufficient screen time.
 

Still here? I wouldn't be surprised if you wandered away as I obviously did. I owe a visit to many of your own blogs.
 

Been a little busy here, for reasons many of you had a hand in. Many, many thanks to Camille, Derek,Gustavo, Marcus, Martin, Matt, Nathan, and Rick O. for all your comments, insights, and critiques over the last couple months of my book, my synopsis, and my query letter. You all rock.
 

At the transition from "I want to be a writer" to "I am a writer", I felt I was taking on a certain obligation. It would no longer be good enough to talk about it. Writers write, and submit, and interact with their peers. Sometimes they even get published. They definitely give back.
 

I've done the above but sometimes feel like I've taken more than I've given. I certainly owe those listed above. If nothing else, I feel I have to at least follow through.
 

This week I sent out my first agent query.

 

I had planned to finish this post in a different fashion. But I have to share this instead. I received my first agent rejection 17 hours and 41 minutes later. And you know, it's true. It hurts less when you rip the band-aid off quickly.
 

Next step: send out another agent query. Because that's what writers do.

 

I've been working on a short story for about 18 months. It's been submitted and rejected several times. I put it aside, worked on it, put it aside again, worked on it. I've been procrastinating on sending it out for a few reasons.
 

First, I want to get it right. I really like the story and obviously want to see it published. Second, I get a blind spot with stories I like. It isn't just the 'darlings', sections that are oh, so clever but don't move the story. I become blind to what the reader sees because the movie in my head for the story is so complete.
 

At that point I seek out critiques. I've done that already. I think the story is ready to go, but still I hesitate. So I wondered if there were some other means to evaluate the text.
 

For novels, I use software called yWriter. It has a tool that counts words, total and unique, and number of times each word is used. If I plugged my story in, would I see anything useful? Then again, I've got a blind spot. What I need to do is compare numbers on my story to another, say by a pro writer. So I found a great story by another author and typed it in.
 

Let's start with the big numbers.
 

Unique words are those that appear once, never repeated. Scrolling through the lists I see these are good words, descriptive words, interesting words. In the two stories, my unique words are a slightly higher percentage than the pro story. I like this statistic.
 

Lesson #1: Use interesting words.
 

Besides the unique words, the rest have been used at least twice in the stories. The usual suspects have been used hundreds of times in both: the, and, of, to. I notice that my story uses "was" 59 times while the slightly shorter pro story has 89 instances. So much for active voice.
 

Lesson #2: Know how to break the rules.
 

Going down the list, it's hard to make much comparison. The words, cut out of their context, seem so ordinary. They are the lunch-pail words, working hard at their job without expectation of big rewards. I'm not seeing any pattern or useful information.
 

How about the bottom, the words that are used twice to ten times? Maybe I'll see something there. Maybe I'm overusing a lot of filler words. Below shows the number of words used for each number of times. For example, if the word "what" and "should" are both used five times then the total is two for five uses. I know, this is getting abstract, bear with me.
 

My numbers are slightly higher, but only by thousandths as a percentage of the whole. What does this mean?
 

Lesson #3: Writing is about words, not numbers.
 

Perhaps this was a futile exercise. I thought as an experiment it was interesting. I think the final lesson for me is:
 

Send the damn story out already!