Monday, September 27, 2010

Candyman

I'm loving the Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies book. I suggest this book to all of you (yes, even you Gilbert) even if you don't write romance. It covers a lot of stuff in it that works for all writers, like what you can use for tax write offs as a writer. Now, I don't suggest buying it if you're not a romance writer, but I do suggest getting it from your local library and flipping through it.

Aside from that, I think I'm going to try getting into category romance (aka, series romance). At least to get into the publishing business. I can move up from there to regular long books. But series romance books aren't as long (typically between 50,000 and 100,000 words, more on the shorter side of that) and writer's publish more of them a year (like 5 or 6 sometimes). Sure, the books don't get the big advances regular novels get, but between the advances, the royalties, and the amount you end up publishing a year... it could look pretty nice. Also, i gives me practice on writing more words in my stories so I can build up to the length that a normal romance novel is (100,000 words plus) and I get my name out there (or at least things I can put on a query letter).

I'm going to need to do some research though, because in series romances, the publishing house wants a particular type of story to sell it in a bundle with other books like it; so I have to find the publishing houses and  find out about their series. Shouldn't be too hard though. It'll be fun.

And it works with 6 months 6 novels, writing a book each of the six months that's at least 50,000 words (though I'm hoping to aim for 75,000 words this NaNo).

Jeez, I'm using a lot of parenthesis.

Another thing I wanted to blog about was this post posted by the guy who made Write or Die: [The 48 Minute Rule]. Basically, you write for 48 minutes then take a 12 minute break. It gives your mind something more solid to hold on to rather than "I'm going to work for 3 hours today". He says that can get you into thinking "well, I need to do the dishes, and I'm hungry..." which leads to other distractions and so on. But if you're going for 48 minutes with a 12 minute break, you can look at your timer and say "hey, I've only got such an amount of time left until I've got a break, so it can wait." I want to try this when I get back to writing which will hopefully be soon >.<

So, has anyone else tried the 48 minute rule? How'd/s it work for you?

Laters!

1 comment:

  1. I tend to take breaks anyway, regardless. I don't know that I go 48 minutes before I do, but breaks happen. I like to try to get 2000 words a day, if I can, because that adds up. Everyone has to find what works for them, though. Isaac Asimov worked eight hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year - and published twelve books a year. I could never do that.

    Gil

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