I thought I would pair up a couple of things. First, a little writing humor about a complete lack of realism when approaching writing/selling/publishing a novel via a YouTube video (alas, the embed didn’t work, so I’ve linked it instead.
And second, a marvelous interview with Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry, whose “practice novel” was rejected 98 times (but with the 98th rejection came some useful insight):
Finally, agent number 98 said that she would read part of it—and she did. She wrote back the next day and said, ‘You write well, but you don’t understand this industry…’ The email was pretty nasty, but it was also a very big help. She said, ‘No one’s going to look at a debut author’s 700-page novel—ever. Do yourself a favor and write a novel of appropriate length, and you can send me that when you finish’—which I never did. But that all turned into Lessons in Chemistry. I started completely new. I felt like I couldn’t change the story [of the first novel] because it was very tightly structured. So I thought, that’s my practice novel, and I put it away. I’m borrowing a few things from it for my book that I’m working on now.
The whole interview is a great read. I haven’t yet read Lessons in Chemistry, but it’s now on my TBR (to be read) list.
Ramblings 