This is not comic related...

Five years ago I wrote a novel and have been trying to sell it ever since. Obviously I haven't met with much success, but I also haven't received any feedback as to why. This is not unusual -- publishers receive metric tons of submissions that they have to wade through and usually the best they can manage is to send back a letter that says "no thanks, but good luck" -- but it also isn't particularly helpful to me, because it doesn't give me a lot to go on.

If five years sounds like a lot of time to you, by the way, it really isn't. The fastest response I ever got from a submission was from DAW books -- 3 months -- and I've been waiting to hear back from Baen for about a year and a half now. This is not a speedy process. Still, the longer I sit around waiting, and the more I go back through the manuscript that I submitted, the more my unease increases.

Is there something fatally flawed in the story that I can't see, because I'm too close to it?

Is there something wrong with the style?

Is the genre too old hat?

Is there a section that is so poorly edited that editors are actively trying to block the manuscript out of their mind?

(This last part is feasible. I discovered, to my horror, that the manuscript I'd sent to DAW was riddled with "junk text" -- the file I'd been using had become slightly corrupted and a number of chapters looked like I'd just been banging on the keyboard with my head for hours on end. That was particularly embarrassing.)

Because editors don't have the time (or sanity) to individually critique each submission, authors have to look to other areas for the same thing. Usually I just hand it to friends and family and say "READ THIS AND TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK!" and then run off before they can say "no"... but you know, I only have so many of those...

But then I thought "hey -- I have readers! Some of them might be interested in looking through this thing and ripping it to pieces!" So this is a request for readers who might be interested in looking through my novel with the express purpose of telling me a) what works, 2) what doesn't, and iii) whether or not it's the kind of thing that would tempt you at a book-selling-type-store.

Here's how I see it working: if I can get a group of you to volunteer, I'll set up a private forum on another domain where you can log in and read and/or download the book, then chat it up on the forum itself -- tell me what works, what you thought was clever, what you thought was mind-numbingly stupid, be as critical and specific as you can manage. I will read your comments and ask questions. This will give me more of a feel for what I might need to work on if/when it comes time to revise the thing.

So if you would be interested in being a test subject, please email me at wrightc -at- ubersoft -dot- net with [NOVEL] stuck in the message title somewhere. And thank you in advance for you brave souls who volunteer.

UPDATE: Thanks for your quick response! I have a pretty good group at this point, I think.

Anyone who is a fan of the Doctor Who BBC Television Series needs to take a look at Rich's ComixBlog. Rich has been writing a truly jaw-droppingly good fanfic comic featuring all ten incarnations of the Doctor since March 10, 2007. I can't begin to tell you how good it is. He's managed to do justice to every version of the Doctor I've seen on TV (I've seen a little of Doctor #2, a fair number of Doctors #3-6, a few of #7, all of #9 and #10 that have been made available in the US to date), both in the way they're drawn and in the way they're characterized. I'm especially fond of the day he's been writing Doctor #6 (the version played by Colin Baker -- I always felt like that version was under-appreciated during its run).

Anyway, I can't recommend it enough. It starts here and is still ongoing.

It's definitely worth a read.

The move from New Orleans back to Monroe went pretty well. My only complaint was that what should have been a minor cold turned into a minor cold plus a slight upper respiratory infection, which means I'll be taking antibiotics for the rest of the week and using a prescription nasal spray that cost me 40 dollars. 40 dollars! I love the US health care system.

Anyway, updates should return to their normal schedule.

I don't usually talk about webcomics. I've been drawn into "web comics drama" in the past, usually when I was on Keenspot and someone was slagging Keenspot over some issue I considered terminally stupid, but by and large I don't decide "today I'm going to talk about webcomics" and post webcomic-derived screeds on my website.

Today I break from that non-tradition by talking about webcomics on Fleen. Now that I can see it in print I wish I'd edited it a little better, but since it started out as an off-the-cuff email I think it works well enough.

Updated: I've changed the category of this post because apparently setting it to "Miscellaneous" caused it to break the RSS feed. I hadn't actually intended this to be included in the RSS feed, but since it seems to have gone in anyway I guess I need to make sure the feed doesn't break.

Slashdot has a story about how Websiteoptimization.com is reporting that web page sizes have trippled in size between 2003 and 2008.

Here is what they're reporting:

2003 sizes: 93.7K

2008 sizes: 312K

Out of curiosity I used their site analyzer to see how Ubersoft.net measured up:

375K

... that's not good.