How's the writing career coming, Veeky Forums?

I have a notepad I just write onto whilst im working at my telephone job for ideas

My main problem seems to be i cant formulate a book into one solid idea or theme, i seem to want to write a book which is about multiple unrelated things at once.

I am Steven King and I frequent lit often. As you aldready know I have a tremendously successful career, with dozens of books published and even more yet to be. Despite my successes I have come to regret my writings. If only I had a board like this in my youth I would not have been so confident in my lonely certainty. It's beautiful to see a place where ideas can be put to the rest and shit on and like chemistry see the impurities lifted and what remains is something enduring and true in itself. I wish I would have waited and been patient instead rushing to make a name for myself. Now I am a joke to myself, by books mock me, and every new author is a stab to my gut for the possibility that here was someone who waited, and sought truth above all else, and sifted through all sides of the aesthetic sphere before drawing the lines of his own self. It's coming along fine Op, only I wish I would have had more patience for the muses to speak through me. I am now the embodiment of force found on a toilet seat sustaining the weight of an obese man.

Pretty good. Finished my first book last year, and now I'm teaching myself animation to create an animated series based on the book to pass the time. I'll release the book alongside the first animation and once the first series is done I'll be writing the second book which I have got all planned out. Gotta do something while on disability. Hoping this is what gets me some money coming in so I can get off it.

Goading. Is that the word for this. Coaxing carries a gentleness with it. But goading seems to me to somehow express less gentleness than coaxing, while implying that the force applied is not blunt but intelligent. I'm going to ruminate on this a while and think if I can find another word that might fit this occasion - because I'm just not sure it's perfect.

Better than it was last year, actually. Nothing professionally published, but I make a little bit of money and that little bit gets a little more and more, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Good, was going to put the finishing touches on a short story and send it to a magazine, but i woke up this morning feeling like shit, and have got nothing done all day.

Other than that, ok. Getting published fairly often, have like 3 books I hope I could sell one day.

I got like 4 A material short stories I need to edit, and like 5 B material stuff too. I've been on this kick lately where I just want to write them, not edit them.

I thought coding was supposed to pay decent money. Buy some furniture you dipshit.

>have connections in publishing
>one of them read excerpts from my work and said they really liked it
>tfw I still can't finish the damn thing
what the fuck is wrong with me

Here's what I do:

>Go to bed by 9
>Get up 4:30
>Shower, eat, dress, etc by 5:30ish
>Write until 7, then go to work

You said you don't have to leave until 9, write until then. I used to do that when I had my old job and I got a solid 1-15 pages in every day, depending on how the mood struck me.

I know it's easier said than done, but if you don't have a significant other or anything else taking up your time, you should try to get some pages in after work, even though your tired. I never actually do it, but it's good to try.

Stephen King makes a good example of this in Salem's Lot. The main character writes 3-5 page bursts multiple times a day, taking a 3 hour break or so I between each one to unwind.

Getting into this habit, it's fairly easy to bang out a 400-odd page book in 3 months. I've done two that way, just recently did my third in six but that took more imagination because of the subject matter, plus I moved during the process which set me back a bit.

Wrote a paragraph, reread it, deleted ms word from my computer

>people who don't start work until 9 and still finish before dark complaining about a lack of time

Just write at work

Hello, me.

Fuck

wow, i would kill to work a 9-5 including transit and lunch times. i work as a programmer in america and currently go 9-8. and i'm one of the people who works fewer hours. some people at my company pull 80 hour weeks.

every day would feel like a vacation if i got home at 5. i would easily be able to double my writing output (currently hovering at around 500 words a day). you have plenty of time to write, sort yourself out.

It's dead. As am I. Today is my 40th birthday, Veeky Forums - I shit you not. Here's where I'm at: you might as well play the fucking lottery when it comes to making a "career" out of your art. Your art is shit. And your art is pure fucking genius. Both of these things are always true, and it always depends on the audience and the larger context, and all that really matters is that you have some way to express your perspective. If what you want is fame, recognition, and validation, then you don't want to make art, you want to do the intellectual equivalent of getting an MRS degree and cozy up to whatever algorithm of narrative or expression that triggers enough resonance in the cultural zeitgeist so as to net you the capital necessary to stop fucking trying. I know that the "MRS degree" is misogynist. It's still a useful analogy, though. And the question is not whether you would sell out or not - it never is, because you will. You'll perform the necessary moral acrobatics to rationalize your way into thinking it's somehow your "dream," or your fate, or written in the stars themselves. And you might be right. But you'll find that the struggle that got you into the abscessed clam mouth from which you would emerge with your pearl was actually far more instrumental in providing meaning than you could possibly expect. And that's if you manage to even do it - because the question is whether it's worth the literal lifetime of devoted servitude and utter submission to even getting yourself into a position to be able to sell out, chances being as uncertain as they are. I'm not saying give up. I'm saying that you'll probably die... and that life after death means accepting the improbability of seeing your dreams realized in this life - yet carrying on because you have no other option where you have more information. You'll never know that the "big break" isn't right around the bend. You'll never know that in the long run, you already have a much bigger sphere of influence than you realize; you may just never know, and that's okay, too. Because it has to be. We'll never have enough information to know that we *aren't* in the best possible universe for each one of us, therefore we can't rule out the possibility, and there is no logical option but to assume that we are, since there is no downside to doing so.

Oh, come on - you know fully well that Steven King is a tulpa manifest through shared cultural hauntings, and as a person he barely exists, and as a writer channels the posthuman AI bots operating outside of spacetime. Why do you think he was so pissed off at that car what hit him that he had to buy it and smash it to bits with a crowbar, bonus-level-from-Street-Fighter-II style? Because it reminded him of the fragility of his physical form, the ethos of which is necessary to maintain the guaranteed audience through which to communicate memes and insert the coded information that will advance humanity into its next evolutionary medium (pro-tip: it's small, hive-mind-like nodes of multiple identity conglomerates which operate as tropes throughout all of humanity as played out both by people and fictional characters, each co-creating the other in a metaphysical dialectic of creation and created, subject and object - or something like that, I'm pretty sure).

Maybe you should try starting multiple stories and being more conservative with each one. That way you can use all of the stuff that you like between them and maybe choose to focus on and explore the one you like most. Maybe even keep the other stories for future projects.

>If what you want is fame, recognition, and validation, then you don't want to make art, you want to do the intellectual equivalent of getting an MRS degree and cozy up to whatever algorithm of narrative or expression that triggers enough resonance in the cultural zeitgeist so as to net you the capital necessary to stop fucking trying.

Real shit. Happy birthday, mate. Don't neck yourself yet.

trade that air mattress for a hammock

hammock with a stand is only a few hundred bucks. Easy to assemble/disassemble. Get the biggest hammock you can get -- family sized if possible. Then you can lay on a nice angle and be almost flat but with that zero-gravity effect of having you head and legs slightly elevated.

Otherwise my life is just like yours. I'd really like to start waking up 2-3 hours early

This is as real a declaration as I've ever read here. Hold fast, user, hold fast. And happy birthday. May you have many more.

For a few hundred bucks he could buy an actual bed

Beds are pretty damn expensive. Hammock Stand with a hammock is about $200. Super portable too

>TFW shit vocab.

Thanks, StePHen!

What contest, user?

Happy birthday. I hope you feel better tomorrow.

I am turning 48 next month

Still writing.

I actually got an essay accepted to a journal recently, believe it or not.

Only if you're any good at it.

>bang out a 400-odd page book in 3 months
Sure if you have no standards.

He can probably get a bed and mattress for free second hand if he spends a few minutes on whatever his country's version of freecycle or craigslist is.

What's it on user? that's pretty cool

I actually brought it up a few dozen Nick Land threads ago. It's an essay about GK Chesterton's conception of liberty. I actually wrote it at the request of Veeky Forums's new favorite magazine, Jacobite, but when it was done they rejected it. So I tried to find a home for it for a while, and ended up getting it accepted by a journal of Catholic scholarship called the St. Austin Review. They're publishing a Chesterton-themed issue some time in the next year, and they want my essay to be in it. It is, indeed, pretty cool. I adore Chesterton, so getting an essay on him published in a journal of Catholic letters is a dream come true.

I'm almost finished with the first draft of my novella and i have no idea who I should have read it for notes, the only person I know who's read a book is my dad and he only reads genre fiction and would just tell me it's great and that i did a great job in that trying too hard to seem sincere post-boomer parent way. My mom doesn't read, my GF only reads true crime and I have 0 friends.

I've been planning a large novel for a year now and last week I had a huge breakthrough regarding the mythical substructure of the novel which I'd completely accidentally instituted. Now I've hit this kind of manic stage in the process, where it's starting to feel like some kind of providence is delivering me the raw materials and working through me to produce this (I know it's not true I'm not schizo) and everything seems so much clearer. But at the same time it's starting to take up so much of my thinking everyday that I'm becoming distant from all the people in my life, plus I haven't actually started it so still got a long way to go. Also first novel

So kind of a mixed bag but I'm optimistic

I wouldn't call yourself schizo for that, in fact, I think its entirely normal. More often than not, reality can prove to be stranger than fiction.

I'll read it for you, what's it about? Want my email or something? Can always post a google docs link

Pretty good, in terms of how I feel about my writing. I self-published an awful sci fi short story a month ago though, since it was rejected by an anthology I wanted money from.
Now I'm working on a literary zine with friends and we'll leave it in pubs for free. It's fun to look over my friends' essays, stories and poetry, and I get to have a large amount of creative space myself. Currently working on a short story I posted in a critique thread that got a good response, so I might use it for the zine.

>Actually publishing by a house
No where near good enough, and I don't write plebby genre fiction for me to get published by a shitty house either. Now, I'll focus on the zine and my novel - which probably wont see the light of day

I want to agree. I cannot. Maybe I don't want to agree. Where does that conflict exist if I am here writing as one? Do I get paid to care if I am the caretaker of these sacred grounds? I need more coffee. I can feel something coming up like a rotten hand.

I mean. It's cool that you feel as if you've worked it out and all. But if you haven't put anything down you've basically done nothing at all.

You should probably write something ASAP. The longer you wait, the less what you produce on your first draft is going to resemble the perfection you have in your mind. And after that, you might get discouraged.

Yeah you're right. I just feel like I need to do more research into the ideas the books responding to, like it's a book I should write a few years down the line when I've got more of a handle on these ideas. I feel like if I write it now it'll just turn out as a piece of jeuvinalia. You make a good point tho and I've resolved to do a few of the scenes I have sketched out in my head as short stories to assimilate into the book when it begins in earnest, and I'm gonna do that before uni starts back in a few weeks.

It's a profoundly weird feeling tho, that sense of having the data come your way in such a manner that it feels like something far greater than yourself is urging the work to be done. It's a well-documented phenomenon tho, the loss of control by the artist over the work. Crazy shit. And I guess it's just whatever part of the brain is used for that kind of holistic processing and "connecting up" going into overdrive, but I've never experienced anything at all like this before.

>punches you in the chest
"Heh, the plot is supposed to unfold to you as you write like a flower, user! No more cue cards!"

Start work at 9? Home BY 5?

Fucking hell you have it east. I work from 8:30am to 5:30pm and commute 30 minutes each way.

Happy Birthday

I am a 36 year old with a PhD in Philosophy. I am $450k in debt and currently working two minimum wage jobs in order to stay alive. I work alongside 18 year olds and whenever they ask about my background I just tell them I've been in prison for a long time, which is less embarrassing than admitting the truth. I am probably the most well-informed Husserl scholar on the North American continent, perhaps in the world. My 1,500 page biography of his life has been rejected several dozen times. No college will take me on since they don't think Husserl is relevant, and that other applicants are therefore pushed to the head of the line. I have had 6 Husserl-related papers published in different journals and philosophical quarterlies, but have earned no money or recognition for having done so. I just moved to Abbeville, Louisiana since there is a job opening at the university in Lafayette and I decided to go all out in order to get it. But I've just found out that my application was rejected and now I'm stuck working at a Wendy's three shifts a week and a Barnes & Noble the rest of the time. I have no wife, no children, and at this point no friends I'm willing to talk to due to the shameful nature of my existence.

I really want this to be just a copy pasta. Please don't be true. Come on.

Very Sartruesque

My future in 11 years.

This is the fourth time it's been posted.

P. good. I have written 4 full length plays this year, plus one novel last year, one this year and I am about a third of the way through a third, the second book in a two part series I hope to start querying for next January. Shopping the plays around atm. The cover artist of my first novel invited me to do the forward for his next photo book after seeing my non-fiction essays, so I am pretty amped, and in return he is doing the cover for my second novel, last year's book.

I get up at 4am every morning and start writing ASAP, and write as much as possible. I think about my work and read and watch all things with an intensely critical, analytical eye. I live and love my work and have been writing basically my whole life, though I have been writing unpublishable practice novels and shit in a diligent, constant way for more than ten years now. It has cost me relationships and made me completely rearrange my priorities, and I sense that very soon something will have to give, if only due to sheer volume. I previously did a short stint of ghost writing which was hateful prostitution to me, but it did teach me a lot about the importance of routine and dedication to the craft.

I bet most people that read the works from Veeky Forums users on here go "Well what a self righteous dickhead" and skip through.

Foucalt and Sartre is fucking torture to read.

That's true about 95% of amateur writers in general though.

eh Veeky Forums today has a particular self loathing cuntness to it you know what i meant. Not very much lulz

I don't have one. I'm just a reader.

The closest I am to writing is shitposting.

Sending out query letters for my first novel. Nerve-wracking, as there are so many different perspectives on how a query letter should be written. It's crazy that the future of my 100k word novel will depend not on the novel itself, but by whether I pull the right strings in the 300 word emails I send to agents.

Half-way through a second work, anyways. But this first one is what I really want published.

I only do that to the self righteous dickheads. You can usually tell by the end of the first page. There are a lot of self righteous dickheads. I know because I used to be one of them. Every now and then you find someone who's got a little somethin', though.

>there are so many different perspectives on how a query letter should be written

Study all of them, and at some point disregard everything they say and just write it the way you want to write it. Follow your own writers instincts. But seriously study them first, as dumb as that may sound.

Writing a good query letter is a huge challenge for a first time, it will take at least twice as long to figure it out as writing your first book will. It's a good test for you, as a writer though, if you can pull it off. If you can't, that's a good hint maybe you shouldn't be writing in the first place.

gl

Your query letter should literally just hook the agent's interest enough that they request a sample.

And maybe a little (and I mean little) intro about yourself and a bit to demonstrate you know the agent/have done your research.

Post your query?

I won't post my Query here, but my format is

1.Name, title, word count, specific appeals to the particular agent ("Your website says you're looking for X, and my novel...") [~3-4 sentences]
2.Brief synopsis, themes and characters (Most of the hooking is here, because leading right into a plot for the Query is more of a genre thing to do, and I'm writing literary). [~5 sentences]
3. Short bio of my writing credentials [~3 sentences]
4. Thank you and contact info

I format it this way because I can copy paste parts 2-4, and write the personalized stuff right off the bat in paragraph 1.

>3. Short bio of my writing credentials [~3 sentences]

Only include this if you have actual credible writing creds. Getting published in your college newspaper, or academic publishing, is going to make an agent roll their eyes. If you don't have any serious writing creds, it's better to not say anything.

Same with your bio in general, if you have some applicable, interesting info about yourself that maybe pertains to the novel, sure include it, but ultimately an agent doesn't care who you are. Also don't include that you've been writing since you were a kid.

Other than that, I dunno, format seems fine but executing it is an entirely different matter.

Also keep in mind that it's also a dice roll ultimately. A good query letter won't necessarily get your book published, and a bad one won't necessarily kill your chances.

What some agents may think is the perfect query, others will think is total garbage.

You should obviously make it 100% what you want it to be, and control the things you can control, but it's weird random world in the publishing industry.

Thanks for the advice. Many websites also recommend omitting any sort of biographical info if you are unpublished. I will remove this part from my template.

Being unpublished isn't that big of a deal really. If you write a good novel with a good query, somebody is going to want it, unpublished or no.

Trying to puff yourself up though, without any actual substantive creds is just going to annoy people.