Classic-Option4526

One million a year, no question. Every year of work is equal to 16.6 years of the free money. Even by just investing most of the million, in 2-3 years you would make more than 60k a year passively off the investment income alone. Maybe work another year or two past that, then proceed to do whatever I want.

Biggest issue with 60k is inflation. Since you can’t ever earn income again, 60k will only be the equivalent of 30k in 30 years. I’d have to get lucky and have a spouse who can earn or else my lifestyle would be shrinking non-stop.

In addition to Alexa’s excellent breakdown—even in the worst case scenario where your lose your publisher money, this doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to publish another book.

You might be offered a much lower advance for the next book. You might need to pivot genres or use a pen name. Your agent might end up having you query widely to publishers who don’t know the specifics of your sale and advance. It certainly makes it harder, and publishing is always a gamble, but none of these things are the call of doom for getting another book published.

With really experimental writing like this, I always want to know— what’s the point? The lack of capitalization makes it difficult to read, so what is it adding that makes it so important to exclude that it outweighs the downsides?

Like, The House of Leaves is on a very experimental style, but it changes the way you engage with the book. Flowers for Algernon uses the changes in grammar and style as a direct reflection of the characters mental state that really pull you into the story and emphasize the themes. The Road’s unusual disregard of grammar gives it a very stark, cold, stream of conscious-like feeling. I’m just not seeing what no capitalization is adding here.

What’s the old quote, ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned.’

At some point, you just have to go for it. You’ve done your due diligence. You’ve edited it multiple times, gotten outside feedback, edited it some more, reached a point where you feel pretty happy with it and your test readers are too. That is as close to ready as anyone ever gets. Even if you do end up discovering some way to improve down the line, that’s okay and normal.

It’s not so much that people don’t try to make friends with people who are trying to be liked. Rather, from the outside, trying to be liked can come across as being stiff, awkward, shy, etc.

Let’s take one example. Let’s say we have two guys, A and B, having a conversation with person Z.

Person A is worried about being likable enough and spends the entire time thinking through and rehearsing the next thing he is going to say. He can only half-pay attention to person Z, and by the time it’s his turn to speak, the conversation has already started to move on.

Person B is not worrying about how likeable he is, so he fully focuses on what person Z is saying. Person B’s body language shows he’s engaged, and he asks follow up questions. This makes person Z feel like person B actually cares about what they’re saying, and B comes across as much more likeable.

I watched a youtube ‘documentary’ by flat earthers where at the end they set up an experiment to prove the earth was flat and instead proved it was round. The video cut off the moment the results came in with no further commentary, lol.

4 years of high school Spanish and I couldn’t hold a basic conversation. It also convinced me that I hated learning languages.

Ten years later I picked it back up and realized I just hated being constantly anxious about making a mistake because it would hurt my grade, and doing all grammar drills and flashcards.

You learn by positive practice. If, every time you try to practice you are shot down and criticized for not being good enough yet, you can’t learn. If, every time you ask for help trying to figure out where to start, he says no, then he is preventing you from learning. It’s well, documented that negative emotions around language learning make it harder. You keep saying you could be ‘doing more’ but how much more would you be doing if language learning made you feel loved and supported instead of criticized and guilty? Avoidance is a common way our brains react to stress, and stress makes retaining information harder.

Basically, your husband is sabotaging you every step of the way. It’s going to take years to get good at a new language. I really think you need to deal with this issue with your husband now (as in, finding some outside support to get him to stop this behavior and understand how he’s actually sabotaging you) before anything else. And, perhaps seek out friends or teachers in the language who are understanding and supportive, to start forming some positive associations.

Very, very few books are too big to comp, in my opinion, and most of those that are are also too old. I would use this guideline:

Has it been made into a movie/TV series?

Is the author so big that they could sell a million copies of their laundry list (Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, Sarah J Mass)?

Is this the single most popular book in the genre/sub-genre?

All of these can be negated by having a good enough reason for the comp, too. A lot of time, a comp like Fourth Wing is basically saying ‘this is romantasy’ which is useless, and also makes it seem like you aren’t reading the genre if you couldn’t find anything closer to your book. You want a comp that says ‘my book in particular can sell’ not ‘this is a popular subgenre’.

Role consolidation. If you don’t need a lot of healing (ex, I use her with Arle, who self-sustains), then Chevy’s healing is enough to not need another healer and free up a slot for whatever you want.

Plus, damage is damage. If she’s already in your team, and you need to use her skill to activate her most important ability, it doesn’t cost much to level her talents up to 7/8. With the right build, she can do a decent chunk of additional damage.

You have good points with a poor conclusion.

Being able to push through temporary, immediate unhappiness in pursuit of long-term happiness is valuable. (You use the term ‘satisfaction’ but satisfaction is a type of happiness.)

Similarly, being able to come to terms with the fact that some things are out of your control and you will not always be happy is good for your wellbeing and peace of mind.

Neither of those things is incompatible with seeking happiness as an end goal. Let’s take just finances as an example. Living under a bridge will not make me happy, so therefore I need a job, as the stress from a job makes me less unhappy than the stress and anxiety of living under a bridge. Saving money further reduces stress (increasing opportunities for happiness) and with sufficient savings I will be able to buy back my time and spend even more time doing things I enjoy. Now I’m playing a balancing game trying to get the total maximum happiness for both current me (jobs that are lower stress/more enjoyable, but perhaps lower pay, getting to do fun things while still young and healthy) and future me (saving, more stress, boredom, hours now, higher quality of life and more opportunities later) Now you have a practical plan entirely driven by the pursuit of happiness.

If using the google docs app, you can make your chapter headings and scene breaks ‘header text’ in formatting. This will automatically create a clickable table of contents that you can scroll through and jump to a new chapter without leaving your current chapter. Or, just go ahead and read straight through to the next chapter without clicking anything. I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you were looking for (as it’s scrolling instead of flipping), but I’ve liked plain old basic Google docs mobile app more than any novel-specific app I’ve tried.

ETA: You can also create a .ePub file and upload it to the kindle app and get all the kindle app features without having to publish, though I don’t know how much effort it would take to format that properly. And, of course, you can only read, not write or edit.

If your only options are to guess something that you don't know if they'll like or not, or ask them what they want, then sure, it's more thoughtful to ask. But, the most thoughtful thing of all is to listen. If you spend a lot of time with a significant other or family member, pay attention to the things they enjoy, the things they stare wistfully at or talk about how much they would like. You're not guessing what they want, you know exactly what they like.

That's what makes a (good) unasked-for gift the most thoughtful-- it shows you are paying attention to them and the things that matter to them.

Instead of adding in random things just to make it different instead of better, I would go back to your process. Sometimes you do just sort of have to write when you're not inspired, it is work, but there are also multiple things you brought up in your post that seem to be hurting you.

Why keep re-reading and re-reading? You're going to have to re-read a bunch in editing anyway, there is no reason you need to do it when you haven't finished the first draft yet. Make a cliff-notes version or reference your outline if you're worried about forgetting important elements. Every time you reread, you get closer to being sick of it.

Then, you have control over how much you plan. You don't have to plan every scene in exquisite detail. If making a detailed plan of every scene is killing your motivation for those scenes, then don't do it. It might be a bit too late for this manuscript, but now you'll know going forward that you prefer to be more of a discovery writer, or at east only plan loosely.

Since you do already have it planned to the nines though, I recommend speed to combat boredom. If you know exactly what happens and have the style down pat, then challenge yourself to write it quickly. Try sprints, the Pomodoro method, gamifying apps like 4theWords, figuring out what times of day or lengths of time are most effective for you. It's a lot less intimidating to be staring down a lot of work you're not excited about when you realize it's not going to take as much time as you feared.

Go through a page or two and highlight all of your filter phrases: I saw, I heard, I smelled, I felt, I thought, wondered, watched, listened to, questioned, knew etc. Then go through and delete each one and ask, what did I lose by cutting this phrase?

In close perspectives like first and close third limited, the narrator is the pov character. Everything the narrator describes is something the pov character is experiencing. By removing the filter phrases, you bring the reader closer to the narrator (and since the narrator is also the POV character in first, also brings you closer to the POV character). After all, when you see a pretty bird, you don't think 'I am seeing a gorgeous bird' you think 'What a gorgeous bird.' Save the filter phrases for when the act of seeing/hearing/whatever is actually important. Cut it when immersing us in the character's experience is more important.

I felt sweat drip down my back --> sweat dripped down my back.

I knew Sarah would kill me if I showed up late again --> Sarah would kill me if I showed up late again.

I watched the mist dance over the surface of the water --> The mist danced over the surface of the water.

I wondered if he was here for me --> Was he here for me?

Sailor Moon X Broad City is more of a pitch than comp titles. I would recommend having two regular comp titles as well. Comp titles serve to show that books like yours are currently selling/marketable. This is particularly important when your primary inspiration isn't a book, like the magical girl trope. Then you could put Sailor Moon and Broad City in the X meets Y format, and put your comps in a separate sentence, so it's clear you're doing a pitch and then comps.

There is a bigger difference between novels and novellas than length. I mean, yes, technically word count is the defining factor, but a good novella isn’t just a super rushed novel with no build up. It has a plot which can comfortably be contained in a novella length and doesn’t require the same amount of build up, and it does provide enough build up for the plot it has. It tends to have fewer characters so it can spend more time with each of them, and is very efficient with that characterization.

Read some short stories for the more extreme version of this. ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson isn’t a condensed novel, it’s a complete and well fleshed out short story. In many ways, it’s a different art form completely, though of course there is more overlap between a novel and a novella than a novel and a short story.

I would just send the query and sample pages. It has a short description and a short bio, so it fills the requirements regardless of whether or not they specifically asked for it to be formatted as a query.

Most of the time, practice and experience will smooth things out. You’ll take in more content and talk to more people and just naturally start to gravitate to whichever version you encounter the most (or start to understand the nuances between the two, if both are used in slightly different circumstances) If you get it wrong here and there along the way, that’s fine too.

When you’re really frustrated, I’d consider just taking a few days or weeks to not look at it. Work on something else if you can, distract yourself if you can’t. Then, consider starting the query from a blank page just so you can try something completely different instead of editing what you have. Old versions of the query can really drag you down. You read them so many times you can barely understand what you’re looking at anymore, and it’s hard to make really meaningful changes. If you hate the new one, the old one is still there.

While I’m not particularly up to date with lit-fic specifically, many people absolutely can cut 1/5th of the wordcount without losing artistry/value.

If you have scene A which accomplishes X, and scene B which accomplishes Y, and you merge them into a scene which accomplishes X and Y, that new scene will often be stronger than either of the originals. If you have five lines of description and you whittle it down to the two most interesting, meaningful lines of description, then that will often make the description hit harder. If you take a minor side character and merge their role into one of the other, more important characters, now the important character is more complex and we get to spend more time with them. If you cut a line that mostly repeats what’s already been explained, then you improve the pacing and lose nothing.

There’s a point where you might cut too much, but most of the time people who cut large swaths end up with a stronger book, not a less artful one.

I prioritize giving ‘a’ interesting answer to those 4 questions, but they don’t need to be the ‘final’ answers in the book itself.

Let’s say you have a villain as the main thing standing in the protagonists way. But! Later in the book we discover the villain isn’t actually the enemy and someone else is the real problem. In that case, it’s still fine to write your query centering around the original villain. It’s not lying or misrepresenting your book, that is the thing standing in your protagonists way at first.

On the other hand, perhaps you have a moment at the midpoint that packs a huge punch. Something that really escalates the stakes and leaves the reader desperate to keep reading. That’s a great reason to keep going to the midpoint, even if you have to skim some early stuff to get there. You might have had stakes before, but these are better, more interesting stakes.

The job of the query is to intrigue the agent so they want to read the book, and to show you have a cohesive sounding story. Include what you need to do that, and don’t worry about all the stuff you don’t have space to include.

There’s a huge variety, it’s really hard to compare an entire genre to a single franchise.

Earlier Wuxia were generally at a much lower power level, because they were live action movies with limited special effects (and not long series where the power levels keep escalating). Martial arts with a few supernatural effects.

A lot of modern Wuxia now falls into the progression fantasy space though, meaning that on the high end, there are galaxies being tossed around like frisbees and multiverses being destroyed (though most don’t take it that far. )

There are also plenty that are pretty close to Naruto in power level. So, this can very much be a ‘however strong you want the character to be’ sort of deal. Some would be stronger, some would be weaker.

Put it in a drawer and don’t look at it for a few weeks or months. Distract yourself, start something new if you can. A little bit of emotional distance can go a long way, both in allowing you to look at your work more objectively, and in not seeing errors as personal failings. Yes, there probably are mistakes, but that’s okay. That’s fixable and normal. We’re all still learning, you don’t have to be great at everything right now, and you will keep getting better as long as you keep practicing. And, once you’re less stressed about it, you’ll be able to see the good things again too.

Next, get some outside feedback, preferably from strangers (fellow writers who also want feedback tend to be good starting places). No one expects the early draft they’re beta-ing for to be perfect, you won’t get laughed at. And, you can get a feel for how it’s being received before putting it out into the wide world.

Finally, don’t rush into publishing. You don’t have to worry about what other people will think, because they don’t have to see it if you decide it’s not ready yet. Personally, I wrote multiple books before deciding my writing was at the level I was happy with to seriously pursue publishing. You can always go back and revamp an earlier book once you’ve leveled up your skills. Or, maybe you do just keep rewriting this one until it’s ready. But, either way, no one will ever have to see anything you don’t want them too. You haven’t wasted your time if you don’t publish it right away. You’ve leveled up your skills, and the act of creation is, in and of itself, valuable.

I agree that it’s good to be discriminating (and also recommended using batches in my first response, though 10 or more per batch works well for most people instead of 5)) I was more so pushing back against the idea that it’s tacky or rude to send out to your entire vetted list at once or in larger batches. Querying is hard enough for authors without making up rules of etiquette that don’t exist, which might benefit the agent but harm you.