Half Finished

Sarah Hoyt talks about half-finished novels:

Sometimes your novel dies.

You know precisely what I’m talking about. You’re standing there – well, usually sitting, but I do have a standing desk – typing away, the novel is going great guns, and suddenly… nothing.

There was life there, a spark of interest, you knew what was going to happen next chapter, and you were dying to write it and unfold every nuance. And suddenly there’s nothing you’d rather do than clean the kitchen, scrub the toilets, or even rotate the cat.

Worse, when the desire to write strikes, it’s always a new and shiny thing...

We know exactly what she means.

When we started Pershing's War:1919 we saw Chauchat armed Doughboys hammering away at German trenches. 30,000 words later... we see nothing.

This is when you find out if you're really a writer. When the gleam is gone, when the buzz has left, can you keep on going to the finish?

Fortunately, we've been at this a long time. So we're not really worried.

Writing Patton's combined arms attack in the Ruhr should be fun.

Writing and Selling

The prolific Sarah Hoyt talks about technology, change, and selling books. She makes a point which we endorse to the fullest extent possible. Of selling books Hoyt says, 'One thing that seems to work is writing a lot.'

Agreed.

The more you write the more you sell. We noticed this with magazine articles. The more we turned in work, the more work publishers wanted turned in. We'd write a piece on Orde Wingate, next thing we'd know a magazine would want a piece on Slim in Burma. Do a lot of work on the Israelis and the magazine would want a piece on 'the other side of the hill' which led to a fun article on the Arab Legion.

We write novels. We hire people to edit them. We have other people proof them. We hire people to design the covers, usually.*

As far as traditional publishing goes, don't know, don't care. 

Conventions? Never been to one.

We don't even advertise anymore. Not one dime. The Austrian Painter just got its 14th review, also 5-stars, so we must be doing something right.

*We did To Survive the Earth, War of the Red Sea, and Israel at War.

What Would we do, Exactly...

...If we weren't writing?

Over at Instapundit, the indefatigable Sarah Hoyt writes:

QUITTING DRINKING IS EASY, I’VE DONE IT HUNDREDS OF TIMES:   Heavy drinkers can’t quit booze even if they want to, study says.  (Of course, I’m not a heavy drinker.  But I’ve had similar issues with writing.  The longest I stayed quit was two weeks, at the end of which I had cleaned everything that stood still long enough, including boys and cats, and the entire family begged me to resume writing… and leave them alone.)

Uh, yeah.

It's 8:06 on a Sunday morning and we're writing this. After this we'll go to work on Pershing's War: 1919 for a while. We're also fighting off the urge to go finish up a pair of magazine articles we've been working on.

We're headed to Manhattan today and we'll spend that car time plotting, also ogling Mrs. Stroock in her skinny jeans and boots, but mostly plotting...

We do lot's of research at night in front of the TV with the kids. And in between bouts of cleaning we plot more.

Honestly, we don't feel very good at night unless we've given maximum writing effort.

That's how you get this job.