Do You Get What You Pay for?

I'm somewhat embarrassed by the time that has passed since the last post. As one of my sons says, "Life happens," or words to that effect.

I'm finding out a little about how it might feel to be schizophrenic. As I work through the comments and suggestions being made by my wonderful editor on my third novel, I wish (no joke!) that we were back in the hard copy age. I could separate chapters and new and old versions in stacks and/or folders and find them again. As it is, I have the (at least three times rewritten) original copy on my computer. I cut and make a new file of the section being sent for critique. It comes back to me with the notations. I need to make a new file of that section to reword and rework and hope I'll end with what I might consider finished--for the time being. Then I copy and send the next section for comment again, and again. (This is a pretty long book now, and getting longer.) Nowadays I feel that I may truly be "losing it" completely as I try to come up with something resembling a final version that I know will have to be rewritten. Which of the expanding list of files is the right one to copy and paste and send, which is the last with tracked changes, which is the first one before the corrections, additions, cuts, et al.? My eyes cross as I survey the open files.

Yes, I remember to give each file a different name, and I print out what I think I've finished with, but I'm digging out of drifts of paper that I hope I won't have to retype until the whole thing is ready for submission, I'm floundering and coming up for the third time from the depths of too many megabytes in Microsoft Word.

I'm still stimulated by the challenge and the hope of print someday, but there are times when I understand what makes people turn glassy-eyed and catatonic, or into raging maniacs. I think even if I'd started when I was younger, if there had been computers then, I'd still feel as if I were trying to find my way back to the car after a carnival ride. Talk about dizzy!

Reading a blog on the subject of finding an agent has made me come to a cynical(?) conclusion: to get fiction published, a writer needs money. Since finding an agent who might be a match involves finding ways to meet one (conferences, workshops, other writers, signings and the like) that aren't possible in your own back yard, you need time and funds with which to travel and buy books -- so you can have ten words with the authors thereof. You need to do a lot of this if you're to meet enough of them to have a hope of being able to choose.

I recently read an ad in a Sunday New York Times book review section that was placed by a "vanity press." "___________(the press) affirms that ________(author)of _____________(title), is free of blame in regards to omitted words or grammatical errors in his book."

If you can't get what you pay for, at least you can get noticed in The NYT. It makes me wonder if any agent who might be seeking a client looks first at self-published, subsidized, or POD writers. Should we be paying to be published after all?