Meandering on Monday with Janet Lane Walters #amwriting

I'll be giving a short talk in a week plus at a library branch in a mall. Interesting concept that. My bit is about the state of publishing and how to get published. Years ago - 1968 - I sold my first short story. Markets abounded and I was able to send the story to about 20 places before it was bought. Then the market, the paying one, dried up and I turned to novels. There were many publishers for both mysteries and romances since those where what I was writing at that time. The first romance I sold went out 17 times, only four of these were repeat sends. At that time the publisher wanted the entire mss and the editors also sent sometimes pages of suggestions for making the story better. The novel sold but the greatest thing was the amount of writing advice I'd received. Priceless. I returned to nursing and came back to a whole new world. Not as many publishers and all wanted a query and an partial. Another thing to learn. They publishers began to dwindle and soon the only way in was to meet the editors at a conference or to have an agent. The publishing world has changed again. There are scads of markets but few pay advances. There are the NY publishers plus Harlequin, the electronic with or without paper copies and the self published.

Enough about that but it's a start on the talk I'm going to give. As far as my own writing, I'm still working on two stories, one a novella somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand words when complete. Maybe a third there. The other is the old story now called the Goddesses of Er. That's going slowly but that's all right. What it consists of is pulling the gems from all the beginning writer pages. Hope to have it ready by the end of the year.