I decided to put a PDF version of LANDMOOR on my blog site. That way, it’s available to anyone who wants to read it:

http://www.jeff-wheeler.com/?page_id=58

If you liked it or not, reply with a comment. I really do like the feedback, good or bad.

Sometimes an e-mail will arrive out of the blue that makes your day. My nephew Nathan sent me one recently. Timing was great.

Uncle Jeff,

I just finished reading Landmoor and it is my new favorite book.  I like it even better than Eragon.  It was so AWESOME- except for the cliffhanger at the end. Emily just e-mailed me Silverkin.  I am looking forward to seeing what happened to Thealos and Jaerod. I really wish they hadn’t stopped prininting the books and I am hanging up a picture of the map I printed off from Silverkin.

Thanks for writing such great books.

Nathan

P.S. My mom is reading it now. 

How can you top something like that? Not easily, but my little sister Emily has been punishing herself by reading some of my older work. After finished LANDMOOR and SILVERKIN, she wanted to read the entire MINYA series and has. I think only my friend Jeremy has wandered that far into my warped subconscious mind. So thanks, Sis! Hope you aren’t too scarred by the journey.

Other news: still no word from the agency. I sent a follow-up e-mail two weeks ago and have not gotten a reply so the waiting continues. I did get another rejection letter and in it, the agent said she gets 5,000 queries a year. That’s about 100 per week, which is daunting considering the volume.

I finished reading the book SUPER CRUNCHERS about how data analysis is starting to take over decision making at companies (and does a better job than expert opinion). There was a chapter on how Hollywood is using algorithms to determine which scripts are more likely to succeed. It also talked about Lulu.com and how they did some statistical analysis on bestsellers based on the title of the book. Well, I tried out their algorithm and the title of my new book “The Wretched of Muirwood” as a 41.4% chance of being a bestseller. Apparently just the naming convention of “The __ of __” increases the percentage significantly. Try it out: http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/index.php

 

 

I read a great tribute in Wired magazine on-line today to the late Gary Gygax, one of the inventors of Dungeons & Dragons. It was neat reading about the man who invented the tools of my budding creativity. I started out playing with my brothers, and have to admit that my older brother was a lousy Dungeon Master. We usually started our adventures with the phrase: “pick a page, any page” (which was a reference to the Monster Manual and we’d basically pick a random page number and fight whatever was in it). Of course, that led to deviousness and sneaking peeks at the book and finding out what the page number was for some of the cool things we wanted to face - like a Pegasus we could capture and fly around on [’Clash of the Titans’ was all the rage back then] or some of the less deadly dragons where we use inventive rule-breaking to gain the advantage (stuff like tying daggers to your boots and jumping down on a sleeping dragon).

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax?currentPage=all 

Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax 

 

For me, the benefits of the imagination came when my best friend Jeremy introduced me to finer art of playing and I rolled up my first character, Jared Ray Blackman. Fans of Landmoor will recognize him as Jaerod. What I enjoyed the most about playing D&D was the limitless possibilities for stories to tell. As much as I’m amazed at the quality of computer graphics today, the games you play on computers can’t re-write the story half-way through because there is a better idea. Or you are limited in what you do based on what a programmer has written into the code. For me, D&D was an infrastructure to tell stories. So I appreciate Gary Gygax as someone who helped me discover my inner muse.

On the writing front - I received another rejection letter from an agent I contacted in December. Still waiting to hear from the agent who was interested in reading the first few chapters of Muirwood.

As Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride: “I hate waiting.”

 

It’s been nearly two months since I first heard from the agent and not a word. It’s funny how the mind works during such a lull in communication. Did the manuscript get lost by the post office? Is it sitting on his desk beneath a huge stack of other similar packages, waiting for its turn to be opened. Will I get a letter back asking for more? Or a call on my cell phone that he loved it? Should I send more queries out to other agents or just keep waiting? So many questions, all circling around again and again. But then I sit back, take a deep breath. I know he must be very busy. That he will get to mine in its turn. Keep other avenues open, but be patient.

I was going through the hard-drive this week and stumbled across a query letter I wrote seven years ago. As I read it, I could see that I knew nothing about the industry or how to engage it. I learned a lot through publishing Deep Magic. I imagine that someday I’ll be looking back at this blog posting and will chuckle, knowing what I know then.

Until then…patience…patience…patience…

We had a fierce storm in California last weekend. Just about everyone we know had fences blown down. Last Saturday, my son and I were pulling nails out of fallen planks.

I have not heard back from the agent who was interested yet, and I’ve gotten two more rejections from two other agents in the meantime. One was personalized and the other not. So much time is spent waiting. But while I’ve been waiting, I haven’t been sitting still. I just started writing an outline for the sequel of Wretched which I have tentatively titled The Blight of Muirwood. Putting ideas on the page, fleshing out some of my initial thoughts gets the creative juices flowing.

I’ve also been watching some BBC adaptations of the novels of Elizabeth Gaskill, a contemporary of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. I really like the character development. Good writing. 

That’s all the report for now. Let’s see what good news January brings.

What a nice early Christmas present this year. After shopping for some new pants and shoes, I stopped by the mailbox and there was a reply letter - not a form letter, but a personalized one.

Dear Mr Wheeler:

I am intrigued by your query and would liek to consider the first fifty to seventy-five pages of THE WRETCHED OF MUIRWOOD, along with a good outline for the rest.

I hope I will wish to proceed from there to considration and representation of the full manuscript, but if not your material can only be returned accompanied by an SASE.

I look forward to seeing your work.

So, needless to say, that made my day and made my month. I’m on vacation for the next two weeks, so the timing is good as well. Still have several other letters out to agents, but this is the kind I was hoping to get! Stay tuned…

Had another dose of rejection from a third agent, but I’m still confident. I sent out queries to five more this last weekend to try and increase the odds. As Napoleon Hill once said: “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” 

Heard the same sentiment from Steve Martin on the radio recently too. The interviewer was talking to him about his new memoir, and he said that he wasn’t really any funnier than other people. The way he made it was by being persistent and not quitting.

On the home front - we are doing some major construction in the house - adding a bonus room. The kids are having a ball playing on a bare, plywood floor. Amazing how much fun it is when something is new. I’m amazed at the transformation going on. Hopefully it will be done soon. 

A week ago I was in New York City on a business trip. While I was eating a burger in Central Park and enjoying the beautiful day in Manhattan, I thought about the agent I was still waiting to hear back from. Funny how thoughts can trigger actions. Friday when I checked the mail, I got the second rejection letter. And it was postmarked the day I was in NY. Strange, isn’t it? But I am not discouraged and will continue to send out queries and sample chapters. After waiting so long on this last one, I think I will send out more than one at a time. These folks are very busy and odds are they won’t all clamor to sign up Wretched at once.

I read an article today in the Boston Globe that goes along with a study I read years ago while part of Deep Magic. Looks like the trends are getting worse. The article is about how much less young people are reading today. Here is the link:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/19/young_people_reading_a_lot_less/?p1=MEWell_Pos3
Some of the trends are:

• Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.
• The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
  

• Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.
  

• The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading.
  

Disturbing, isn’t it? The publishing industry is the victim of the digital age. I wonder in how many years the ability to read and digest information will be seen as a skill to have. I also can’t imagine a world without books. Movies are great, but they still cannot fully immerse you in someone else’s imagination for very long. All I know is that I want my kids to read and they stand a better chance if they see me reading.

And speaking of which, they’re finding me reading the work of new author Stephanie Meyer (author of Twilight). I’d heard so much about it being all the rave with teenage girls (it’s a vampire love story) that I wanted to analyze it from a writer’s perspective. It was a good book, but I can’t imagine teenage boys giving up their video games to read it. Not a chance…

 

:

I received my first rejection letter for Wretched after returning home from a quick business trip to Phoenix. One of my mentors, Sharon Kay Penman, has always said that writers waiting for responses from agents or editors is like dangling and twisting slowly on tenterhooks (an idiom for being in a state of uneasiness, suspense, or anxiety). I was not very nervous and had already prepared for the possibility that I was bound to be rejected multiple times before finding the right agent. It was a little disheartening to get a strip of paper with two sentences addressed to “Dear Writer” - but alas, such is the cruel fate of a writer. As soon as I received the rejection, I went down my list and targeted the next agent to submit to, who wants the first 50 pages as well as a synopsis. So, on the way home from work I need to pick up some more computer paper (didn’t realize we were almost out) and will target this next agent. I also e-mailed Betsy Mitchell, the editor-in-chief of Del Rey, who I know from the Deep Magic days, and she suggested two more agents to try who represent YA fantasy authors.

As Napoleon Hill wrote: “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”  

I’m leaving for China next week, so I should be saved the tenterhooks of waiting for the response because I’ll be too sleep deprived to care!

Today is the anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks. My wife and I talked this morning about how much was different now than then. Six years ago, I took a commuter train from Livermore to the Bay Area. I didn’t have a cell phone, only a pager, and my wife sent me text messages about the attacks as the news happened. I remember sitting on the train, shocked, wondering what world I was going to arrive to when I reached the Bay Area. It felt like someone had turned a page and a new chapter began, very different. Back then, we only had one child, a 2 year-old who noticed all the beautiful flags hanging everywhere. She’s eight now and has three other siblings. She can’t remember a pre-9/11 world at all. It was before Deep Magic was even born - back when Brendon, Jeremy, and I were brainstorming the possibility of publishing an on-line e-zine. So much has changed over the past six years. But I don’t think a year will go by that I don’t remember that shaky feeling on the train, reading text messages that were almost incomprehensible to me.