Did I miss a golden opportunity?

With my regular cash clients on indefinite hiatus, I’ve been applying steadily to freelance positions advertised on journalism websites, Linked In and the like. The most interesting was for a “with” ghostwriting gig, as in The Perfect Assassin by James Patterson with Brian Sitts. The company in question provides the plots, then pays a writer to flesh out the details — dialogue, setting, etc.

They’re doing this in several genres so I applied for the fantasy gig. Last week I turned in a 1,000-word scene following their plot, and I think it was good, but they gave me a No at the start of this week. The problem may have been that my tone was urban fantasy when they wanted a Tolkien or George RR Martin vibe. Did I miss a golden opportunity? It would have certainly been more fun than most of my paying gigs and might have boosted my name recognition factor. On the other hand, I don’t know what length of book they wanted: the pay would have been good for 60,000 words, unsatisfying for 100,000. Plus it would come in three scheduled payments per book (one when the first quarter is done, one when the manuscript is done, one when revisions are finished or something like that). I don’t suspect them of chicanery but a new company might run out of funding before I got the cash.  Who knows?

Otherwise the week went well. I spent some time jotting down ideas for the next phase of Let No Man Put Asunder and got about 5,000 words done. I’m already thinking of revisions; if I hit my minimum for the month, 10,000 words, I may go back and polish everything, as I did with the first few chapters already.

I rewrote Mage’s Masquerade and I’m really pleased with it. I’ll print it out and do a final read in hard copy later in March.

I finished rereading The Impossible Takes a Little Longer and it’s much better than I thought. Not publishable but as I’d hoped, the story arc is largely there. I started jotting down notes on fixing things; a big one is a lot more intensity in my protagonist’s emotions. I’m putting her through the ringer but it’s not showing on the page.

I read the second half of Obolus to the writing group — well, I got about halfway through in the time allotted. That’s frustrating as I need feedback on the ending, so I’ll wait and read that part again at the next meeting. Otherwise the reading went great. They found it much improved over the draft I read them a couple of months back. One guy said my lines were so good that like Douglas Adams I distracted him from the flow of the story. I can live with that.

I also reread Oh the Places You’ll Go! which I intend to release as a solo short story. It looks good but it made take more editing to make it good enough.

That plus a little bit of research reading covers it, I think. Plus I had articles about comics writer Jim Shooter and a noteworthy Silver Age Hulk tale over at Atomic Junkshop. On Con-Tinual’s Facebook page I participated in a discussion about Wonder Woman, a topic you may have noticed I’m fond of.

#SFWApro. LOTR covers by Barbara Remington, Wonder Woman cover by Gene Colan. All rights remain with current holders.