BeeCycling

The Revise and Resubmit Rejection (Repost from my old blog.) Writers are all too familiar with rejection. But there’s a more unusual type of rejection I don’t see much about online – the revise and resubmit rejection. What it is A rejection – but, it’s not the “ and the horse you rode in on ” type of rejection. Sometimes instead of just being told “No” by a publisher, the author gets a “no, but…” A revise and resubmit rejection says the publisher doesn’t want it as it is, but if the author is prepared to get the red pen back out and make some specified changes, they will be prepared to consider it again. What it’s not It is not a guarantee that they will take it if you make those changes, only that they will consider it again. It’s not a contract. It places no obligations on either party.

Is your book an albatross? (Republish of a post from my old blog.) What is an albatross book? It’s a book you’ve been working on for a very long time but essentially is dead weight. It’s dragging you down, like the albatross hung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner. I lugged around two albatross books for years without even writing them. Only after I got rid of them could I start to actually write. It’s usually the first novel. Or your Great Novel. Your magnum opus that will shake the literary world to its core – if you ever get around to writing it/submitting it/selling it. If you have actually written it and started submitting it, it’s getting rejected, but you keep on editing it and keep on trying because my god twenty years of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this thing!

It's been a month since I created an account on Mastodon . A few days after I created the account, I decided to lock down my Twitter account and focus on Mastodon. I am loving it.   I found a good instance to be on. I've had a couple of toots go a bit viral, getting several hundred boosts and likes. Have found lots of cool people to follow - by this point probably less than half are people I was following on Twitter. I am building up followers nicely - am currently on 468. I'm not here to tell you all about how to get started on Mastodon - I'm still a noob myself after all, and still learning basic stuff every day. But I've got a couple of thoughts to pass on to other new Mastodon users, who are maybe struggling a bit figuring out how to make more connections, especially if not a lot of your Twitter friends have come across. It does matter which server/instance you're on We all get told, "just choose any server" when first getting signed up. You can i...

I'm currently on 46 books read for 2022, which is lower than I manage most years, but it's been a weird year for various reasons, so I'm pretty pleased with that really. Here are some of my favourites, in no particular order.

I'm going to post a few favourites of mine from my old Wordpress blog over the next few weeks, usually with some tweaking. Then come 2023 it should be basically all new stuff - aside from one that's kind of seasonal and needs to be posted around the start of February. 10 Reasons you haven’t written your book yet (And why they are stupid.) (I was guilty of several of these in the past.) 1. I haven’t quite finished the research/outline yet. Why it’s stupid: If your first save of the outline or some research notes for this project was onto a floppy disk, you just may be procrastinating.

Last word on Twitter Before Elon Musk took over Twitter I both adored and hated that beloved hellsite. Sometimes I wanted to get away from it, but it was hard to break the addiction. So I guess I should at least thank the muskrat for that, because oh boy, did I go from “I wish I knew how to quit you,” to “Oh, that was easy” in two weeks flat. I haven’t used Twitter for several days now, since the poll to allow the Orange Menace back on. Especially after it ended at the infamous cursed ratio of 52:48. That was a sign. Now last I saw, Trump hasn’t actually come back to his newly unlocked account and, has said he won’t. (Even Trump thinks Musk is a loser. Let that sink in. Apparently he’d lose money if he did come back anyway. ) And I wouldn’t have to see his tweets, cause I’d block him. It’s just the toxic miasma his presence creates through the whole site that puts me off.

Following the many shenanigans of the past couple of weeks since you-know-who started his mad rampage through the Twitterverse, I've decided to stay off Twitter and focus on Mastodon for now at least. It's a wrench. I both adore and hate that beloved hellsite, which I've used since 2007. But the question is, do I want to fully deactivate the account? Do you? There are pros and cons on both sides depending on who you are and how you use Twitter.