writer

So, I write. I write for fun. I'm a part-time writer, and a full time liver. I thought I'd start this off, build up my following and such. Not that I care much about a following, but in order to be read, you have to have readers, so there's the dilemma.

I've been working a manuscript, Lost Man, for about five years now, part-time. So, what's it about? Here's the blurb I've written so far for my query letter:

Lost Man is a story of survival in the wilds of Yellowstone, and upon finding that you are actively seeking writers from the Pacific Northwest and represented similar works as Disappearance: A Map and Into the Forest, your representation for my manuscript would be a very apt match. The lost man is Truman Everts, and he never knew his grandfather or his history, and he had never traveled the fifty miles to Yellowstone National Park. His father was too routine, too stoic for a family vacation, and his is quite, complicit mother died young. Now, Truman is living in his family home, working for Kurtz the ex-buffalo rancher who raised him, and beer drinking with his best friend Todd.

On a whim he treks to the fabled Yellowstone with Todd, traveling the same route of his grandfather, 130 years yore. On the day of return, he finds Kurtz’s open hearse bumping up the gravel road. A snow unleashes in the September air stranding Truman in his home without power and a mighty case of the flu. All collapses, he loses all – his job, savings, health, Kurtz, and rationality. Grasping with all extremities he finds, in the recess of the family bookcase, his grandfather’s writings – a personal tale, lost alone in Yellowstone for 37 days -- a history to soon parallel his own. Screams of a mountain lion, cat tracks in the snow, and his fevered mind strikes him on a fool’s flight into the wild wintery forest. Lost Man jumbles historical events, characters, and quotes with modern fiction in a seemingly illusory realm. It’s a fervent survival tale, taking the reader down the rabbit-hole of a family’s history to find what it really means to live.

The draft is complete, and I've now revised it three times. I'm working on the 4th revision, which is the first time all the way through. Given, some chapters have been revised more than that, and some have been deleted, and some have been moved around in manuscript. Of the 100 or so pages, single spaced, in Word, I've written, I'm at about page 80, so I'm nearly there. Woot!

I had the goal of putting out letters to agents, which I've read is the best way to go for fiction, by April, but after I did the 3rd edit and plugged all the pieces togeteher, I was at about 42,000 words, and the "normal" novel is about 50,000. I knew places to add in some backstory, sidestory and rewordings to make more sense where I knew it was lacking. Any way, as of today, the manuscript is up to 46,000 words, and there's a big section about Truman's mother and how she met his father, which I'm currently working on and will add a least another 1,000 words or more. I'll describe that later.

Now that I've jumped into this. I'll just write about what I'm writing about as I go along.

So here it is, a writer's journal for the those who wish to read.