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Ovid (2709)

Ovid
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Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.

Journal of Ovid (2709)

Monday September 30, 2002
11:43 AM

I have an agent

[ #8099 ]

Kind of weird, but I now have an agent for a tentative book deal. There is no book contract yet and certainly no guarantees. In fact, I have nothing but a possible schedule that requires me and a co-author to each churn out over four and a half pages a day for three months. Is this doable? Given my writing experience, this seems like something that can be done, but not easily. I would hate to sacrifice quality for quantity. There would be no point in writing.

All in all, I think I can sum this up as a definite possibility of a firm maybe of three months of agony. Clearly, I'm not as bright as I thought.


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  • I'm curious, why did you get an agent? Is there an upside that I missed out on?

    As far as whether 4 pages per day is doable... Well, I definitely couldn't do it but writing speed is a personal attribute. Have you ever written a chapter-length article? Figuring out how long it took you might give you a good estimate for how long it will take you to write a chapter in your book.

    Also, does that time estimate include editing time? I found that I spent almost as much time editing my work as I did writing

    • Of course there's an upside to getting an agent. There's a percentage of money that I no longer have to worry about spending :)

      Seriously though, I was contacted by another individual and the agent/author relationship was already set up and I was merely being contacted by a potential coauthor. Personally, I'm fine with that. I used to sell cars (don't hate me for it!) and while I'm good at negotiations and paperwork, I prefer to minimize that. If someone else wants a percentage to handle those details,

  • Well, you didn't say if you otherwise have a job, and how many hours per week you work. If you have a 40 hour per week job, I consider highly unlikely that you'll do 4 pages per day (which means 28 per week). That comes out to a chapter per week _non-stop_ for 3 months.

    When writing the Mason book, I was working about 30 hours per week and I did not write nearly that fast. Maybe I wasn't pushing myself very hard but I found that I had to be in a certain frame of mind to produce anything decent. It wasn'

    • I do have a full-time job, but I am single, so that helps. I do have a fairly active social life, though, so that's something which needs to get tossed by the wayside for a while.

      do {
        unless ( $working ) {
          write( $stuph ) && undef $social_life;
        }
      } while ( ! $dead );

      My coauthor and I are still working out deadline details, but I have no idea how this is going to turn out. There are a few other ingredients which have been tossed into the mix, s

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