Will Noah's Custodian Get Published?

I am about to embark on my first publishing odyssey. My 2012 NaNoWriMo challenge has been massaged into what I think is a cohesive and worthwhile short novel. I'm sure I could spend years on it, adding and expanding, but it's time to move on.

It wound up at just over 54,000 words- 4,000 words longer than the first draft. Most works are supposed to get shorter after editing, but given that it was written in an extreme hurry, it needed more exposition and details. It is fairly different from the first iteration.

I want to thank my good friend Jeff Saladin for helping push me to make it better. His advice was invaluable and very insightful. And, of course, I must thank my family for putting up with me as I worked on it. My wife has fully supported me in my dream to be an author. She'd love me to be a best selling author and make lots of money at it so she can spend her time building a foundation, being home with the kids, and working on photography. I'm trying!

Analog magazine is one of the most prestigious Sci-Fi publications out there, and it accepts novel-length submissions of up to 80,000 words (they are serialized). I'm going to start there, and I believe I could then seek traditional or self-publication in book form some time after publication if they give me a chance. The downside is that I may not be able to see my work in print for a couple of years, but that's the biz. They pay upon acceptance so that would be nice. So, I have to format my manuscript for Analog and send it in, I'll do that this week.

If that doesn't fly, I may try querying a couple of agents and sending it to some publishers. The problem I'm likely to run into is that it is short for a novel- I read in many places that the big publishing houses want 70,000 words, minimum. So I'll look at some Indie publishers and see where that takes me.

If all else fails, I will self-publish on Amazon. So, it will get published, one way or another.

At any rate, we'll see where this takes me. More importantly, I'm excited to move on to something new. I have so many ideas for novels, and I want to write them all. There is only one way to do it.

A New Challenge

Even as I aim to finish prepping Noah's Custodian for publication (formally if accepted, by myself if no taker is found), my thoughts have turned to the next NaNoWriMo beginning November 1st.

My musings have lead me to another story that already has a title. My next novel will be named The Death Cheater's Diary. Once again, I'll shoot to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

While the central premise has a sci-fi twist, I expect this to be a human condition story, as many sci-fi stories are.