Starting A New Decade

Here we are, on the edge of a new decade.

What happened to the last one?

In the past nine years, I decided to stop tossing my writing into the bin and made an effort to improve my writing skills.

I made a concerted effort to get a novel published. So where am I at now, as the decade ends?

Not published at book length, but I've managed to get the wordsmithing to a level that garners compliments from literary agents. The praise coming after the "not quite right for me" part of the rejection, to be sure, but there's clearly been improvements made.

If I continue along this trajectory, getting better at crafting sentences and paragraphs and chapters, I just might sign with a literary agent before 2020.

By that time, of course, there may be only one or two major publishing houses left, making it even more difficult to get a novel in print. And the notion of "in print" could have morphed into the creation of an e-book, which would sell for 99 cents, of which the author gets fractions of pennies in royalties.

Happy New Year, writers. Let's hope the coming decade is better than the last.