Musings of Two Creative Minds

For those of you who haven't heard yet, my father-in-law has been fighting cancer for the last year.  Unfortunately, he's fought the good fight but due to masses of blood clots in his head, they cannot finish the job.  So he is now in hospice care at home.  As you can imagine my wife, myself, and our family are devastated and are trying to spend as much time with him as we can.    So I won't be posting as much, but I don't want my readers to be left without much new here. So I'm offering you all the chance to post articles about writing here on my blog.  Feel free to push a book or books of yours, but please offer some tidbits or story about an aspect of writing and how it affected that particular book(s).   I'm looking for insights into plot, editing, characters, development, rewrites, cover art, publishing, agents, self-publishing, etc.  Again, all I ask is that if your pushing  book, make sure the article connects to it.   I ...

Good morning all.  It's 6:20AM here because I forgot it was Daylight Saving Time and the clocks went back an hour last night.  Still, got a good night's sleep which is just fine.  Been doing a lot of thinking lately about my first novel and the continuing wait about it's fate with an agent back in New York.  Yesterday I reached a decision and that was to begin querying more agents again.  After 22 months of waiting I checked in with some friends yesterday who know the agent in question and assured me that there is no "Exclusive" arrangement and that I'm free to query other agents in the meantime.  This was not known to me.  I had always read in a number of blogs, articles and advice to writers that if someone asked for a full manuscript, you did not continue querying other agents, unless told otherwise by the agent who made the request that it was okay to do so.  Just goes to show that not everything you read is always accurate I guess. Mind yo...