Nicky Penttila

So, the Washington Romance Writers annual retreat was this past weekend. This is my home chapter, and my favorite writer’s confab, mostly because it feels more intimate (and so, so supportive) than the bigger events. It feels so different I didn’t even tweet during the day and a half — a true retreat from the press of e-life.

I was inspired by talks by Kristan Higgins (“What are you prepared to do?”), Cathy Maxwell (“You’ve got talent!”), and especially Sherrilyn Kenyon — whose story I am still chewing over. As she said, I had no idea of her or her life, and how much can I know of anybody else’s, either?

I got good reactions during my pitch-to-agent sessions, and another reminder that I need to Always Be Marketing. That includes using a real photo, not my beloved anime mug, as my avatar. But the camera is traditionally indifferent or hostile to me, really, just no love at all. It’s so bad that sometimes at relatives’ houses I secretly steal their worst pictures of me and trash them (sorry, grandma). Just thinking of getting photos taken makes my smile turn grimacy and my face break out.

BUT marvelous planners that they are, the retreat organizers had invited a photographer who has a magic about her that set me so at ease. After another member raved about her photo session, I went and signed up for the very next session so I couldn’t back out and had no time to worry about it. And we did it — and found 4-5 images that look pretty good! She’s tweaking them, so I won’t get them for a few weeks, but that’s one giant to-do item checked off the list. All because I went to retreat. Thank you Barbara Woodard, photographic designer.

So, I’m working up a proposal for my next historical, after rough-drafting a contemporary in February and March. A bunch of the same issues keep cropping up, or is it the tree pollen distorting my field of view?

Story-wise, I seem to be building another set-of-three structure, with three pairs of protagonists-antagonists and interlocking stories. Maybe it’s too much Dickens in my diet, but I seem to want to explore many angles of a subject, be it second-chance love, duty vs. family, or whatever. Unfortunately, this is what got last year’s story rejected — too many subplots and not enough focus on the main romantic couple (one editor suggested I cut every subplot out). Am I treading down that same (reject, reject) path again? What could I do differently?

Career-wise, I am very tempted by the idea of e-publishing/self-publishing. Advantages: quicker potential payday; I can “be an author” now; I have more control over my content. Disadvantages: I’d need to spend money on my own editor, cover designer, and text-coder; I’d need to spend time now on marketing; I worry that if the story isn’t “good enough” to find a publisher, what makes me think it’s good enough to publish any other way?

One twist: I could write the interlocking stories as standalone novellas, and sell those as e-versions, and then gauge the interest in my weaving them together into a longer tale. The more successful current e-pub authors have a lot of content to sell, while my books are long and intricate and take a year or more to finish so I have not so much to sell. And if a 30k-word novella and a 120k novel both sell at 99 cents, what is the advantage to making it a novel? The pool of e-authors is relatively small now, but surely will explode; maybe now is the time to take advantage of a smaller market?

Or is this all jumping the gun? Maybe I should just keep writing the novels, and when I have five or six good ones, and when I have exhausted the query-submit-agent-publisher route, then turn to e-pub. But I want to be an author now. But I want to be a good author more. And while I want to make money from my writing, I can wait another few years to do it: If our current economy holds steady, I won’t need to get a more-immediately-lucrative second job until the end of 2012.

All this mental buzz (plus my bad reaction to the tree pollen) has cut into my writing time this week. That won’t get me anywhere. Weekend of writing coming up (with a break for the DC science writers’ workshop). And — great timing — the next weekend is the Washington Romance Writers annual retreat; maybe my fellow scribes have found some answers.