Keith Graham

I submitted my novel to Baen Books last week. I am beginning to regret this, and I went back to the Baen site and re-read the guidelines. I found a line:
Reporting time: usually within 12 to 15 Months. (Sorry, we get lots of manuscripts.)
Well that sucks!
I am not capable of waiting 15 months for a likely rejection.
I also did a search on agents that might accept the book. I found www.fineprintlit.com and submitted to a person named Laura Wood. She is starting to handle Genre fiction, and she sounded nice and smart. I expected an email response, but I didn’t get one. I think that I would have set up an auto-respond email if I was doing this kind of thing, but, of course, she did not have the expertise to do that, and it makes me worry about her credibility.
So, I have to pick a date where I publish my book at Amazon.
My brother, Larry, is actually reading the book, and making notes. He is not a reader, but he is enjoying the book and is making many very good suggestions, many of which I had already thought about. When he finishes marking up the proof copy, I think I’ll check it out.
I finished the book on March 12th. Maybe I’ll pull the trigger on April 12th, that would make it four months from starting the book to publication.
I have to be clear about the time it took to write the book. I wrote the first two chapters in 2003, so technically it took 20 years to write, but I could not find the time back then to work on a novel, so I kept it in a Work In Progress folder for that whole time. Elapsed time was a few hours in 2003 and then three months in 2023 and now a month of hesitation.
I found another novel where I wrote the first two chapters. It is called “The Glass House”, It is even older than Murder in Luna City. I tried to pick it up, but it did not flow as easily as “Murder” (original name was All it Takes is Brains.) I think that I need to add some characters and let the characters pull it forward. Its other flaw is that it is about a Neural Net, which is actually the dead ringer for chatGPT. I think it may be too technical for most people. (I am also reluctant to mention chatGPT in a time when publishers are being inundated with LLM fakes.)
The other novel is “To Become A Dragon,” which meanders too much. I have chapters stretching over several years, and I don’t know how to tie them all together. 30K words, so it at least it has a good base to fill in the missing parts.