Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• What I think about this last week, all in all.
• How well I followed the plan.
• Reasonable near-term goals.
• Thoughts on further-out improvements.

This week, I planned to scope out some romance publishers and have a look through their catalogues. I did that, but there were a few subgoals that didn't work out, so I had to abandon them.

The big stumbling block I had this week was around having some slightly off assumptions about how things work. I assumed that all publishers would have as detailed guidelines as it sounds like Rutskarn ran into, and that doesn't seem to be the case for the ones I found. So, lacking the training wheels I expected, I had to recalibrate my expectations. I'm not sure it really affected my short-term plans, but it definitely scrapped some of my long-term plans.

Basically, once I have more exposure to the genre, I'm going to have to kind of be self-directed to develop at it, since I'm not seeing the aforementioned training wheels.

On balance, this means more work than I wanted to put in to developing an outline, but probably not much more work.

So far as the reading list I put together, I'll probably have to go over the individual titles again. There are some that I'm somewhat skeptical as to whether they fit into the strict romance novel framework; some of them are very short.

Ultimately, this week doesn't seem too impressive to me in terms of the artifacts I got out, but I went over all of the excerpts for nearly every book I put on the list, so it's not like I didn't put in effort. Where I fell short was down to bad assumptions on my part, and issues with website navigation.

Going forward with the project, I want to hold off on reading for now. I'd like to take some time at some point to go over resources I've found, in a less skim-y fashion.

Next week, it occurs to me that my Python projects are kind of foundering due to my feature envy of Rust. It might make sense to try porting Tiny Music to Rust and see how that goes, since that doesn't have any dependencies that I remember.