I’ve never had a deadline for writing something new. It’s wonderful (because I know what I’m producing will, in some form, turn into a real book) and terrible (because…deadline). Mostly wonderful, though, because it is so hard writing into a void. That’s what I call all the writing I did working up to selling SCARLETT UNDERCOVER. I was just going on blind faith and hope that maybe someday, somehow, someone would publish my stuff.
Ugly truth: there are two manuscripts tucked away on my hard drive that never sold.
The first one I really love. It made it all the way to the acquisitions process at a big publisher. The second one is kind of bad (hmm….maybe I could churn out some high fantasy even though I’m not a huge high fantasy fan…). But I learned so much from both of them. They took maybe 2 1/2 – 3 years to write in total, so I call them my do-it-yourself MA program. Except I didn’t really do it myself, because my agent and a bunch of editors read both and gave me great feedback.
This is turning into a ramble, so let me cut myself off by saying it feels SO GOOD to have wrapped up the first narrator’s story in DREAMLAND BURNING. And it’s amazing to think that even though I’ve always been a decent writer, the process of becoming a novelist is turning into a wonderful and existentially endless kind of thing. Like yoga, I guess. Speaking of which…
Namaste!