Here's my confession. It's been a shameful four years since I last gave any attention to my first "breakout" novel, then titled Vicarious Windows, currently tentatively titled "Sword of Damocles." You wouldn't believe how many changes it's gone through. Titles, characters, sequences of events - the whole premise, really. Scenes have been rewritten and then later scrapped completely. Characters have vanished, been renamed, or reassigned personalities. Then, after a year-long process of sending queries and manuscripts out to agents and getting my hopes dashed, I ended up shifting my attention away from the project and starting fresh with "11:11."
With "11:11" I was writing more for an adult audience and so I generalized that to this idea that my writing had matured and "Vicarious Windows" was no longer viable. After "Twilight" came out and the market changed in the direction I had wanted to take it, I regretted missing the shot. Only within the last month have I considered the possibility that now might actually be a good time to exploit or even nudge the market with "Vicarious Windows/SoD." So I've begun the process of taking it through yet another hard and soft edit, getting it ready to face the agent slush pile nightmare again.
I haven't been in the game since 2007. The process of writing queries for "VW" was exhausting and so I took a different route with "11:11" and self-published. They - other authors I've met - insist this is the best option. You make more money and have more control. What you don't have is the machine that drives marketing for a professional pub house. I've done what I can on Facebook and YouTube, but after two years, no one outside of my family has bought my book. It's shameful to say that in two years, I only sold six copies.
So I bought the latest edition of the lit agent directory, along with a companion book that gives you all that secret background information you can use to convince them you once met at a cocktail party. I'm going to put "11:11" on the back burner now because I don't think the market is right for it at the current moment. "VW" or "Sword of Damocles" fits into the YA "supernatural book to movie" category, so really it's now or never.
The soft edits have been hard on me this time around, since it's been awhile since I wrote anything in this character's voice. My style has evolved since then several times over. In "11:11" I was very minimalistic and was teasing out this idea of shifting viewpoints. I later evolved into an epic prosaic style for "To See Once More The Stars" which I later discovered was crap. My latest project, "Acceptable Loss" was basically me overcompensating by including almost no purple prose. It's actually an advantage because now as I'm doing the hard edits for "VW/SoD" I find it a lot easier to take out those lingering prose-y handles that I framed every scene with. And since it's been four years since I wrote them, I don't feel bad about killing my darlings.
But when I'm doing the soft edits and really getting into the sentence structure, dialogue, description, rhythm, etc. I'm finding it difficult to maintain a continuity from the 2006 version to the 2010 rewrites. It's like when I wrote my brother and sister's papers for school and had to make the writing sound younger and less "educated" so the teacher wouldn't be suspicious. If I got too carried away I could rewrite the whole novel, but who's to say I'm not replacing "2006 chaff" with "2010 chaff". I'm trimming the fat and then frying the damn thing in butter, which means that just because my style changed, it doesn't mean it got any better. That's the insane thing about being a writer. Having the story is the easy part. Identifying the perfect way to tell it is the real challenge.
The other challenge is having a split personality between artist and business person. I have to distance myself from the artistry of the work in order to be the editor. I have to cut scenes without feeling bad about all the work I put into them. I have to decide whether or not this story is marketable despite having fallen in love with it. Writing for an audience has always killed me a little, but it's a necessary evil. I don't want to make money. I just want people to get excited about my story. But in order for that to happen, I have to find a way to get it in front of them. Since I can't afford to mail a free copy to every person in America, I have to get published.
When you stand at point A and look over at "getting published" as point B, it's overwhelming. Really, I have to consider it more like point "Z" and focus on all the steps in between. You don't just jump to the top rung of the ladder, you take each rung one at a time. And more importantly, you don't stand on a single rung for too long. It's not meant to be like that. I can't have an edited manuscript complete for another year without sending a query. But the process of researching agents, writing queries and putting my heart and soul into an SASE and sending it to New York is not something I'm eager to repeat. Clearly, four years ago, I wasn't ready with "VW/SoD." I'm just worried I'll go through the process again, fail, and four years from now realize that I still wasn't ready. You can't ever really know if you have a successful project until it succeeds.
But malingering isn't going to help either. I might not win the race, but I've at least got to show up and start running. Talent is a catalyst. In scientific terms, that means it's the last little bit of energy that combines with existing energy to push the reaction over the edge. If you don't apply it to something, it's useless.
