Ambling here, stream-of-consciousness project consideration. I’ve wrapped the last of my contracts (though I do still have Anna’s revision of Hawkspar to do. I want to get back to writing fiction again. I’m considering directions.
I know Claire wants to look at a proposal for another EMT suspense novel; she really enjoyed I See You. I’ve sent one off to Robin, and after Claire transmits the stuff I sent her last night so that I’m cleared with accounting, Robin will pass that on to her. If she likes it, I’m golden and that will be by next project.
If she doesn’t like it, though, I’m in a quandary. Supportive editors who like your work are damned hard to find. There is, however, the consideration that another year like last year could very well break me. Not just financially, though that’s huge. I find that I’m queasy even considering going near another ten months of work and 140,000 words of unpaid proposals to sell a 90,000 word novel (as I did with last year’s Onyx Proposal), and I have to consider this time knowing when to say, “No more.” Do I do that after one proposal? Three? When the bank account is so drained that I end up doing another work-for-hire just to keep us solvent long enough to find something that she’ll take? Do I just keep going, making myself sicker and sicker of the whole process, as I did last year, until I hate the thought of even walking into the office? I love to write. I don’t want to go there again.
Quandary two is Faalca, the third stand-alone novel of Korre. Anna already okayed the proposal, but can’t buy the book until we have a better idea of how Talyn is doing. I don’t think we’ll know that until we have paperback sales, and I don’t know when the paperback will be released, but if they come out around the same time as the hardcover of Hawkspar, we’re looking at 2007 at the earliest.
Quandary three is the banquet of pendings on my table. I have delicious projects I want to sink my teeth into:
- Ghosts & Gremlins, Inc., currently existing in proposal form as a scary/funny four-book series about a skeptical Southern ghost-hunting quartet faced with real evil, which could find itself collapsed into a one-book big fat novel;
- Seven Accursed, a series about warriors who dared to battle the gods and who were cursed with immortality when they lost;
- Cadence Drake II (not even a real working title, of course), where in the process of getting good false papers for her new ship, Cady would cross paths with Tangerine again, plus the increasingly mysterious cop who saved her life once;
- C, the Secret Project;
- A very cool juvenile fantasy series I unearthed from my hard drive, which I already sold once, before the line to which it had sold ignominiously tanked;
- Worldbuilding Clinic;
- Plotting Clinic;
- Revise and Submit Clinic;
- Any one of the five best of the dozen proposals that I came up with for Claire last year, all of which I’m still wildly in love with;
- … or maybe a book starring one of a handful of fascinating people who are kicking around in the back of my mind, developing compelling stories.
So. What’s next? I have no clue. Something, clearly. My fingers aren’t restless yet, but they will be soon. I’ll let my mind wander for a bit while I catch up on non-fiction-writing work, and see what starts to coalesce.
Leave a Reply