And so, like the butterfly, I emerge from my cocoon after a long period of absence with new wings, and yadda-yadda-yadda, whatever else metaphor you wanna stick in there…
I’ve let this place lapse for quite a while, though in truth I honestly hadn’t realized just how long it had been. While I’ve certainly had things to say, my writing efforts have been focused elsewhere. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
Firstly, I’ll mention a little bit about what’s happened with the manuscript I’d been pitching when last blogged here, Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit. I had some decent nibbles from agents and publishers (queries have resulted in requests for longer samples on numerous occasions, and one publisher requested the entire manuscript), but no good, hard bites yet. The main problem seems to be the book’s length, which is about 50K words longer than most publishers like to see from a new author. (Longer books cost more to print, and while there are plenty of books out there by established authors at 150K words or longer, publishers don’t like to spend the money printing such books if the writer doesn’t have an established base.) I haven’t given up completely–I’m still pitching it occasionally–but for now I’m focused on pitching the (shorter) book I’ve written in the meantime, which I’ll mention in a moment. I still love Murdering Zeus, though. I’m continually tempted to self-publish it and try to make it go viral in geek circles, but I can’t quite bring myself to let go of having it published in more traditional fashion just yet.
But yes, I’ve written a new book! It’s tentatively titled A Memory of Dragons, and the pitching process is (knock on wood) going well–or, at least, encouragingly. In December, an agent responded to a query letter with a request for a sample, and two weeks later asked for the full manuscript. I’m sorry to say the agent ultimately passed, but she did have a few constructive comments which I used to do a few revisions before I started pitching again. Just this past week, I had another agent ask to see my full manuscript! So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
But hey, I should mention just what it’s about, huh? Put simply, it’s a contemporary fantasy about a man who takes a pilgrimage to Britain to honor his dead girlfriend and encounters a pickpocket who claims to possess her stolen memories. There is, of course, more to it, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now. Unlike Murdering Zeus, it’s not a comedy, though it’s not without humor. Characters in the book visit a number of places across Britain that I’ve been lucky enough to visit myself (Worm’s Head, London, Cardiff, Conwy, and others), and it was fun to revisit those places in my mind as I wrote.
Lastly, there’s also a little bit of news regarding my self-published novel, A Shadow in the Flames, but I’ll get to that in the next entry…
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