Next Project
Okay, as I'm giving Quinton #7 a little breather before the final proofreading, time to tackle something kind of major.
Way back when, I wrote a total of four books before the fifth, "One Helluva Gig," was picked up for publication. Of those four early efforts, one had a premise good enough to attract the interest of a couple of agents, but when they saw the final manuscript they were, shall we say, somewhat underwhelmed.
One in fact told me, exact quote, "To be honest, I didn't even want to keep reading."
Over the years I worked on improving my craft. I've been beyond fortunate in that, so far, everything after "Gig" has found a home with one publisher or another. (Ones still making the rounds, so this record may be marred a bit.) Even so, I've never quite forgotten that early attempt with the cool premise but the lousy execution.
A few months back, I pulled the old thing out of mothballs and dusted it off (i.e. opened it up on my computer) to see if there was anything salvageable.
Barely. After I'd gotten to about page fifty I wondered how that agent way back when had managed to keep on reading. I mean, the prose was really, really bad. And yet . . .
I still get a kick out of the basic idea, the main plot device. I decided that, once my relocation was complete and I got a little breathing room on Quinton, I'd tackle the whole thing from the ground up. Understand we're not talking just a little tweaking of the style. The whole darned thing, minus the foundation, has to be uprooted and rebuilt from scratch.
So that's my project for the spring, summer, and into the rest of the year. Redo the entire thing, from scratch, and see what comes out of it. It may still turn out to be no good, but I'm going to give it my darndest to build something cool out of the rubble of the original manuscript.
All I want to give at this point is the working title, "Regress," and the genre. It's a combination legal procedural/ horror, in the same vein as "The Litter" but of a drastically different subject matter.
This morning, I began working on the outline and hope to have the entire thing ready to present by end of the year.
Wish me luck.
Way back when, I wrote a total of four books before the fifth, "One Helluva Gig," was picked up for publication. Of those four early efforts, one had a premise good enough to attract the interest of a couple of agents, but when they saw the final manuscript they were, shall we say, somewhat underwhelmed.
One in fact told me, exact quote, "To be honest, I didn't even want to keep reading."
Over the years I worked on improving my craft. I've been beyond fortunate in that, so far, everything after "Gig" has found a home with one publisher or another. (Ones still making the rounds, so this record may be marred a bit.) Even so, I've never quite forgotten that early attempt with the cool premise but the lousy execution.
A few months back, I pulled the old thing out of mothballs and dusted it off (i.e. opened it up on my computer) to see if there was anything salvageable.
Barely. After I'd gotten to about page fifty I wondered how that agent way back when had managed to keep on reading. I mean, the prose was really, really bad. And yet . . .
I still get a kick out of the basic idea, the main plot device. I decided that, once my relocation was complete and I got a little breathing room on Quinton, I'd tackle the whole thing from the ground up. Understand we're not talking just a little tweaking of the style. The whole darned thing, minus the foundation, has to be uprooted and rebuilt from scratch.
So that's my project for the spring, summer, and into the rest of the year. Redo the entire thing, from scratch, and see what comes out of it. It may still turn out to be no good, but I'm going to give it my darndest to build something cool out of the rubble of the original manuscript.
All I want to give at this point is the working title, "Regress," and the genre. It's a combination legal procedural/ horror, in the same vein as "The Litter" but of a drastically different subject matter.
This morning, I began working on the outline and hope to have the entire thing ready to present by end of the year.
Wish me luck.
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