osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2020-03-31 09:02 am
osprey_archer) wrote2020-03-31 09:02 am
Entry tags:
March Writing & April Goals
At the beginning of March I hoped to prepare The Threefold Tie for publication and complete the final round of major revisions on Honeytrap, and… I have achieved both those things! (In fact, The Threefold Tie is available for preorder - I’ve never done preorders before, this is so exciting - it goes live on Friday. And yes, there will be paperbacks too, but I couldn’t figure out how to make those preorder, so they’re not showing up yet.)
Of course the global pandemic meant that I had much more writing time than expected, but on the other hand the whole global pandemic thing has been, how shall I put this, distracting, so I feel I did pretty well.
The library where I work is now closed “until further notice,” with the earliest possible reopening date of May 4th… which makes it particularly unfortunate that I’m going into April without my next writing project lined up. I’ve been poking at the m/m Sleeping Beauty, but I’m having trouble seeing the shape of the book; I suppose I could write the parts that I have and see if something develops as I go.
The other option is - well. I’ve been organizing my computer files, and I finally made a folder for “completed but unpublished novels”… and discovered that I have six… which seems excessive, frankly, but here we are.
Three of them are unsalvageable, but the other three have been neglected mostly because it would be difficult to market them under my current pen name, and they’re also too unlike each other to lump together under a different pen name. However, at the moment I have oodles of time and a burning need for a new project, so… clearly the moment they’ve been waiting for!
1. The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball, a middle grade novel about two girls who live in the same house fifty years apart and become friends through the medium of time travel (yes, a popcorn ball is involved) and briefly gain the ability to fly on Halloween, at which point they enchant a bunch of Kit Kat bars so that when they eat the Kit Kats, they can travel through time to visit each other. It is bonkers? Yes. Did this bother agents when I sent out query letters? Absolutely. Do I nonetheless love this book and wish to inflict it upon the nation? Yes.
I’m planning to start with this one, even though it’s probably the oddest fit for Aster Glenn Gray (although The Wolf and the Girl was also a non-romance with weird magic, so maybe people just expect this of me now?), because it will be by far the easiest to prepare for publication. Obviously there will be small revisions throughout, but are only a couple of scenes that need big changes.
2. Sage, a YA novel in diary format, about an ambiguously bisexual high school senior and her three best friends and the books they read and the adventures they have and their hopes and fears for the futures etc., and I have never figured out a good hook for this book, which may be what bothered agents when I sent out query letters about it. Clearly it would be more hook-y if Sage fell in love with her nemesis’s chief minion (currently they just become friends), but that would shift the emphasis away from friendship and when I was writing it I really got attached to the YA novel without romance aspect, because I never saw that growing up (I still don’t think that’s really a thing) and I wanted that to exist.
I wrote the first half of this my first year out of college, and the second half about four years later after I’d written three coffee shop romances and also Reciprocity, and it’s obvious that there was a STEEP learning curve in between… and also I’ve tried to revise that first half in the past, without success. (On the other hand, Honeytrap has given me lots of practice revising a book with a messy and badly organized beginning, so I might finally have the chops to revise this.) But it would require a lot of revision for maybe not that many sales.
3. Harriet Peabody, an m/f historical romance set a couple years after the Civil War. Former Civil War nurse Harriet Peabody and Civil War veteran Dr. Thomas Conroy both think they are Too Damaged for Love, but of course they fall in love with each other.
This was originally intended as a Jennifer Montgomery book, and it’s not wildly out there for Aster Glenn Gray - it is at least a romance, although unlike the other Aster Glenn Gray books, it’s m/f. But I have a suspicion that it needs lots of revisions, and, to be honest, it’s not a passion project like the other two… But on the other hand it would undoubtedly outsell them both by a factor of at least five.
Of course the global pandemic meant that I had much more writing time than expected, but on the other hand the whole global pandemic thing has been, how shall I put this, distracting, so I feel I did pretty well.
The library where I work is now closed “until further notice,” with the earliest possible reopening date of May 4th… which makes it particularly unfortunate that I’m going into April without my next writing project lined up. I’ve been poking at the m/m Sleeping Beauty, but I’m having trouble seeing the shape of the book; I suppose I could write the parts that I have and see if something develops as I go.
The other option is - well. I’ve been organizing my computer files, and I finally made a folder for “completed but unpublished novels”… and discovered that I have six… which seems excessive, frankly, but here we are.
Three of them are unsalvageable, but the other three have been neglected mostly because it would be difficult to market them under my current pen name, and they’re also too unlike each other to lump together under a different pen name. However, at the moment I have oodles of time and a burning need for a new project, so… clearly the moment they’ve been waiting for!
1. The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball, a middle grade novel about two girls who live in the same house fifty years apart and become friends through the medium of time travel (yes, a popcorn ball is involved) and briefly gain the ability to fly on Halloween, at which point they enchant a bunch of Kit Kat bars so that when they eat the Kit Kats, they can travel through time to visit each other. It is bonkers? Yes. Did this bother agents when I sent out query letters? Absolutely. Do I nonetheless love this book and wish to inflict it upon the nation? Yes.
I’m planning to start with this one, even though it’s probably the oddest fit for Aster Glenn Gray (although The Wolf and the Girl was also a non-romance with weird magic, so maybe people just expect this of me now?), because it will be by far the easiest to prepare for publication. Obviously there will be small revisions throughout, but are only a couple of scenes that need big changes.
2. Sage, a YA novel in diary format, about an ambiguously bisexual high school senior and her three best friends and the books they read and the adventures they have and their hopes and fears for the futures etc., and I have never figured out a good hook for this book, which may be what bothered agents when I sent out query letters about it. Clearly it would be more hook-y if Sage fell in love with her nemesis’s chief minion (currently they just become friends), but that would shift the emphasis away from friendship and when I was writing it I really got attached to the YA novel without romance aspect, because I never saw that growing up (I still don’t think that’s really a thing) and I wanted that to exist.
I wrote the first half of this my first year out of college, and the second half about four years later after I’d written three coffee shop romances and also Reciprocity, and it’s obvious that there was a STEEP learning curve in between… and also I’ve tried to revise that first half in the past, without success. (On the other hand, Honeytrap has given me lots of practice revising a book with a messy and badly organized beginning, so I might finally have the chops to revise this.) But it would require a lot of revision for maybe not that many sales.
3. Harriet Peabody, an m/f historical romance set a couple years after the Civil War. Former Civil War nurse Harriet Peabody and Civil War veteran Dr. Thomas Conroy both think they are Too Damaged for Love, but of course they fall in love with each other.
This was originally intended as a Jennifer Montgomery book, and it’s not wildly out there for Aster Glenn Gray - it is at least a romance, although unlike the other Aster Glenn Gray books, it’s m/f. But I have a suspicion that it needs lots of revisions, and, to be honest, it’s not a passion project like the other two… But on the other hand it would undoubtedly outsell them both by a factor of at least five.
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I read a draft of Sage at some point and I think there's a market for it and things like it - probably a small all-ages market that overlaps a little with the market for the coffee shop romances.
The historical romance could be good, but if your heart's not in it, it'll be less so.
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Sage and Harriet Peabody are both going to require more time/effort (Sage probably more so, just because it's so much longer). Once The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is finished, I'll stop and reassess which one I want to work on.
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