And while the queries for Novel 2 languish under piles of their brethren in lit agent inboxes, I start a new story.
It's something I haven't done before, a love story. Novel 1 had a side romance, but it got lost in THE END OF THE WORLD, which was slightly more pressing at the time. Novel 2 had no romance at all - not even so much as a weighted moment or longing glance. I've tried to write love stories before, but they always putter out. I thought it was because I'm not a romantic at heart, and I don't find love stories to be interesting in and of themselves. But then I look at my obsessive shipping of certain couples, and I realize that's bollocks. I just hadn't found the right story yet.
Around Christmas, the right story found me. Wonked me upside the head and broke open like a plot piñata, more accurately. All the candy scenes landed in more or less the right order, and I knew, I KNEW I had to write this. I knew it would take a lot longer than anything I'd done before, and I knew it would be a total bitch to write, yet I'm certain, if I can find that timbre I'm looking for, this will be the best thing I've ever done.
A week later and I'm 7000 words in, 5000 of which were written last weekend in a fit of joy I've never experienced in my writing before. I know it won't last. This novel, like every novel, will hit a rock, or a whole mountain range, and there will be issues, days when I loathe it, but, for this moment, I adore every the story with a passion I didn't think I had in me, and it's such a wonderful, strange, beautiful feeling.
At a time in my life when I spend 23 of my 24 hours obsessing over publication, a moment of writing just for the sheer joy of it is worth more than words could say. This is why I write. Sometimes it takes a sound thrashing to get me to remember of that.
3 comments:
wow! good for you! i'm jealous! out of curiosity, how many queries are you sending out at once? i thought maybe 3. but that seems wimpy. maybe 5 for me?
On the first day I sent 10, mostly because I'd already made a list and decided to hit everyone.
Way I look at it, querying is like pulling off a bandaid, get it over with quickly and either get repped or move on.
So far I've sent about 20 in 2 weeks, only a handful of replies so far.
Of course, the bad part of this method is that all the rejections come at once. So I guess I'd only send out as many queries at once as I was willing to get back as rejections on the same day... :P
thanks for responding. my logic is that if i get five rejections, i may look at my query / pages and tweak if they are way off. i think i'll stick with 5 at a time--to prolong the rejections. haha!
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