On August 30--four days after I woke with a crushing pain in my chest--I completed a draft of a new novel. The manuscript sits on my desk next to my computer monitor. It's a few thousand words shy of meeting the optimum length for its target market, but is otherwise complete. All I need to do is add a few new or expand a few existing scenes to get it to the appropriate length. Then it'll need one last editing/proofreading pass before it'll be ready so submit. It'll be one of the first things I do once I regain a decent attention span.
I haven't written many novels. This is my fifth. All four previous novels were published by small presses--two received great reviews, two others were also released as audio books--but none sold particularly well. The novel sitting in front of me has the potential to sell to a larger publisher, and I have reasonably high hopes for it.
During the last few weeks spent finishing the draft of this novel, I also started outlining another novel, one intended for the same publisher. Although the outline is quite rough at this point, I think I'll be able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time once I can return to the keyboard.
Does this mean I'm abandoning short stories? Not hardly. Short stories are my bread-and-butter and are likely to remain so for quite some time.
2 comments:
Very cool deal. Maybe you could blog about the genesis of the novel at soem point and how you set about writing it.
Kevin
(who remains sort of stuck on his)
Michael, Glad to hear about the new novel. Who cares if the others didn't sell well? When this one hits it big the others will be reprinted. By the way, anybody seeing this who hasn't read Michael's "All White Girls" should grab it post-haste. Excellent story.
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