Novel news

Calm down, it's not that kind of news. Trust me, if I'd found an agent or publisher the title would have been positively hyperventilatory. I can use words like that. I'm an author.

I remembered that yesterday; hence the title.

No, I hadn't really forgotten it, but the lack of any positive response to my early submissions had, if I'm honest, taken the wind out of my sails. I knew the beginning of The Novel needed reworking, and I had no enthusiasm for the task. So there it sat. Gathering dust on my hard drive. Going nowhere.

As is so often the way of things I had no conscious grasp of how much time had gone by since those first submissions. September LAST YEAR! God. And my last reply? November 12. That's not bad actually. Only about eight weeks after the query. All told I had 15 responses from 20 submissions. All negative, naturally. The five no-shows were all from agencies whose guidelines say "we'll only contact you if we're interested." I hate that. How do you know if they're still looking at it, or they haven't even started looking at it, or they've binned it, or they're passing it round inside their firm to find the right agent? Even a form rejection is better than listening to static.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. Over the past week or so I've been building up a head of steam to get that rework done and honestly? There wasn't that much to do. The first few pages were grossly over-written. A result of me knowing that they are the Really Important Pages and had to be Just Right, so of all the 100,000 words in the book those few hundred had been written and rewritten so many times there was no energy left in them whatever. They needed a fresh start.

I cut out the waffle. Always a good idea. Tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story. Don't try to impress with flowery language and long words (like hyperventilatory, for example). Cut to the chase.

That was the second problem. The first three chapters waffled on endlessly about the personal life of the main character, but never got around to introducing the conflict. After reworking, the conflict parachutes into the story in the second scene. So with a few hundred words of self-indulgent waffle stripped out, and four key scenes of conflict distributed liberally around the first three chapters (agents often request chapters 1-3 in their submission guidelines) I was much happier with the start and felt ready to restart submitting.

So I did.