World of Mirrors

Currently, I am working on two novels: Festival Madness is the work in process, and I think I'm about 40,000 words into it. Remember us technical types like to quantify things. I wrote the entire middle, and went back to the beginnning and did the first murder, the FBI raid, and some of my character's angst. Now I need to do some nuts and bolts stuff to put all the underpinnings in place while moving the plot ahead, and I'm not terribly inspired. So....

Cut to the 2nd project, World of Mirrors, the East German book. Tried like hell, and couldn't get anyone interested. We are talking about 45 agents and editors taking a pass. I finally found a small press who actually read it, said they liked the writing but thought it would be better about 25,000 word shorter (it's not really long) and to scratch all the food, scenery, etc.) Thought about that, decided I could cut quite a bit if my character's back story wasn't influencing the book so much. Decided to take this novel out of my series, change the names to protect the guilty, and do some serious (but not 25,000 words) cutting. Well, guess what? When you change the character's name and back story, even age, the whole character changes. What she wants certainly changed. So now besides cutting out food, etc., I'm having to make some major changes to dialogue, etc. And I still had to put some back story in, so now I'm even-steven with the word count, hoping still to do massive cuts later. This is an interesting experiment, no matter how it comes out.

No, I have not heard from any of the agents. I have ideas for two short stories that I'm dying to write.

Completely bogged down in trying to get half a dozen collections of "stuff" read to sell on EBAY. This is, like work. What now, well, as always, suck it up.

Fondly,

Grapeshot