Yesterday I emailed eight lovely humans inviting them to read and provide feedback on the second draft my novel. This is critical for me, because humans represent the core demographic I’m targeting with this novel. I tested my teaser on each of our cats:
James is overdue delivering his wife’s birthday present: forty-five years overdue. Now, he’s stuck in a summoning circle in Edinburgh. He needs a body. Any body will do.
But not a single one of them expressed strong opinions. Besides, consumer surveys have shown cats have little disposable income and once they learnt there are more birds in the story than cats, they lost all interest.
Now that the second draft is complete, I get to start on lots of different things. The first is the long wait for those lovely humans to tell me they hate everything about the story and they’ve crafted a dartboard with the main character’s likeness. This might be excessive, but at least I know I’ve struck a nerve. But feedback is a funny thing. What if one person says the romance felt forced? Well, there are eight people, so what did the rest of them say? Everyone likes what they like. Some people like a slow-simmering romance, but when a story takes place in a constrained period of time, a romance needs valid reasons to boil over. I worry about other things, but that’s just an example.
The second thing I get to do is start looking for an agent. I now have a synopsis and a query letter. That means I can start shopping around for someone willing to do battle with the dragons of publishing. From all reports, this is an exhausting and discouraging process. Fortunately, I no longer drink.
The third thing is fun. I get to start researching and planning my next novel. All I can say is it’s based in a secondary world following a climate-disaster¹ induced immigration crisis. So, totally unlike our own. All of those details are background to a twin-timeline heist story I’d like to tell about what we’ll do for friends. To get to know the characters and the world better, I plan to write some short stories first. So maybe those will show up here.
The ultimate thing is to cudgel my second draft into a passable third draft. After incorporating the feedback from the lovely humans who will have told me all the ways I’ve disappointed them, I’ll chop the scenes into appropriate chapter-sized chunks and massage them so they’re harder to put down. (Right now the “chapters” are the beats from the Save the Cat plotting technique, which is fine to me, but not great for readers.)
¹ Did you know the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is nightmare fuel?
History or Fiction
I love a good historical fiction novel. There’s nothing better than feeling the sense of place long gone, getting to know people who strode this planet long before I did, all while reading a captivating tale. I still recall reading a book that took place in the thirteenth century,
A New Town
As the population of Edinburgh expanded within the picturesque medieval city, well-travelled Britons and immigrants expected more from their capital. As the Enlightenment dawned, wealthy and middle-class residents were no longer satisfied living cheek-by-jowl with the poor. Nor did they relish walking through streets literally flowing