One Step Backward, One Leap Forward

Well, friends, we come to something hard; one agent I queried took the time to say more than “no thanks” and actually explained why she was passing on the novel. As it turns out, she rejected it for some reasons that were nagging at me about the novel that I hoped I could get away without addressing.

See, I started writing this novel...well, maybe that will get me into trouble. I wrote the first lines of what would become this novel when I was 16. Even now, I realized that the plot ideas I had for book two – which I began sussing out even back then – were pretty crappy. Somehow I hoped that plot ideas I had for book one, that I came up with at the same time, would be okay. Well, they aren’t.

There were two issues I noticed about my novel; first, that the protagonist was an orphan who’d lost his memory. Because, you know, very few fantasy books address that issue. Second, about halfway through the book, the focus shifts from the protag finding his parents and regaining his memory, it shifts from that to his facing the arch-villain. I worked with what I could, bringing up the conflict that would be resolved earlier on, but attention is still focused on another issue for about the first half of the book.

And, wouldn’t you know, the agent had the same issues. She only read my query, but still recognized that him being an orphan would make it cliché, and it seemed to her that I had too much going on at once. Brilliant.

So, now, to the extent that I want to keep this novel – and I’ve considered it closely, and considered just moving on with book two – I need to revise what I have. Tighten it up, make it a little less cliché, stuff like that.

So, for the next month or two (I already have ideas how to change, it’s a matter of going chapter by chapter and erasing all mention of the protag’s memory loss and lack of parents) I will be editing this book with the intent of resubmitting to agents by November/December. With God’s help, it’ll be done even faster than that.

But I must get to work. Onward and forward. See you Monday.