(laughing my ass off at erika's story, in a twisty little way)

We had a genuinely good writers group tonight. Everyone had something to read, and they brough me cake for my birthday.

That's exactly the way to read it.(I may be one of the only writers around who borrowed from life for a story like that.Although the prosthesis was a nod to my homegirl Flannery O'Connor and "Good Country People".) Sounds like a good group, Deb.

You know what I like about this particular writers group? Everyone at the moment is not only writing, they mostly know what they need input on.

So when Stephanie prefaces reading an early bit in her new book, Wire Monkey, by saying, "OK, I can't help feeling there's too much exposition by the main character, but all the info needs to be there", she really does want the input, and listens, and processes.

It's all good.

Here's a question for the more experienced writers: So I've got the Lucy manuscript fairly polished, and I'd like to start shopping it around to agents in earnest. But I've also been re-reading the 14,000 words or so I've got written in Anna so far, and you know what? It's much, MUCH better. Oh, it's got all kinds of first draft rough edges--a giant backstory infodump here, a scene that reads a little rambly there--but the plot is stronger, my voice is surer, it reads more smoothly, the whole nine yards.

So, given that I already know I'm capable of writing a better book than Lucy, is it in my best interest to shop it around? I really want to, but I think a big part of that is just my eagerness to feel like I'm taking the next steps.

Hmmmm. Good question. My gut take would be to query some agents with synopses of both books; if they ask for a partial, you can can then tell them that "Anna" is, in your opinion, the stronger book.

Alternately, you can simply query on "Anna", and tell a responding agent that this is the second book in the series.

Am I making sense here? It's a bad morning healthwise and I'm a little groggy.

Well, I can't query on Anna until I've finished it, right? Not as an unpublished writer.

True - I forgot, you aren't editing, you're in write mode. Truth to tell, then I'd probably wait, if you feel Anna has the better chance of pinging interest.

That may be smarter, but I'm just chafing to have something out there, you know? Finishing Anna is months away, at minimum. And for all I know, I'm being too hard on Lucy. I mean, my third book will probably be better than Anna, and I've certainly seen worse books than Lucy get published.

Upon further reflection, AmyLiz has Lucy now, and expects to have time to read it within the next month or so. Since she knows her stuff and is a fresh set of eyes, I think I'll wait and see what she thinks, and also what kind of feedback I get from the contests I entered it in back in June. That might give me an idea whether or not the glaring flaws I'm seeing are just from having spent so much time on it that I'm nitpicking.

Susan -- Just peeking in because I'm still unpacking and dealing with a looming deadline, but I saw your posts, and wanted to chime in. Everyone (hopefully) gets better as they go along, but by no means does it mean Book #1 sucks. And from what I've seen of Lucy (just that first chapter, so far) it definitely doesn't. Edited to add that that sounded like damning with faint praise, and what I should have said was: What I read of Lucy so far was charming, atmospheric, and very smoothly written. I think most of us also see the glaring flaws in our own work much more easily than others do, because we're always much harder on ourselves. So what you might see as a flaw (because you know you could have/want to have done it better) someone else might not notice at all.

Plus, I'm of the mind that you have this done and ready to go, and while you wait for feedback from whatever source -- which, as you know, can take a while in coming -- you can keep writing Anna. Then if someone's really interested in you as a writer, rather than just in that book (which happens very frequently in romance, because everyone wants to "grow" authors as a brand) you can say, "Hey, I have another book X amount of pages from completion."