Holy crap Barb! that's amazing!

Thanks guys-- I did take a drink after I did it and have been supplementing with iron and chocolate. (Not at the same time, but you know...)

How come, Barb? Which book?

It's the 60s book, Amy-- the WF/Mainstream/whatever it is. I finished it in October, thought I'd nailed it, thought for sure this was the one that would help me break through into the adult market, except... NSM. Essentially, what happened was all the left turns to Albuquerque the plot took, coupled with all the stops and starts in the writing, since I was writing and editing STARS in there as well, plus the utterly different feel of the book as a whole, culminated in, what my agent rightly said was, "two different books."

At the point after which I took the longest writing break on it (which was about the halfway point in the manuscript as it happened), the tone of the book changed considerably. More importantly, the plot really took a seismic shift-- all the left turns wound up with my main character changing from an active protagonist in her own story to more of a passive narrator to someone else's story.

It's not that the second half is bad per se-- it's just not the same story.

I couldn't see that four months ago when I finished. I thought it was just the niftiest thing since sliced bread. But Adrienne is absolutely right. No one would have bought it in the state it was in. Understandably I was more than a little upset that two years' worth of work was essentially going down the toilet and I very nearly came close to chucking the whole thing out the window and saying "Screw it." But we've come to a compromise. Given that I have nearly 200 pages more or less intact I asked Adrienne if I came up with a solid direction in which I could take the story and write it up as a synopsis, could we submit the extant 200 pages and synopsis to at least test the waters and see if there's any potential interest in the market for this sucker before I go writing a whole new second half. She agreed, so basically, that's what I'm doing.

Honestly, though, what I should be doing is writing more on Haunted, the ghost YA, but I'm a little stuck there, too.

But this is FUN, right??

::headdesk::

Sounds like a plan, Barb.

I need some of that editing mojo Barb. I just finished a somethingorother that's an inconvenient word count - 10,000. Why can't it be 5k or 50k? Bother.

It's a Novelette!

Cog is coming along nicely. I just finished chapter 4 and I'm at 7,500 words.

I've started work on chapter 5. There are trolls and pneumatic tubes. Everybody likes pneumatic tubes!

Even the trolls?

Well, they mostly use them to send incendiary devices.

Cool!

they mostly use them to send incendiary devices.

answer 1) ... and gnomes. gnomes fit in pneumatic tubes.

answer 2) They got tired of using the internet to send incendiary devices.

/rimshot/ tipyourwaitress folks...

Sorry Gud. That little outburst should mean that I'm happy to read for you when you've got something you want read.

And if anyone's interested in reading this IDon'tKnowWhatItIs Slipstream thing, let me know. It's longish.