I had the most relaxing weekend ever. I’m sure the crappy, rainy, freezing cold weather helped to slow me down like a cryogenics machine. I didn’t stop altogether, but I came close. I got out and about for a little bit on Saturday morning, before I decided that my time would be better spent doing nothing at all. It also happened to coincide with Hallmark Channel’s start of Christmas movies.
So I basically started watching Christmas movies on Saturday night and watched all damn day Sunday. I even watched the ones that I’ve already seen. In the midst of my binging, my aunt sent me an open submission call from Hallmark. Apparently, they are accepting unsolicited manuscripts for books. Hallmark style books. Books with happy endings that involve small towns, beaches and/or Christmas. Romance or mystery. All happy endings. No on the page murders or sex. Good clean fun.
Stop laughing. I can totally do good clean fun. I don’t usually, but I can. And if you are a writer and you are reading this, you may already have something in your hand. I will have to write something, but I’ve decided that I’m going to.
I’m doing the NaNoWriMo event again this year. It’s the National Novel Writing Month. It starts November 1st. It’s basically a competition with yourself to write 2,000 words a day every day in November. If you successfully do it, you will have a novel or be very close to having a novel.
That’s where The Nora Tree came from. It was my first NaNo book. I’m getting ready to unpublish it, however, and do a revamp. I’m much more seasoned now and I think if I tweak a few things, I will be able to make it a great book instead of an OK book. I guess that’s one of the perks of self-publishing. You can unpublish at will to make it better. I’m sure it’s frowned upon. And I won’t do it more than once, but I am going to do it. I’m also going to start the sequels.
I have so many ideas floating around in my head, I’d need 80 hours a week to write just to get them all in print. But slow and steady leads the race so I am just going to do one at a time.
Which leads me to my dilemma. I told you all last week that I got my novel finished. The publisher is waiting on it. I’m just doing one last editorial run through before I send it off and let them have their way with it. My dilemma is that I have this nagging little voice in my gut telling me that I should shop it around or, rather, shop myself around and attempt to find a literary agent.
I just realized today that I am very attached to this book and to these characters and I want to share them with as many people as possible. So I thought maybe if I found a literary agent, I could get a bigger publishing house to take a look at it. Also, the publisher I’m talking to hasn’t published any books in this genre. I don’t even really know what you would call this genre. I guess it’s erotica. It’s just a different version than what most people are used to, I think. I could be wrong.
Either way, I’m really attached to the book and I don’t know if working with a publisher is going to lead to parts of the book being changed or toned down. I’m partly thinking I should just get a bad ass cover made for it, send it to an editor and promote it myself across a few mediums.
Can you say confused?? Because that’s what I am.
I think it’s because it’s my best work so far. That’s how I feel about it anyway. I guess I’m going to sleep on it for a day or so, take my time with the final edit and listen to my gut.
In the meantime, I’m going to work on my very PG novel that I’m going to pitch to Hallmark when I get it finished. I also have the third round of the fiction contest I entered months ago coming up next week. If I make it to the next round there, then I will have to come up with another short story. Plus, I’m still doing the ghostwriting thing that I’m pretty much in love with.
So even if I can’t figure out what to do with this one particular issue, life is going pretty fucking great right now and I don’t foresee anything changing in the near future except for it getting better and better.
Also, if I have any erotica readers out here, message me on Facebook or on the Ask Roulette section of the blog (it comes to my email) and let me know if you’d like to be a beta reader when I get to that point.
Thanks for being so great, y’all!
RouletteWeekend 