Originally I wasn't going to post until Tuesday since I missed Thursday due to LIFE, but I had some free time (amazing how that happens when you don't sleep at night) and an idea for a post, so here goes.
I don't know if this happens to other writers (I assume it does and that I'm not just some freak :) ), but I have 3 novels with the entire first, second and third drafts done and am working on the next revisions. BUT I don't plan an subbing them to agents even if I get them to the point where I think of them as done.
It's not that I think they aren't good or that the concept of the story is completely unoriginal. I just have this gut instinct that they aren't going to sell - or at least not right now. Do I have anything to back up that feeling? No I don't, but it's enough to make me not want to query them to agents. I also have the series I started that has a ghost as the MC of which I am in the midst of the first draft. That one I think might sell. However tonight as I was looking through the coursework for my online classes, an idea came to me. It took me about 15 minutes to write up the outline (and I do mean outline - 3-10 bullet points per chapter) of the 26 chapter story. And as I was writing it, I just knew that if I can write it well and do justice to the concept, this one will sell. This will be the novel I query first, and I already know which agents I want to query with it.
Until tonight, I thought maybe something was wrong with me that I didn't want to query any of the novels I've already written. I worried that maybe I wasn't really that serious about getting published. Which is silly since aside from my children and school, writing and getting published is the one thing I am most serious about. So I was thrilled when I realized I finally have a novel I am going to write and know I will submit to agents.
But what makes one idea click when others don't? I love all my story ideas. All the ones that I only have outlines of, and the ones I've actually written one or more drafts of. So why this one? If anything, compared to my other ones, it's a bit more on the ordinary side, similiar (though different) to what's already out there. So why does this one make my insides sit up and go, "This is it. This is the one that is going to actually get seen."
Does this mean I'm going to drop my work on the others? Yes, at least temporarily while I work on this one (working title What You Make It), but I'm not giving them up completely. I do believe that eventually I will submit those to an agent and try to get them published. They just won't be my first, or maybe even my second or third, but someday they will be brought out into the light.
So for the moment, I am going to take down the word count bars for my other novels and put up one for What You Make It and leave that as my only one while I work on it. And let me know, please, whether or not I'm the only one this happens to, or do some of you have works that you don't plan on querying any time soon?
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