Friday, January 16, 2009

LIttle Lost Orphan

A couple days before Christmas, I received an email from the editor who had requested a copy of the manuscript of my poor little lost novel. He liked it a lot, he said. But.

The publishing house is going to focus on non-fiction this year.

So my poor little orphan is back home again.

Here's the problem. Every agent who has read the entire novel or just parts of it, liked it. But.

They say they can't pitch it. They say it has no clearly defined genre. It doesn't fit with chick lit. It's a bit too general (rather than literary) for women's fiction (which tends to be very literary - think Secret Life of Bees).

And all the advice I've gotten is to write something else, but the novel in progress will have the same problem. I don't write literary - my writing style is straight up tell the story and if I try to, it becomes a lumbering, self-conscious beast.

So I don't know what I'll do with either one of them. I'm either too lazy or not good enough to just go purposely write something with more commercial appeal because I can only tell the story that is in my head. If I try to 'make up' a story it will come out fake and shallow.

I polished off a chunk of short story that's been hanging around for several years and quite literally at the last moment sent it off to the Palmetto Fiction contest just to feel like I was doing something.

It's just annoying.

Loki sez: I think you should write a book about...uh...two cats who are...uh...brothers! And one is really a scaredy cat and the other is too brave for his own good and they can go on adventures.

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