It has been three and a half years since I posted here.
I have been working on Gorracula in dribs and drabs that entire time.
I left the story of the book's progression in summer 2013 when an agent at The Midwest Writer's Conference asked to see a sample of my book. I sent it. She told me to send more when the book was finished. Then I went back to school. I was still very unsure of my writing abilities and felt like I needed guided practice and time to develop if the book would ever take a decent shape.
I finished my creative writing bachelor's degree in May of 2015. I had taken a novel writing class that went a long way toward helping me drive the story of the book forward and finding what didn't work. I had also taken the summer of 2014 and made concerted progress, treating writing like a job, blocking out five hours a day meant specifically for writing.
That process led me to a clearer shape for the book than it had yet had. But I also had some distressing insights. Distressing because they revealed story elements that wanted to be introduced but which would require rewrites starting at the very beginning of the book.
I plugged the new ideas in and worked as hard as I could make myself work. By Fall 2015, the time I initially started this blog, I was nearing the end of a serviceable complete first draft. I entered a crowdfunding contest through InkShares.com and tried to build a network of interest around Gorracula. It came to very little and meanwhile I was running out of money, trying to ignore the fact I needed to get a second job and time was running out on my life as a novel writer with the time to write his novel.
I began interviewing for jobs, crap jobs, the kind we all end up taking no matter how much we try to deny we'll have to work them. I got one at a call center, working product support of a tax preparation software (you know the one). I was set to start the first week of January 2016. I had a couple of weeks to give birth to a completed draft of Gorracula before that job started and I ran out of time and hope.
I had the business card of the agent I had met two and half years before in my wallet and I held it like a talisman. It offered me some hope if I just did my part and finished, maybe I had a chance. I finished my draft. It came in at nearly 200,000 words and for all its janky mismatched pieces, unwieldy character diversions and unanswered plot questions, it was a complete story I'd finished it. Then my call center job started and on that first day of work I sent an inquiry to the agent whose card was burning a hole in my wallet.
A week passed.
No word.
A month passed
No word.
I decided to write again. This time I heard back. Sadly she had switched agencies and was no longer representing fiction. She was kind and encouraging and that was all. It was done.
I took her card out of my wallet and continued work.
Obviously I didn't give up entirely. I tried to harness disappointment into motivation. I researched agents nominally looking for the type of thing I'd written.
No takers.
I gave the book to a couple people to read trying to get some feedback. No one finished it...not a good sign.
I ran out of steam and went on living. I didn't think about Gorracula for a good long while. When I came back to it I came to a difficult realization.
It was awful. It was structured all wrong, it had no main character, it had too many side stories and covered too much time. It was unfocused, uninteresting and tedious.
It would have to be completely rewritten. I kept maybe 40% of the first three chapters but beside that it needed to be rewritten.
Read PT 8.
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