POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Seventeen Novel Drafts Is The Charm!

I have no published novels.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t written drafts under editorial or agent direction.

Let me back up a bit more. My first (and currently only) book was published in 1998. It’s still available in print from Amazon.com – http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Science-Sermons-Little-Kids/dp/0788012940,  or direct from the publisher – http://store.csspub.com/prod-0788012940.htm.

I wrote it, sent it, they took it, offered me a crappy contract which they neither fulfilled nor apologized for, then kept the rights for the book despite two requests to have the rights return to me. *sigh* I pretty much gave them a major “something” for nothing.

My next experience was soul-crushing. I’d written a novel about a girl who survived the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894. An editor was interested enough in it to have me rewrite it four times. I did it gladly because she was both an editor at a major children’s magazine and an editor at the book publishing arm of the magazine’s parent company. She also suggested I write a short story that took place at the same time, and I wrote “Firestorm!” which was published in 1997 and nominated for the Paul A. Witty Short Story Award – the editor also asked for an historical sidebar, for which she also paid me. Not counting the original writing and editing phase every writer goes through, I did four more complete drafts. Then another publishing company put out a novel...that not only covered the same time period, but whose main character’s name was Maggie. My main character’s name was Megan. The publisher dropped RED DEMON (my book) after sympathy, offers to read one final draft to fix some problems, and a long letter explaining that it just wasn’t going to work.

My third and most recent experience is still (a bit) ongoing. In response to an agent’s quip that the YA novel I’d sent him wasn’t “edgy” enough, I wrote VICTORY OF FISTS (you can find the first two chapters here: http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/search/label/Victory%20Of%20Fists%20--%20Chapter%201%20and%202), finishing it in 2007, I polished it and started sending it out in November of 2008. When an agent finally expressed interest in it in 2011, I thought I had it made! On July 10, 2012 – six drafts later – the agent accepted the manuscript and began the process of submitting it. It went out eighteen times...and returned the same number of times. We have given up now and though VICTORY OF FISTS is at its “last-chance” publisher, I have no real hope. Even my former agent said, “It feels like a miracle when a sale occurs.” Not just about this book, but about ANY book.

And so, back to the title of today’s essay: “Seventeen Novel Drafts Is The Charm!” One of my favorite science fiction writers, Jack McDevitt, shared at a conference I attended last summer, that he’d written seventeen drafts of his novel THE DEVIL’S EYE, part of his Alex Benedict series before it was finally published. This wasn’t his first novel (that was A TALENT FOR WAR ((1989) One other novel appeared before that, which he’d written, then discarded the entire first half); it wasn’t his first story, “The Emerson Effect” (1981) (he was 46 years old!). THE DEVIL’S EYE was his fourteenth novel, and he’d written sixty-four short stories prior to this one, as well!

The takeaway from this essay? Persistence. Keep on working. Hmmm...Maybe I should work on some more revisions of VoF? I’ve got a loose plan to re-write RED DEMON as a time-travel novel...

What do YOU think?

Image: http://opionator.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/the-devils-eye.jpg