Writing Update

I've been reading a lot of (literary) agent blogs lately, as motivation and education. They do a lot of contests, and I am excited to participate. But I want to be ready with a completed novel and solid query before I start submitting anything.

This year's NaNo project, The Really Good Guy, was not my first attempt at a novel. I intend to finish that book, and I intend for it to be really good. So while I pluck away at it as the mood strikes, and I have very good notes for what I want to change and where/how I want it to grow, it's not my primary writing focus right now. I don't want to push on through a finishing/polishing/revising process when I'm not feeling passionate about the work, just to have it "done." I want it done right, which means that I need a little more practice at this whole novel-writing gig before I go back to work on The Really Good Guy full time. It's too important to me for it to be my training novel.

In the meantime, I'm back at work on an earlier attempt at a novel, Seek Ye First. Long-time blog readers might have read early chapters of an early draft of this one, before I petered out a few years ago. I had trouble finding my character's voice, and was uninspired by the mystery. (This was a real problem, in what was supposed to be a "cozy mystery" novel.)

As Paul and I were working down in our basement last week, I was moving around both my writing references and my Agatha Christie collection, when, bam! Inspiration. I've been working on parts of this book subconsciously for a while now, and have been having more success with the main character's voice. The mystery, however, is only now coming into focus and beginning to excite me. So we'll see where this goes! I'm not revising; I'm starting over from scratch. I keep telling myself that I'm not throwing all that previous hard work away; it's all there in my head somewhere, enriching this new draft. I hope.