Tag Archives: letting go

The novel I (might?) let go

4 November 2013 Jordan 1 Comment

This entry is part 10 of 13 in the series All my novels

I still have a few slots left on my blog tour for Spy for a Spy, running 7-12 November 2013! Come sign up!

I am surrounded by young adult authors. That is, authors writing for young adults. Like, surrounded. Where I live, on the Internet—to find another author writing to an adult audience is actually a challenge most of the time. Plus, I know (ish) a lot of very, very successful YA authors—awesome agents, big book deals, best sellers. So I get lots and lots of chances to think about whether YA is for me.

The answer is usually no, not really.

Except for this one time.

The book stats

Title: Slash and Burn. Maybe Scorched Earth. Maybe that will be the sequel.
Genre: YA post-apocalyptic (Not dystopian. There is a difference.)
Inspiration: A very vivid dream, inspired by the TV show Falling Skies, shortly before Nano 2012. As in, like, weeks.
Writing dates: November 1 – 20, 2012.
Length: 69,265 words.
Back cover copy: The war for Earth is over. But the battle’s just begun.

In a depopulated post-apocalyptic California, 17-year-old Adrienne Lucas has finally found some semblance of normalcy in a collective farm led by her father. Then newcomers arrive, promising a return to the comforts from Before. Adrienne’s father represents the voice of reason against the newcomers’ siren song—until they silence him forever.

Adrienne’s devastating loss is compounded when she discovers the man she’s loved for years, the man who saw her father as practically his own, the man who lives in her home as part of her family is also the man who betrayed her father and sentenced him to death.

Now Adrienne will destroy them all. Starting with him.

Or, in video form:

Don’t see anything? Click through to view the trailer!

What I learned from this book

Well, obviously, I learned that I can write YA. It was nice to take a “break” from the strong voice of I, Spy, with a different voice. Interestingly, it was still in first person, present tense, and still had plenty of humor, but it was a very different tone. I hadn’t written anything remotely speculative in over a decade, so it was kind of fun to go back to that. And of course my husband is big on emergency preparedness, so it was fun to use him as a consultant.

But probably the most important/interesting thing I learned from this book was letting go. A week or two after I finished it, I opened it up again to export from my trial version of Scrivener, and . . . I just didn’t really “feel” my novel. It was a rough first draft, of course, but something was (and still is) missing for me, especially the passion and the drive to go back to it.

Funnily enough, I’d kind of forgotten about that over the last year and just came across my posts about that as I was trying to track down my final word count. I slotted the book into my production schedule down the road, but . . . we’ll see. It’s a cool story, but as I realized (quoting Natalie Whipple): “this business is too hard to waste effort on something you don’t 150% love.”

What do you think? How do you rekindle passion for an old project?

COVER IMAGES: Girl: Self-portrait by Kelsey; Fire by Marion Doss;
Blood drips: Pooling Blood by Joleene Naylor; all via CC

Publishing

When it’s time to let go: Abandoning a novel

13 December 2012 Jordan 9 Comments

After I let my Nano 2012 novel sit for a week, I guess it started to congeal. I couldn’t fathom ever coming back to it. I still liked the premise, but maybe there was more struggling/floundering in my first draft that I’d wanted, more [oh, we need a scene that shows X], more [agh what else am I supposed to do in here????] in it than I would’ve liked. The writing quality is actually okay (for a first draft), and nothing stands out as being bad or irreparable, but I just . . . meh.

I think almost all of us have novels we’ve abandoned. Maybe they’re in a metaphorical (or real!) drawer, maybe they’re “trunked,” maybe they’re on 3.5″ floppies somewhere. Usually, these are our earliest novels, our first attempts at wielding a full-sized plot or creating believable, sympathetic characters—and so they might not be very good. They might not be fixable, either. Or maybe we simply found a shiny new idea and pursued that.

It’s hard to abandon a novel—but harder still to work on something that doesn’t work at all. I did a “Half-No” for Nano 2010, and eventually finished that book, but basically the entire second quarter doesn’t work. I tried a major reset at the beginning of this year, nearly a year after I finished that book, and . . . I got nothing. Still.

Sometimes, of course, we have to work on difficult things, or things we don’t enjoy—maybe we hate drafting, or line edits make us want to scratch our eyes out. If we want to be published—trade, small or well-published as an indie—we still have to do the parts we don’t like.

However, that doesn’t mean we have to flog ourselves over stories that suck our souls dry. As Natalie Whipple pointed out last month (emphasis mine),

For example, I wrote something this summer that my editor passed on. And with good reason. I certainly don’t blame her, because looking at it now I don’t think it’s something I put my all into. I don’t have the proper passion for it, which means I’ll probably have to set it aside out of necessity. Because this business is too hard to waste effort on something you don’t 150% love.

So often, when I’ve lost the passion for a book, it shows in the quality. And if you don’t LOVE your book, why should anyone else?

The last one is my sister—I thought it was a great point! Occasionally, we might try something new, different, challenging, and that’s great. If it doesn’t turn out, or if you change your mind, at least you tried, and it’s okay to accept that it doesn’t work, and move on.

And you never know—maybe you’ll come back to it, say, while you’re exporting it from Scrivener to Word, and read a scene or two and fall in love all over again.

Soon, we’ll talk about when NOT to give up.

What do you think? Have you given up on a novel? Why? Come join the conversation!

Jordan McCollum