Since I heard that the market for WW1 novels was dead, I have felt rather deflated. The idea of finishing The Ash Grove at this point and getting it published to take advantage of the WW1 hoo-ha has been a long-standing one, which I first conceived about 8 years ago. Sometimes clearly, one can be too far sighted. Perhaps if I hadn't been distracted by the Love Object and written The Romantic Feminist first, then things would have been different. I might have finished it by 2012 and snugly moved into the correct position.
However, I have clearly had to do a great deal of learning on the job and as a result The Ash Grove is probably better than it would have been otherwise. So. What to do? I still have the wretched book in 5 or 6 slushpiles at present - I plan to try about 6 more in the UK and at the same time attack the US market, and send half a dozen query letters to US agents in the next few days. I can probably risk a rather harder sell on them... trumpet blowing being better appreciated apparently.
The dilemma is of course, whether to carry on sending TAG out - or whether to revert to TRF - and whether to write Conc. or whether to dive into TGAD (the name of the new project)....I tried turning a little bit of it into a script and presented it at Tara's script writing group - of which I am an apathetic member - I usually go along to supply critique, rather than submit work, but as one of the group last time said "Why do we never see any of your work?" I thought I'd better turn up with something...anyway, it was politely received, no real criticism - which was disappointing, I was hoping people would spot all sorts of deficiencies - but apart from someone suggesting "wicked" would be used rather than "smart" there was no real critique.
M has just told me that TAG is "an absolutely marvellous book" - which I immediately translated as "anything to stop you whingeing". It does need some editing - so that is what I should be doing in my idle moments. I'm sure it could happily lose 5,000 words or so.
So, I do have a plan of sorts. I don't feel really happy or secure about it, but it seems better than doing nothing.
However, I have clearly had to do a great deal of learning on the job and as a result The Ash Grove is probably better than it would have been otherwise. So. What to do? I still have the wretched book in 5 or 6 slushpiles at present - I plan to try about 6 more in the UK and at the same time attack the US market, and send half a dozen query letters to US agents in the next few days. I can probably risk a rather harder sell on them... trumpet blowing being better appreciated apparently.
The dilemma is of course, whether to carry on sending TAG out - or whether to revert to TRF - and whether to write Conc. or whether to dive into TGAD (the name of the new project)....I tried turning a little bit of it into a script and presented it at Tara's script writing group - of which I am an apathetic member - I usually go along to supply critique, rather than submit work, but as one of the group last time said "Why do we never see any of your work?" I thought I'd better turn up with something...anyway, it was politely received, no real criticism - which was disappointing, I was hoping people would spot all sorts of deficiencies - but apart from someone suggesting "wicked" would be used rather than "smart" there was no real critique.
M has just told me that TAG is "an absolutely marvellous book" - which I immediately translated as "anything to stop you whingeing". It does need some editing - so that is what I should be doing in my idle moments. I'm sure it could happily lose 5,000 words or so.
So, I do have a plan of sorts. I don't feel really happy or secure about it, but it seems better than doing nothing.
