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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Finished my next novel!

Whew! I just finished the sequel to A Fine Likeness, tentatively called The River of Despair and the next in the House Divided series of Civil War horror novels. While A Fine Likeness is a standalone novel, I wanted to explore the world a bit more.

The River of Despair came in at 107,000 words, 12,000 more than the first book. It will probably get trimmed some, and will be off to beta readers soon. I have to hurry, though, because next Friday is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, when I change my tune and start writing a post-apocalyptic novel called Radio Hope.

Oh, and Jack Badelaire over at the Post-Modern Pulp blog just gave A Fine Likeness a nice review. My favorite part is when he says "I think the only weakness of A Fine Likeness, if there is one, is that I'd be hard-pressed to pin this book down in any sense of a traditional genre. I don't really consider it traditional horror, but the supernatural elements definitely take it out of the realm of historical fiction. I think the author was actually very smart in independently publishing this book, because I can't imagine a traditional publishing house attempting to market this book."

That's exactly what several publishers said in their rejection slips!

7 comments:

  1. Congratulations on finishing!
    That seems true of so many books these days. They aren't confined to one definite genre.

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  2. There's nothing like the feeling you get from finishing a first draft of a book. And good luck for NaNo. I think you'll need that for your word count goal.

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    1. No luck, just hard work and persistence. Oh, and coffee. Lots of coffee.

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  3. Congrats - that's great news! Good luck with revisions. :-)

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  4. Congrats! I had the same issue. "It's new adult comedic urban fantasy, with in-detail gore and no kissing scenes" doesn't appeal to major agents or editors so much.

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