I’m working on MASTER’S ENDGAME right now; the third book in
the trilogy that started with FORTUNE’S PAWN and continued in PROPHECY’S
GAMBIT.
If you’ve read any of the series, you know that while there are a lot
of winding subplots going on, the main theme concerns the red-haired,
strong-willed barmaid Callie, and her unborn child with the bloodlines of Elf,
Dwarf, and Human. She doesn’t understand that her unwed mother status is
something auspicious—to her it’s an embarrassment and an encumbrance at best.
All around her, people and situations she has no inkling of are coming together
in the most exciting, and sometimes sinister and dangerous means. In the end,
I’m not sure she ever will understand the significance of her life. I do; but
that’s only because I know this story so well.
While its roots go back far deeper into my adult life, the
actual source material for these three books comes from a far larger tome I
wrote back in January 2000 to early summer 2003. I am currently revamping the
last of it to fit the needs of my current publisher, the interest of my
readers, as well as my own changing standards.
Writing that seminal book took almost
4 years worth of hard work in snatches and sleepless hours between household chores,
school meetings, family gatherings, cooking meals, gardening, taking pets to
the vet, holidays planned and executed, and moderating an online bulletin
board. Yeah life went on all around me, but I gave up hefty chunks of my free
time and a lot of sleep to get words on the page, chapters filled, and the
various threads of ideas interwoven to create this big backdrop, doorstop of a
novel finished.
Finished—that’s
the operative word here. I started something, I plugged away at it, and I
eventually finished it. I’ve not always been good at that in my life, but I set
out to write a book, and after a passel of false starts and short sabbaticals
while I pounded my head against the wall rather than pounding keyboards, I
actually finished it. THE CHILD OF THE FOREST
was the original title, and I got it done. Completed. Kaput. Fin. Cue the end
credits music.
I remember the day too, when I realized I was finally done writing
the book. I typed THE END and then just sat there staring at the blinking
cursor in disbelief. I might have even shed a tear or three. I couldn't believe
I’d actually done it! All 850 some odd pages lay in files on the family PC, on
various worn out laptops, and several floppy disks. It felt monumental. Printed
up, a chapter at a time, letting my old Okidata laser printer rest when it got
too hot, it weighed a ton and filled a box. With all the typos and changes,
that monstrosity represented a torrent of words and an ocean of ideas that had
come flowing out of my brain, running down through my stiff and aching fingers,
and pouring onto those pages. Some days—hell sometimes for weeks or months—the
words had barely trickled at all. Other times they came so fast, my poor
keyboarding skills could barely keep up with them before they flitted on to wherever
lost thoughts go. I looked down at THE END on that last page, and I knew then how
the famous sculptors felt, watching a raw block of marble chip away into a
masterpiece. I understood fully why it took Michelangelo 4 years just to paint
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and how much he dreaded all the work
involved in creating that masterpiece. I thought at the time I had created a
monument of my own, and there was nothing humble about that feeling!
If you’ll forgive me for so naively thinking I had somehow
reinvented the wheel all by myself, then you can get inside the sense of
accomplishment I felt. So many of us set out to write, and so few have the
resolve to see it through. For me, this book came at a time in my life when a
lot of things had been going wrong, and situations out of my control were
spiraling into continual frustration and anger. I needed to know I could do something positive with all that energy.
After being a stay-at-home mom by necessity as well as choice, I was also
hearing the career clock loudly ticking away. With not as many vital
distractions keeping my urge to make a name for myself stuffed in the back hall
closet of my mind, I was itching to do something BIG & IMPORTANT. Since my
boys were nearing adulthood and didn’t need me as much, writing filled that
yawning fulfillment gap.
Now, I suppose I could have stopped right there, and said,
hey, I wrote a book—YAY ME!—but I didn’t. I wanted to sell that book to someone.
So I groomed the manuscript as best I knew how, wrote a cover letter, and sent
off some sample chapters. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. Eventually
it…
…got rejected of course. Repeatedly. In my naïveté, I could
not understand why. I thought it was brilliant, far better than a lot of what I
had read. All my beta readers loved it. So did my tireless volunteer editor,
Mr. Lee Houston Jr., though he did say it could be better with some minor
changes. He also suggested that maybe I should consider dividing it up to make
it less weighty and more salable; something I flat refused to do at the time. I
was not chopping up my baby! Unfortunately, the mainstream publishers I was
sending it to didn’t think it was anything to get excited over, and they
summarily chucked what I sent them and sent back a form letter with a stamped
signature and went on to the next item in the slush pile. Nobody was mean, just
necessarily unfeeling, because business is business, and I didn’t have the
industry chops or the glitzy eye-catching name to make it worth more than a
cursory glance. So while the rejections were sterile and impersonal, the fact
that there was no encouragement or criticism included left me yanking hair out
by the roots. That doesn’t happen much in mainstream publishing, but it would
at least have given me a chance to figure out just why this 4 year project
wasn’t worth reading past the first page. The message was plain—don’t let the
door hit your ass while you’re slinking away in defeat, Mrs. Unknown Author.
I had the damnedest luck too. My initial target publisher stopped
accepting unagented work the winter before I was done. Without a contract in
hand, my chances of attracting a literary agent were slim and none. I didn't even bother querying agents, just kept cruising through the Writer’s Market
listings, and sending it out. Two other smaller publishers I chose got scooped
up by one that had already turned me down. I was in the midst of reformatting
it for yet another company whose submission guidelines wanted different
margins, font, and so on, when the head of that company died, and things went
into flux for new submissions. Out of frustration, I sent it back to one of the
first publishers I’d tried, having heard the editor had left. He hadn't and I
got my rejection slip far faster that time. Arrgghhh!!!!!!
I submitted short stories while that book was making the
rounds too, glibly not realizing that the magazine market as a whole, and
speculative fiction magazine markets in particular, had contracted to the point
where just the big names or friends of the staff were getting space between the
ever-burgeoning ads. I began to feel like Typhoid Mary when the one solid bite
I got on a story was sent back for rewriting. While I was feverishly doing
that, the owner/editor passed away, and the magazine went out of business
shortly afterward. Double Arrgghhh!!!!!!
Five years of that hamster wheel insanity, and you could
stick a fork in me, because baby, I was done. I chucked the last envelope with
its rejection slip jammed back inside into a magazine holder beneath my desk,
and stopped writing for a while. Seriously, I did. I can only handle so much
rejection you know, and it reminded me far too much of dating. Now and then I’d
write a little something just for fun, or pick away at the second doorstop book
in that weighty series, but my heart was not in it anymore. A writer without an
audience is like a daisy in a hayfield. You live and die in obscurity.
Fast forward to 2010, when I tentatively sent a couple of
stories to Tommy Hancock over at the fledgling Pro Se Productions, now known as
Pro Se Press. He was very enthusiastic about my stories, and because of that, so
was I again. Fortunately, while I had been on hiatus from seeking Famous Authorhood, I’d never totally
given up on writing, and had a whole lot more stories like those just waiting
to be resurrected. Over the 20-some odd years I’d been banging on keyboards and
wearing them out, I’d amassed quite a bursting file of stuff. I dug it all out,
spruced it up, completed the unfinished ones, and started bombarding his inbox
with clusters of tales I had once prayed would see light of day.
Quite a few of them have too. Some are still lurking in the
wings, awaiting their debut, and they stand hand-in-hand with brand new
material. Oh, what a feeling it is to see your name in the author credits, your
very own words spreading over the pages, with maybe an artist conception of
that this character or that scene looked like. That alone, was enough for me.
People were reading what I wrote. It was incredibly orgasmic. I walked around
smiling like the village idiot for weeks.
Along the way, Tommy asked me if I had any books written, or
would I consider writing one? And yeah, I thought of THE CHILD OF THE FOREST, that hernia-inducing mountain of pages that was
languishing in several hard drives and 28 yellowing printed chapters shoved in
a closet. I kind of mentioned it sheepishly, because I knew Pro Se didn’t print
the kind of lush, zaftig novels I had my heart set on creating at the time.
Tommy didn’t care for the title, but he liked the premise, and said if I could
split it up, and make each part a story unto itself, he’d consider it. First I
had to submit a formal proposal, and then get to work.
Oh, you better believe I did! I’d had several months of
writing notoriety I had never gotten anywhere else, and I was positively
itching for even more. So I wrote a bang up proposal, dug out my best file of
TCOTF, sawed my baby in rough thirds, and set to work.
As I was working on that
very first book, I started thinking about what to re-title it. I took the two
main themes, Callie being a pawn of events around her, and yet being fortunate
enough to have survived them, and came up with FORTUNE’S PAWN. That started the
whole ‘chess game’ title theme for the series. Kind of funny, coming from
someone who never successfully played a single game of chess (though I will
beat the snot out of you at checkers).
Now I learned a lot from rewriting that first book; about
what to keep and what to toss, how things can be worded well enough to get the
point across and still be brief enough to qualify as fast paced, and how to seamlessly
weave new scenes in between older ones. Not everything I had in the original
book was worth hanging onto, but a lot of it was decent material. There were
real gems here and there; so much of it was salvageable. It was an education,
and an undertaking that required another walloping boatload of commitment, along
with a practical jaundiced eye, to weed out even the most cherished scenes that
had become too dragging and timeworn when reread. I eventually got past the
stage where I wanted to curl up in a ball and moan every time I had to excise
some precious little anecdote, and began gleefully whacking it to pieces and
rebuilding it.
I have to give Lee credit as both editor and friend, for not
pointing an accusing finger and saying, “I told
you to break it up!” about 50 times a week. I could hear him grinding his teeth
to keep from biting his tongue in half. Yeah, I’m that stubborn, but it’s
what’s gotten me where I am. I even changed the personality of the main
character—his beloved red haired barmaid—in the course of rewriting it, to be
more as he had strongly suggested he’d like to see her. (Lee has a thing for
redheads you know, but don’t tell him I tipped you off on that.) Callie was far
more of a victim of circumstances and always an emotional wreck in the original
book. In these retellings of her life story, she’s now a heroine in her own
right, and I like her far better that way too. I promise you, she will continue
to be so throughout her life.
Bottom line here is, splitting the book up worked well. The
last third of the original tome was the most action heavy, and while I’m doing
some serious cutting of source material, I’m able to retain far more of it than
I did at the beginning. I am writing new scenes and rewriting within the old
ones so that these three books that tell you all about dear Callie’s life in
that complex fantasy world move smoothly together toward a conclusion for this
series. I say ‘this’ series, because there will be more to follow, only I’ll be
letting someone else take the lead. You’ll find out what that means by the end
of MASTER’S ENDGAME.
What can you take away from this? First of all, if you want
to be published, you have got to do a whole lot of writing. You need to be
persistent in getting your work out where it can be seen, and not let the
rejection slips (or negative reviews) stop you from writing more. You have to
listen to feedback, even when it’s critical. Try and learn something from it too.
Most of all; take chances—now and then tell someone what you are working on, show
people what you have to offer. I know it’s hard to share, because we all worry
about being scooped, pirated, or plagiarized, but people who know your work and
enjoy it will tell someone else, and that can mushroom into opportunities. So
don’t hide in your garret, get online and network! Indie publishing is the new
frontier and it’s a very much an internet phenomenon. I got into Pro Se because
Lee recommended me, as he had been recommended by someone else. That got me
books listed on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, something I could not have done
for myself at the time. Word of mouth is slow, but it can do what you don’t
have a budget or an agent for.
I wouldn’t even be writing this blog post if I wasn’t
stubborn and crotchety enough to keep at my craft. Today—with four novel length
books, a digest sized children’s story, and who knows how many scattered short
stories in print, sold on major online sites, and with more to come—I can
proudly call myself a published author.
Now I’m working on adding ‘famous’ and ‘wealthy’ to that
title. Hey, a girl can dream!
Write on,
~Nancy
