Here we go again!

Well, our requests have all been sent, our nerves sufficiently frayed, and now the only to do is wait.

Well, wait and start another novel.


STAYING DEAD is our first novel. Our only novel. And when you have all your hopes and dreams resting on ONE thing, you tend to go just a teensy bit crazy.

Why won't you love me?!?

So, to offset the crazy, another story must be born!

You know, starting a second story is a very different experience than writing your first. For one thing, you know so much more about the industry than you did before. You can't just write a manuscript blindly! That's stupid! You have to query, you have to send your first 50, and if you're doing contests, you have to sell your story in 250 words or less! It's a REALLY different experience.

Hubby and I worked out the plot over the weekend, and it was a TOTALLY different experience than the first time. The first time, we were all "Oh, this is going to be awesome. EVERYONE will love this. They'd be stupid NOT to!"

Ha.

Wrong.

WRONG.

Now, as we're working out plot elements, we're all like "Will this query well?", and "How will this look in a partial?"

Asking those exact same questions to us when we were plotting out STAYING DEAD would have resulted in a blank stare. We would have been all like "Why is Crazy Person saying crazy things? They should be less crazy and make more sense."

LESS crazy, you say? Why would anyone want THAT?

We've actually changed our plot because it made the query better. That's kind of a weird feeling. That exact same change took us MONTHS to figure out for our first story. And now we did it in an hour.

So how about you guys? How many projects are you working on? Is it a good idea to have CPs vet the synopsis before starting the MS?