By Richard Jay Parker
One of the inevitabilities of being a writer is being removed. I don't mean bodily -although that has certainly happened to me on occasion. But when the work's completed and the long process of submitting to an agent/agent submitting to publisher begins it's sometimes difficult to suddenly have work you've been intensely engaged in out of your hands.
It's a long, slow process and living with the fact that writers' time and industry time is like dog years and human years respectively (and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense) is frequently frustrating.
If you've seen Inception imagine the writer being in that dream within a dream within a dream which lasts a lifetime but, in reality, only lasts as long as it takes for a car to fall off a bridge - or a manuscript to land in a bin.
Currently a lot of people are asking me about book 2. My agent is excited about it and wants to get it right before he puts it out there. He's right, of course. Every draft has improved it. I just have to overcome my desire for it to be released into the world yesterday.
When I started writing books I had a bottle of champagne bought for me to celebrate my first publication. X years later it was dusted off and finally opened and tasted vile. And tasted good. And worth the wait.
Visit Richard at: www.richardjayparker.com
Put it out of your mind, Richard. As soon as I deliver one book, I'm off on the next one. Dead End has only just gone to the printers and no. 4 (title under wraps!) is already delivered to my agent - and I'm 20,000 words into a possible next book. Might never be published as I'm also working on a completely different synopsis and will have to see which one (if either) my agent wants me to work on but in the meantime, I'm just writing. It's the only way.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Leigh.
ReplyDeleteWe await No 2 .. (the book that is, not you know what).
ReplyDeleteD.