David Thayer

I read the snippet of information about Evanovich last week. Stuff like that resonates with writers because while her success is obvious the struggle to launch her career occurred off stage. When her day arrived she was ready for it as a glance at the bestseller list confirms. A decade of struggle is going to weed some people out of the process, but there is no uniform experience in this business, no reliable template for the newcomer to follow. The here and now offers a deluge of information from bloggers such as Miss Snark although I have reservations about the value of devoting too much time on her site. The valid experience is the one that occurs in private between the writer and the agent or editor with work to read. Everything else is entertainment.

I don’t see how to avoid two things on the road to publication: reading what is published and writing your own stuff. That’s the part I can control, so that’s what I try to focus on. I try to write new stuff through to the end and put it away while I hack through another thicket of prose in another WIP. If this going to take me a decade, I’ll need more than the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I packed for the trip.

I opened up a novel I wrote a few years ago. It’s a crime novel called AN AZTEC IN CENTRAL PARK. There are two points of view, one from a criminal trying to protect his daughter, the other from a cop trying to protect an old friend, a priest bent on revenge. I’ve decided to bring the story up by revealing more plot in the beginning. I’ll let you know how it goes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 7:15 am and is filed under Working Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.