Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Agent search, writing with a job, and WIPs

Long time, no post! Yes, I fail miserably. But in my defense...I started a full-time temp job around the time of my last post. I've only just started figuring out the whole writer-with-a-day-job thing a couple weeks ago. And even then, all my writing energy has been going toward my freelance theatre writing job (on Examiner.com...I'm the Columbus Theater Examiner) and my WIPs (more on that later). But I haven't forgotten you guys and now I'm here to update! Woo-hoo!

So...agent search. Nothing too exciting since my post about the partial. I haven't heard back yet on that, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for good news. My new totals are...30 queries sent out...eight replies (7 rejections, 1 partial)...2 closed. I'm holding out hope and still have a TON of agents still to query, so I'm not going to let the rejections get me down! And, as a boost to my self-confidence, my younger sister just finished reading the current draft of "Nor the Battle" and told me that she really liked it. I figure that's good news, especially since this is just the latest of generally good feedback I've been getting from my readers.

I'm keeping myself plenty busy with other WIPs, though...to the extent of insanity. I can't seem to stop with coming up with ideas I love. As of today, I have three stories I'm going to try to work on...one that I'm focusing 80% of my attention on, the other two are just to keep me sane. Three different genres. And I haven't even started edits on "Child of Roses" yet. Awesome.

Here are my current WIPs, just for kicks and your own info, in case you were dying of curiosity.

Boxes of Pandora: (fantasy) In theory, this is the first in a planned trilogy. Think...Narnia meets Greek mythology. And friends. And drama. Yeah, we'll go with that. It's my first time seriously trying my hand at fantasy and it's the project I'm focusing most of my attention on. The biggest reason I have the other two projects is so I can go and hide with them when THIS project starts intimidating me.

Ship of Dreams: (historical fiction) I've decided to go back to my historical fiction roots, because I used to write a lot of historical fiction back when I first fell in love with writing. Which is strange, really, because I've never really liked history itself. I've just found certain events or time periods fascinating. And Titanic was an event I found interesting back in elementary school. I found it so interesting that I read as many books (fiction and non-fiction) as I could get my little hands on. I could rattle off any obscure fact at the drop of a hat. And now I'm trying again, on a more serious level than I used to write back in the day. The story of Titanic will be told by three points-of-view, one each in each class. And to make life more exciting for me, the Titanic exhibit is returning to COSI Columbus (the local science center) at the end of this month for quite a while and I'm going to use it for research. Woot!

And, my most recent addition...as in...I started writing it today at lunch...
The Memory Game: (general YA fiction) This is my comfort novel for now. It's a genre I'm more familiar with, so this is where I'll probably run to to hide the most. It's the story of a girl who, for a reason I'm not going to reveal right now, can't remember anything before she was seven. And so she needs to try to recover those memories and come to terms with the truth of her past. I'm still working on the details (obviously), but there you are.

Okay, that was a really long post. Whew.