Five rejections and a realization

A couple of weeks ago I sat down in a frenzy and wrote out a synopsis of SotO and a query and sent it off to a dozen agents. I got nothing but form rejections back, which makes me immediately wonder if the query is weak. With no way to verify its strength, I decided that I needed to look deeper into the manuscript and see if there was anything unusual about this book that makes it worth publishing.

In talking over the process with friend Will Davis, I learned that his novel, already accepted by a publisher and previously in editing stages, was put on hold since the industry is suffering now. This is not only disheartening, it's shocking, because a strong literary fiction piece deserves to be put on shelves and enjoyed by readers the world over. Trouble is, his agent told him, only one genre is selling now: Horror.

I've been mulling this news around in my head, and ever the jump-the-gun kid, wondered if I shouldn't put SotO on hold and shift to ...err Shift, a book that definitely blends horror and fantasy. From the research I've been doing, genre blends seem to be much more popular with publishers than straight fantasy novels. Teen fantasy, modern fantasy, fantasy mixed with medical drama, every agent seems to be looking for these on Twilight/Harry Potter things that don't fit solidly into one box or the other. Striding the fence is all well and good, but ultimately Shift is little more than a spin-off tale, and one that doesn't have a backbone of its own as of yet.

I admit it's hard to write horror when I don't read much of it, and I learned with Molly's Fault that stepping out of your genre completely leads to nothing short of disaster. I sit on the precipice therefore, mulling over which story should get the first big push.

SotO is my original story, that "I have a novel in me" book, the story I have been writing since my childhood. Shift was the "oh hey, I think I can write something NOT SotO for once" revelation piece, and it's still amorphous and globbular the way that all unformed thoughts begin. I haven't found where this story wants to go. But maybe I need to form this unsculpted mass into something presentable, seeing as how it's a blend story with horror elements and all those things spell saleability.

Also I have gotten back into reading fantasy again, living in the genre I want to write, and I've come across some great work. Excellent work, the sort of writing I want to weave into my story. So I have also been chewing on how much tweaking is needed to deepen my world. Yes, ironically enough, it's the world building I have a problem with -- I know, shocking for a fantasy writer. I think it's because I read as a young writer that world building kills perfectly good fantasy tales, so I reverted to the opposite extreme. The notes I've gotten back from others reading my work indicate that the reader is left to fill in the blanks, which is fine for a murder mystery, but not when you're describing the sieging of a city.

I've started building bones for the SotO world, but none of them are represented in the actual novel as of yet. Essentially I built my origin stories for the races on the world, and in that received some much needed perspective, but there is no skeletal structure in the novel. It is still at its core a novel written by a twelve year old, with none of the solid description that comes from building out your universe until it's so real anyone could see what you see when they pick up the book. My bones are different from other fantasy books in that this is a fantasy based on American history and geography, not British, but you would never know that from reading it. Damn, I have a lot of work to do.