Six and a half weeks

To continue the story....

I emailed my agent and suggested that we show my editor the plot treatment and the 100 sample pages. I also told him that I was trying to get into writers colonies this summer and that if I did I should be able to finish the book within a matter of weeks.

He wrote back quickly, but he must have misunderstood my email because he said "Well, since you're within a few weeks of finishing it, we may as well wait until you have the whole thing."

I started to correct him. There's a big difference between being a few weeks away from finishing it right now and going to a colony next summer and then being a few weeks away from finishing it. But once again I did this thing I rarely do, but need to do more often. I paused. I let time pass.

And during that time I talked to my writing friends, a couple of whom are farther down the path of publication than I am and who pointed out a very real truth. If you show a half-finished manuscript to an editor she might like it, she might take it, she might give you money for it. And that's all great because it gives you a cash cushion during the time you finish the book and because it shows your editor is committed to your long term development as a novelist. But what isn't so great is the fact that if an editor buys a book based on a half-finished novel or plot treatment she's going to create in her own head a sense of how that book is going to be as a finished product. By selling a book to an editor based on an idea, a plot treatment or a half-finished work, you invite a sort of collaboration.

And from watching the careers of my more experienced friends I know that this sort of collaboration has its dark side. It can plunge you into a circle of hell known as collaborative rewrites. I sold the first book intact. It took a while to sell it, granted, but once I finally found an agent and an editor who liked it, I knew they liked it as it was and they made virtually no suggestions for changes. A couple of additional scenes and I was good to go. This spoiled me. I didn't have to go through the months or years of rewrites some authors experience, trying to incorporate the suggestions of the agent and then the editor.

I mulled. My agent was thinking - erroneously, but optomisitcally - that I could have a rough first manuscript to him within 6 or 7 weeks. Could I? Could I push through and finish the draft earlier than I planned? If so, perhaps he could sell it and and then I spend the time this summer polishing an existing manuscript. It was a tempting thought.

I wrote him back and told him I'd have the full thing to him by the middle of April.

Maybe nutty, I know. But as I said in the last email I sense a window of opportunity is open to me now and I want to at least try to poke the second book through it.

Wish me luck.