If I’ve told you anything about my first novel, this is probably what I said, “It has vampires in it.” Which means that you are once more about to know next to nothing about it–I’ll remedy that in a minute–because I’m taking the vampires out.
I started querying in at the beginning of April (fyi: as my fellow writers know, six months is not very long to spend querying) and I’ve received some comments from agents who like/love my premise, but don’t feel optimistic about selling a YA vamp paranormal romance right now. This alone is not enough to warrant the re-write, in my opinion. I believe that there will always be vampire love stories and that they will continue to enjoy wide readership. But, these agent comments did get me wondering.
Could this story be true to itself without vampires in it?
I’d asked myself this before, when I was still writing and looking for agents to query, and I kept coming across agent bios that specified, “NO VAMPIRES.” The answer was always, “No.” My tale was a vampire story because the plot necessitated that creature. (Well, zombies would have worked, but they just don’t do anything for me.) There just wasn’t anything else I could use. I LOVE vampire stories myself. And, as I mentioned, I believe vampfic will continue to sell because people like the read it.
But, recently, I got to talking with my buddy Hope Collier who reminded me of something a fact that should have been obvious: I’m a writer; I can just make it up. That got me thinking some more and, long story short, I came up with a way to write vampires out of the story. The question then became: would this re-write be truer to the soul of the story than the vampire version? I have been meditating on this since the beginning of September.
Option 1. Stick with the vampires (at least for now.) Do one more edit (including a faster paced opening), and continue querying. If I don’t find my agent match, I can always try out the other idea.
Option 2: Shelve the vampire version and do a major overhaul following this new idea. If it doesn’t work, I can always return to the vampires.
I was originally going to go with a mix. Edit the vampire version, and while querying that, experiment with the new version. But I’ve decided to go full-out with Option 2, and here’s why. In On Writing, Stephen King gives a metaphor of novel-writing as an excavation–the writer’s goal is to see how much of the skeleton she can unearth–and I have always felt I didn’t get the whole shebang with this story. Now, I think this is always true; you don’t ever get all of it. And I think another edit might get just enough more. And I truly believe that, if I continued querying, I would eventually find the agent who loved the vampire-version enough to sell it. BUT, now that I have the new idea, I have this feeling I can’t shake that replacing the vampires will unearth a lot more of skeleton (get me to the story behind the story, if you will), and I have to find out if that’s true.
So, I am de-vamping my novel (and, as I said above, I can always return to the original manuscript if the hunch turns out to be wrong. Or if I get an offer from one of the agents still reviewing it!)
This re-write is also going to include the faster-paced opening, and I am translating the story from first person past, to first person present tense. I have long felt that if I could do one thing differently with this book, I would have written it in present tense, because I feel it suits my voice better. I was talking with Lorna Suzuki on Twitter the other day, and she commented in passing that she’d originally planned to write three Imago books, but ended up writing nine! Well, I’d been thinking, “Hey, past tense is fine. Hopefully, I’ll write a trilogy, and then I can do my next book in present tense.” Oops. Gonna go ahead and take care of that now. And I am aiming for the new version to be about 8,000 words longer, for a total of 70K.
My goals for the next month and a half are as follows:
October: New beginning (√ done). Work through ms converting past–>present & replacing vampire elements. Cut what won’t work.
November (NaNoWriMo): Write 50K new words from which to take the extra words I need to make 70K (I won’t need full 50K, which is good, because I tend to cut 30-40% of my raw material.)
Oh, and to go along with the re-write, I have also completely revamped my website (ironic, isn’t it?).
Now, the part you’ve been waiting for. I promised to make up for doing away with the one bit of info I’d given about my novel, and I will. I have a new title, a logline, AND an excerpt (aren’t you glad you read, or skimmed, all the way down?). Click here to find out.
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