It’s been a long time since I posted here, and I must apologize. Along with teaching and family obligations, I’ve been focused on finishing a draft of my novel. The good news is I set a goal to complete it by the end of 2025 and achieved it!

I need to think of this blog not as a distraction or burden in my writing journey, but as an ally. That means I’m going to try to be more forthcoming about the struggles of writing and selling a novel. I might as well pour out my frustrations here. In the past, I thought everything I posted here needed to be perfectly sculpted, and mostly about ideas, not myself. That’s too hard to do.

So I’ll see if I can be less hypercritical and more relaxed about just getting something up here that’s relevant to my or your writing life. I’ll try not to just vomit stuff up on the screen. (Ick.)

About my novel … It’s a dark fantasy/horror with a twelve-year-old protagonist. It takes place in a suburban setting, a few decades back. I haven’t watched Stranger Things on Netflix but those who’ve read parts of my novel say it has a similar vibe.

The writing of it began a decade ago in a Writers Studio class here in Tucson, taught by my friend Rene Bibby. (She’s a great teacher, and my predecessor as director of the school’s Tucson branch. She still teaches online classes with The Writers Studio so check her courses out. You won’t regret it.) Originally I saw it as a short story, but it kept growing. And growing. And growing.

Which is my problem. The novel is way over 100,000 words. I’m proud to have written such a substantial work. And I promise it‘s not merely a gargantuan mess, but a story with structure and themes and, I hope, characters that are compelling.

But here’s the sad truth. Few publishers or agents would consider such a large manuscript from a first-time novelist. I’m grappling with how to deal with this. I have to concede that trying to market it as it is would be a non-starter.

So I’ve decided the only choice is to break it into three bite-size portions and market it as a trilogy.

Advantages of this approach:

1. It doesn’t affect the story at all.
2. If some publishing decision maker likes my pitch for the first volume, it may be a plus to tell them it’s a trilogy with the other two parts ready to go.

Disadvantages:

1. Finding breaking points is tricky. A cliffhanger can be a fantastic way to end a book if you wish to persuade a reader to continue to the next volume. And why wouldn’t you? But it can also make it seem like the book doesn’t stand on its own. (Well, it doesn’t.)
2. I can’t think of another one right now. Maybe it will come to me later. This is me being less hyper-critical about what I post.
3. There is no Rule 3

Right now, I’m immersed in revising the manuscript and preparing supporting documents you need in order to market a novel. (Can I just say “sell a novel?” I hate using “market” as a verb, but that battle is fought and lost. I even used to work in marketing in the nonprofit realm, and I hated the word then, and still do, which is probably why I’m not in marketing anymore.)

I’ll try to write more about those struggles and the resources I’m turning to. And I’ll post any other dumb stuff about writing that I can think of.

Because why not?