Writing for the Love

For a long, long, long time, I've been working on an an epic fantasy novel called Livinity . There are older posts on this blog about my past progress. The unpublished manuscript even won an award in 2011. And yet, it still needed work. The latest round of edits involved splitting my 142K word novel into two books. One of the main reasons for that was the fact that I struggled to draw attention from agents/publishers with that huge word count, especially for a first book. With great, often eye-opening, feedback from my critique group, I worked on deepening characterization, adding tension, and enriching the other world setting--just a few of the things that needed work. I spent a lot of time editing, adding content, editing, adding content all while trying to anticipate where to split the novel in half. Something happened in the midst of all that writing and editing. My word count was climbing faster than I expected. I quickly realized that I might end up with a trilogy. Ye...

Part III  The RPLA Banquet The Royal Palm Literary Awards Banquet took place Saturday night. I had it in my mind to not think about winning, but to be grateful that I was a finalist. I could query agents and publishers with the line, "This manuscript was a finalist in the Royal Palm Literary Awards," and that would be great even if I didn't win. I had no way of knowing how many entries were in my Unpublished Fantasy Novel category. Nor did I know how many others were finalists like me. The chances of winning were completely unknown to me, and still are, in fact. I had the privilege of meeting Nicole Resciniti , an agent with the The Seymour Agency, just outside the banquet hall before the doors were opened. She and I had chatted about Sprinter at breakfast that morning, and she was willing to take a look at the manuscript. I planned to email her after the conference was over. When I spotted her waiting to get into the banquet, I realized I hadn't even ment...