Other projects
Right now, finishing Book 4 of Restoration (or a complete draft of it, anyway) is my main focus, but I have more irons in the fire than just nine more Restoration novels. Oh, yessiree. There are two other "franchises" if you will, in my pipeline that I want to groom for ultimate attempted publication.
Alas, I will have to be a bit vague on the details right now, as I have a lot of faith in the marketability of both of them, so until the copyright submissions are safely away, I'm going to call them "The Shakespeare thing" and "The Superhero thing"
The Shakespeare Thing
Also sometimes referred to as "my theater book", the Shakespeare Thing was inspired by my desire to capture the magic and solidarity of community theater. It's about a troupe of down-on-their-luck, other-dimensional muses who perform exclusively the works of Shakespeare in an attempt to atone for their founding member causing the infamous curse of the Scottish play. The plot of the first book is how they finally manage to overcome the curse's stigma (even if they never really can break the curse itself-- that would just be too idyllic a book to write, don't you think?) ;-)
Although I'm planning a four or five book series for The Shakespeare Thing, only Book 1 is written. It is in the murky middle of overhauls and edits at the moment. The first draft was written for NaNoWriMo 2009, and has come a long and much-improved way since then. My game plan for this series is not to worry about sequels until one of two things happens: (1) Someone wants to publish the first book and commit to the others. (2) Laura and I finish writing all twelve books of Restoration.
I have a lot of faith in The Shakespeare Thing, so I'm cautiously optimistic that Point #1 will happen first. Since the book is deliberately secular, I'm not going to submit it to OakTara (Restoration's publisher), so I'll be almost starting at square one when I'm finally ready to query it. I'd kind of like to go "traditional" and try and do the agent, big publisher route. This possibly explains why I have been dragging my heels in finishing up preparation of the manuscript, as the whole query, rejection, rinse repeat cycle is not one for the faint of heart.
If all goes well and Laura and I finish a draft of Book 4 by Thanksgiving, my goal is to get the 2nd draft of the Shakespeare Thing tweaked and polished to my liking, ready for the next, carefully-conceived stage of my editing process. I'll have to see if I can come up with a "5,000 words" equivalent for editing instead of straight-up writing. Any suggestions?
The Superhero Thing
I really can't talk too much about this one at all yet. Except to say that it's a derivative work involving people with superpowers, and once again I'm working with coauthor, in this case melyanna. She might think I've given up on it, but I hope that this post will reassure her, because I definitely want to write it, but I'm more productive if I focus on project at a time, so hopefully she'll be okay with me putting it in the queue. Hopefully, once we finish planning and get started on writing, it will go smoothly, since the basic premise is kind of like candy to write. I think once we reveal it, it will make a lot of people fangirly squeamishly interested. I hope this extends to publishers. :-)
Alas, I will have to be a bit vague on the details right now, as I have a lot of faith in the marketability of both of them, so until the copyright submissions are safely away, I'm going to call them "The Shakespeare thing" and "The Superhero thing"
The Shakespeare Thing
Also sometimes referred to as "my theater book", the Shakespeare Thing was inspired by my desire to capture the magic and solidarity of community theater. It's about a troupe of down-on-their-luck, other-dimensional muses who perform exclusively the works of Shakespeare in an attempt to atone for their founding member causing the infamous curse of the Scottish play. The plot of the first book is how they finally manage to overcome the curse's stigma (even if they never really can break the curse itself-- that would just be too idyllic a book to write, don't you think?) ;-)
Although I'm planning a four or five book series for The Shakespeare Thing, only Book 1 is written. It is in the murky middle of overhauls and edits at the moment. The first draft was written for NaNoWriMo 2009, and has come a long and much-improved way since then. My game plan for this series is not to worry about sequels until one of two things happens: (1) Someone wants to publish the first book and commit to the others. (2) Laura and I finish writing all twelve books of Restoration.
I have a lot of faith in The Shakespeare Thing, so I'm cautiously optimistic that Point #1 will happen first. Since the book is deliberately secular, I'm not going to submit it to OakTara (Restoration's publisher), so I'll be almost starting at square one when I'm finally ready to query it. I'd kind of like to go "traditional" and try and do the agent, big publisher route. This possibly explains why I have been dragging my heels in finishing up preparation of the manuscript, as the whole query, rejection, rinse repeat cycle is not one for the faint of heart.
If all goes well and Laura and I finish a draft of Book 4 by Thanksgiving, my goal is to get the 2nd draft of the Shakespeare Thing tweaked and polished to my liking, ready for the next, carefully-conceived stage of my editing process. I'll have to see if I can come up with a "5,000 words" equivalent for editing instead of straight-up writing. Any suggestions?
The Superhero Thing
I really can't talk too much about this one at all yet. Except to say that it's a derivative work involving people with superpowers, and once again I'm working with coauthor, in this case melyanna. She might think I've given up on it, but I hope that this post will reassure her, because I definitely want to write it, but I'm more productive if I focus on project at a time, so hopefully she'll be okay with me putting it in the queue. Hopefully, once we finish planning and get started on writing, it will go smoothly, since the basic premise is kind of like candy to write. I think once we reveal it, it will make a lot of people fangirly squeamishly interested. I hope this extends to publishers. :-)