Since spring of 2011, I have been working on a project that has taken many forms throughout the years and stood as my education in WRITING. It started first as BENEATH THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK, a book with little plot coherency, horrible pacing, and a word count of fewer than 50,000 words when its first draft found completion in spring of 2014. Yet, the characters held some promise and I had stuck it out to a completion of sorts, so I continued editing. I finished again in the summer of 2015, this time with a new title THE ERINYES at 70,000 words, and found a genre—Historical Mystery. I decided I would begin querying spring of 2016 on April Fools, because why the heck not? To be creative is to be the fool after all. By the time I *thought* I was ready to query, I had again changed the title to RED SKY AT MORNING and had a word count of 105,000 words. I sent it out and crickets.
Summer of 2016, I decided to go to a summer literary festival. There I learned valuable lessons in the “Business of Writing.” I strengthened my query and cut down my manuscript to 95,000 words. This time when I sent out my query I got two bites, one partial request, and one full request. Both ended in rejection. So, I went back to the drawing board. I entered pitching contests on Twitter, where I was always lucky enough to get requests. One of those requests, in January of 2017, turned into an R&R. RED SKY AT MORNING morphed from present tense to past tense over the spring and over the summer from adult fiction to young adult fiction. Summer of 2017, I also found AMAZING critique partners, which you can learn about here. Again, I entered Twitter pitch competitions and got bites—lots of them, ten requests on my pitch, which turned into one full manuscript request, and two partial requests. From the slush, I received one partial request and one full request. From that, I have received three R&Rs.
But this is a conversation about inspiration, not just my querying journey. From day one, this project has inspired me and pushed me forward. Yes, there were many days when I had to force myself to keep writing and equally as many days I wanted to give up altogether. Yet, I kept at it because the tinge of inspiration kept whispering in my ear—even when it was the smallest voice there. However, with this draft—which must be the eleventh—I know what I need to do, I mostly know how to do it, I want to do it, yet my inspiration is whispering about a different story. I love RED SKY AT MORNING with all of my heart. I want to see it in print and write the full trilogy. Yet, and I’ve said yet quite a bit, I can’t find the motivation—it feels a little too much like work and like it will need a perfect and precise surgery that I can never complete. My feet feel the edge of the precipice on which I stand and the possibility of capturing my dream of publication feels the closest its ever been. Each step of the way I have managed to make progress and improve. I know I can edit this book and I probably will. But I am not sure I can right now.
With a winter filled with finals, the holidays, international travel, and a bad case of the flu, I hope that I will get past this funk. I hope that it doesn’t mean that I have “Inspiration Block” on this project of my heart. But, maybe, seven years of one story just does that.
Hang in there. Its inspiring to hear your journey. Great to hear persistence. X Tilly
Thank you so much <3
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