I have a buncha novels on my hard drive that have been sitting around collecting dust since, oh, 1990 some time, I guess. In \u201993 I wrote one that got me an agent another that year that got me a contract\u2014before they were shut down (because, according to the rumor at the time [get this] it was making too much money and it had been created to take a loss for tax purposes) (remember Kismet? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?) [dead link]; one in \u201995 that got me an early-Saturday-morning phone call from Harlequin to pleasepleaseplease overnight the manuscript; and a fourth novel in \u201998 that got me a different agent.<\/p>\n
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In \u201995 I wrote my senior thesis; since my major was creative writing and journalism, I wasn\u2019t required to write a paper deconstructing anything. Instead, my assigned professor (a Latin professor, no less!) asked me to write 25 pages of a novel. When I came back a week later with 100 pages, polished, perfect, she switched gears and asked for me to write a paper describing my creative process. She was fascinated with how I\u2019d done what I\u2019d done.<\/p>\n
However, that 100 pages was the basis for The Proviso<\/em> and I knew I had something different, something that would probably never sell. I set out to continue the flow of the short story I had written the semester before<\/a>. I had become fascinated with a throwaway character (Knox Hilliard) I\u2019d created simply as a tool for the protagonist of the story (Leah Wincott) to complete the allegory. Knox is a bastard. He would never sell in genre romance and I knew that.<\/p>\n On the other hand, my four attempts at writing romance to spec failed to impress since the three that didn\u2019t get picked up missed something somewhere. So between those four instances of \u201coh so close but yet so far away\u201d and the impossibility of selling an anti-hero when anti-heroes were de trop<\/em>, the whole thing got to me. I threw up my hands and said, “No more.” Then I woke up one morning last summer re-energized.<\/p>\n So today. Just now<\/em> I\u2019ve read two articles that have left me pursing my lips and thinking maybe it\u2019s just as well I never grabbed the brass ring. As I\u2019ve said before, technology caught up to me and got cheap enough to not break the bank, the atmosphere changed (and is still doing so as more authors get publishing savvy), and I\u2019m older with enough DIY skills and a little money to do it right.<\/p>\n The first takes my breath away with regard to artistic integrity:<\/p>\n The Hamster Wheel<\/a><\/p>\n In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It takes my breath away because I could probably do that \u2026 but why would I want to? And all that for \u2026<\/p>\n