Wednesday, August 17, 2005

My poor novel is heading off to Canadian publishers this month. I dearly hope it gets picked up. It's not something I'd write if I were writing a novel now. (It's the childhood of Morgan le Fay, King Arthur's half sister, whose vengeance enables her to survive exile and slavery, and gives her magical talent tremendous force, but prevents her from accepting grace.) But it's got a lot of me in it, and I think some people would think it was really cool. Just a question of finding them and getting it into their hands.

Funny, but I find it harder to give up on the novel than on the score or so screenplays I've written that no longer represent my best work. I almost never send out old spec features. But I don't think the novel is poorly made. It says what I wanted it to say at the time. It tells the story I wanted to tell. It's just caught between two genres, too literary for genre, too genre for literary. Anyway, I'm not asking for someone to front millions to produce it, as I am when I send out a spec feature. I'm asking for a publisher to front maybe five thousand bucks in production costs.

We'll see what the market says... if this doesn't work I'm just going to self publish at Lulu or iUniverse, 'cause I just can't bear to see the poor thing sitting in the dark...

10:44 AM

4 Comments:

Good luck with it. I'm planning work on my first novel. I've been looking at some of self publishing options too. IUniverse looks like the best to me. There's a run down at Poewar.com for anyone else who's interested. The site compares Lulu, iuniverse and Xlibris.

By  Matthew Reynolds, at 11:19 AM  

Alex-

For those of us more familiar with feature writing, can you tell us what it is like to be in "the room" of a writing staff as they go to work?

thanks

By  Brandon, at 12:48 PM  

I just finished my first novel and am now starting the slow and painful process of finding an agent. Unfortunately, my story seems to suffer from one of the same maladies as yours: it doesn't fit nicely into a specific genre.

I will give myself two years to find either an agent or a publisher. If no one is willing to take a chance, I think I'll just post it online under a Creative Commons license and hope that the right eyes fall on it.

And I hear what you're saying about not wanting to let a story that you've obviously spent a great amount of time with just sit in the dark.

By  Unknown, at 5:03 PM  

Alex, do you have an agent, or did you send it directly to the publisher? And did you restrict it to Canadian publishers?

By  Lawrence, at 9:59 PM  

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