Novel Dreams & Weather

Finally Mother Nature rained on us last night for the first time in two weeks. We've gone longer stretches but our county and a few surrounding ones have put voluntary restrictions on water to try and head off the problems of a few years ago. When we first moved to our house we were in the middle of a region wide drought and one of the hottest summers I can remember growing up in Virginia. The following winter and spring were one of the wettest on record too. It literally rained for forty days and wiped out our drought. But this spring and early summer have lacked in the rain. We've had beautiful weather with incredible stretches of humidity free days and then there's this week, high temperatures and high humidity. Dark clouds roll in and then roll right through without a drop of rain until last night when approximately a quarter of an inch fell in 20 minutes.

I know boring, writing about the weather, but it's in the news here and on many local residents minds.

One of my many dreams is to publish my fiction. I started out as a non-fiction writer and was bitten by the fiction bug back in November 2003 when on a whim I participated in NaNoWriMo. I amazed myself by completing a crappy 50K first draft of my first novel in thirty days. I spent almost six months revising and rewriting that novel and when I thought it was finished I took the leap and queried agents with no success of finding one but the feedback I received was positive. I fixed the problems in that manuscript and sent it back out, still no success but the feedback was I had a strong well-written novel, they enjoyed the characters and story but ALL of them felt the novel wasn't my voice. My first thought was how would they know, they only know me from my cover letter and novel. However many of them gave me the go ahead to send them further partials of my future completed novels.

Little did they know I had been on a tear with my writing and I had completed a second novel and was working on a third. I took a chance and sent a partial of my third unfinished novel (at that point I'm now on # 5) because I loved the main female character. While I waited to hear from the agents I worked furiously to finish the manuscript. Eight weeks later I had a bite from an agent who was impressed with my writing and she wanted to read the rest of the book.

I finished the manuscript sent it off and waited. I continued to work on my fourth novel while I waited to hear about my third, I thought the wait would never end but 12 weeks later I received a letter telling me what a compelling story and the depth of my cast of characters was superb but, yes another but this agent didn't think the book reading world wasn't ready for my main character. Skip ahead to this year, May to be exact and the release of Martha O'Conner's The Bitch Posse an edgy, raw novel that follows three girls friendship in the 80's and their current lives and how what they did as teenagers affected their adult life. I saw a glimmer of hope for my novel and sent the manuscript out again and this time changed my letter to reflect that there is public interest in grittier, raw stories. Women want more than typical Chick lit and Romance novels and the success of O'Conner's book is helping me prove my case for my PTA hating mom, who does what many of us have thought about at one time or another, she leaves her family, yes her children too.

Six weeks after being asked by my dream agent to reread the manuscript, I have hope that my dream of publishing my novel will soon be a reality.