It’s not the easiest time to be submitting manuscripts. One week life seems to be working out okay, and the next week throws more curveballs that leave you second guessing everything. Life is like that anyway, but the gravity of the coronavirus situation adds to it.
What I want is a professional, somebody who works within the publishing industry that can flat out tell me what needs adjustment. For as much as I can ask those tough questions to my friends and beta-readers, they can really only make guesses as to the pulse of the publishing world. I really want somebody who can say “This really won’t fly because of X.” Because from there, I know where to aim. As it is, I can only make my own guesses as to what people will like and not like.
There are a few questions that I keep coming back to. I am a character driven writer. The characters move my stories. I want the elements of magic to be subtle, questionable and definitely not the crux of solving the problems. But I also want to play with the picture of adventures and conquests being anything but what they really are: soul-wrenching, gnarly and brutal.
So the questions I keep circling around on are:
- Is the world I created unique enough? Going for that magic-is-questionable angle, I’ve shot for a more realistic and feudal setting.
- Is the world I’ve created to brutal for the current reading climate? I know I’m having trouble watching and reading emotionally difficult stories right now; no doubt, I’m not the only one.
- Is the stratification between the conquered and the conquering, the wealthy and peasants too much? For me, this theme stems from commentary about dehumanization in our war culture passed down through a legacy of imperialism.
My initial chapter is a rather brutal depiction, somewhat like a Quentin Tarantino movie. I wonder if it’s too abrupt and turns off the reader before they get into it. If that is the case, then yes, that is a problem that needs to be addressed. Ultimately, it’s not an agent I’m pitching to, it’s a reader. I want to be able to work with a professional who will give me that honesty.
In the meantime…
I’m working on my second “break-in” manuscript. It’s getting less tangled, though still needs a lot of work. I’ve expanded my masculine story and contracted my feminine story. I’m still thickening individual chapters and characters, so I can’t quite look at it as a whole yet, but it feels like I’m getting there.
As side note, it’s bizarre how voice changes when writing in present tense and past tense. In some ways, writing in past tense and then switching it afterward to present tense makes descriptions more vibrant, and yet I also find it writing in present tense initially makes descriptions more concise.
