Monday, December 03, 2007

Untold stories

I heard from my editor last week. You may recall she's contracted me for two more books, this time contemporary romances. I sent her a synopsis for a story, but she requested a change that would impact the plot so greatly that I shelved that story and started a new one. I'd really grown to like the first story idea, although I admit I like this new one even better.

The story idea rejections I'm accumulating makes me wonder about the number of untold stories floating around out there. Counting my ideas alone, we have the two sequels to On Fire, my September 2007 romantic suspense; the first contemporary idea, which my editor just rejected; the sequel to You Belong to Me, my November 2006 romantic suspense; an epic fantasy trilogy; and my island mystery series, which is generating rejections as we speak.

It's not my intention to throw a pity party. Honestly. I know it may sound that way, but that's not my intention. I'm truly fascinated by the fact that we may have millions of orphaned story ideas hovering around us.

I'm obviously incredibly naive. All this time I thought, as writers, we'd come up with ideas and, as long as we told the story well, it would find a home. But this experience has shown me, the market has much more to do with the stories I sell than I originally thought.

Patricia

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Patricia,

Hang in there. I know how you feel. I also think this is the reason why so many traditionally pubbed authors are taking matters into their own hands and self-publishing or, at the very least, leaving the big name publishers alone and choosing smaller independant publishers. When you get right down to it. No one needs permission to be published anymore. They can do it themselves.

Angie

Anonymous said...

Hey, Angie!

You have an excellent point. As I wrote the post, it occurred to me a lot of those untold stories probably become self-published.

But I'm not down. I promise. I'm still optimistic enough to believe my untold stories will find a home. :)

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