Moving on…

Ringing in 2017!
Ringing in 2017!

Happy new year, everyone!

So, as promised, I’m taking a little time out from my writing schedule to give you guys an update of what’s what.  It should be noted that, as I do this, I have a load of laundry in the dryer, a second load in the wash, and a pot of lamb stew simmering away in my crock pot for tonight.  Also this morning, I’ve broken down a crap-load of cardboard boxes (the detritus of Christmas), and this afternoon, I plan to mop the kitchen floor and, if I’m feeling up to it, carry three cots up to the attic (the detritus of New Year’s Eve sleeping arrangements for my friends).  I mention all this because people sometimes ask me what I do all day, and the answer is mostly “write and cook,” but there’s all the day-to-day stuff that keeps a household running that needs to happen.  Frankly, the only reason I’m blogging and not hammering away at the new novel is that I pumped out about sixteen pages over the past two days, and I can stand a day away from it.  Having said that, I’ll probably work on it some more this afternoon.  Because I’m me.  And, if I’m being truly honest, I probably won’t carry the cots upstairs this afternoon, because they’re not really in the way, and I can bribe my neighbor to help me next week with a pitcher of martinis.

But I digress.

For the moment, I’m setting aside the marketing of Solomon’s Archivist, not because I don’t think it’s a worthwhile book or that it can make money; I just can’t seem to convince anyone else of that.  And a big part of that is that it may not be “the right book at the right time.”  And while that’s frustrating, I can accept it, because I worked in marketing for nine years, and I understand there are many wonderful products in the world that simply don’t have a market.

As many of my reader-friends already know, while I’ve been marketing Solomon’s Archivist, I’ve been working on its sequels, so an unsellable novel has ballooned into an unsellable trilogy of about a thousand pages.  It would be easy to see this as a colossal waste of time, if I hadn’t been giving myself an education at the same time, both in novel-writing and novel-selling.  My experiences at the 2014 Writer’s Digest Conference alone were eye-opening, to say nothing of my multiple experiences with the Push to Publish Conference and taking to agents and on and on.  I know a lot more now than when I started, maybe even enough to set the book down and move on.

And, that’s not all I’ve been writing for the last five years.  There have been a few new plays.  Two productions.  The work on Martinis with Nick.

 

Several friends are pressuring me to self-publish, but I resist that option.  I’m happy to explain why, but I think that deserves a post of its own.  For now, I merely want to assure everyone that, while I’m setting Solomon’s Archivist on a shelf (for now), I have not given up on novel writing, and The Lost City of the Metal Men is coming along swimmingly.  God, I love that title.

All right.  Now I have to pull underpants out of the dryer.


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