A great lady I know who has edited for magazines is editing my book before I send it off to agents. The money I’m paying her is an insult to her skill and I hope to make it up to her one day. Now I’m stuck here with nothing to do. I could paint the walls in the basement or clean out the car (I’m messy), or take the dogs to the dog park, or go to the library looking for a good book. I could do a little overtime at the job I hate, I suppose. But the truth is, I don’t want to do any of that. I want to be off on my next project.
I have a number of ideas in the hopper and I’m trying to figure out if I should go with one of them or something else altogether. Writing another book is a major undertaking so I want to make sure it’s something I like vs. something I think “will sell.” And yet it has to do that too, if I ever hope to quit that horrible job of mine (they pay me to sit next to a window and work at my own pace, the bastards). What I’d love to do is begin a follow-up to the one I just finished, but that’s a little ambitious, isn’t it? I mean, I haven’t even shown it to an agent, let alone sold it. So these are the things I’m thinking about as I try to pursue this thing called writing.
John L. Monk 