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The Writing Project Meme
Aug. 30th, 2012 10:30 pmVarious of my writer friends (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ritaxis, julesjones, etc.) have been doing a “current writing project” meme and since I’ve just sent the story out to the second round of test-readers (and since I’m trying to become more comfortable with self-promotion) it seems a good time to be a meme-sheep. I almost thought about doing it about Book 2 instead, but the questions fit better with a more or less completed project.
1. What is the working title of your book? Daughter of Mystery Considering that it’s now part of a thematic set with the titles of its two sequels, I think it’s gone beyond “working title”.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Since I was keeping a meta-diary about how the idea developed when I first started writing, I know fairly precisely, but I’ll give you the slightly fuzzier version. One of my guilty pleasures in the Regency genre collided with a fantasy novel I read that was so close to being the story I hoped it would be that I was ten times more disappointed than if I’d read a book with no promise at all. And I decided that I needed to buckle down to writing the stories I desperately wanted to read: fun, semi-fluffy, fantasy/historical adventures with characters a modern lesbian could identify with, without having them be modern characters stuffed into a non-modern setting. And then I got a scene in my head and started trying to set up the context for that scene.
3. What genre does your book fall under? This is actually a tough one. It’s a romance. No, it’s an alternate history fantasy. No, it’s an adventure full of intrigue and mystery. It’s solidly a “genre novel” in the sense of not being "literature", but it doesn’t see any reason to be restricted to just one genre.
4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Heavens, what a thought. I have no idea. But wouldn’t it be fun?
5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? The one-sentence cocktail party pitch that I’ve been using is: a Ruritanian Regency lesbian romance with magic, a mystery, and a bit of swashbuckling. That’s not the synopsis because it doesn’t say anything about the story, but I’ll let it stand at that because otherwise it would be a very long sentence.
6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Er … what a startlingly false dichotomy! I don’t have representation and since I’ve pretty much decided to start with the specialty small presses, there’s no need for it. But I definitely plan to go for professional publication, not self-publishing.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? I can answer this with precision, thanks to that aforementioned meta-diary. I started writing it in November 2007 and finished the first draft on the last day of 2011. So that makes it 4 years and a couple of months.
8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? If there were other comparable books, I wouldn’t have felt quite so driven to write it.
9. Who or What inspired you to write this book? Me. My desire for fun stories with characters I can identify with.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? Probably different things than would pique my own! I suspect that few readers would be interested in knowing the precise set of phonological-change rules by which I developed the Alpennian language out of Latin and Langobardic. But perhaps I could start a competition for who can identify the second same-sex romance in the story (other than the main characters) and provide the one key piece of evidence that makes it obvious in retrospect.
ritaxis, julesjones, etc.) have been doing a “current writing project” meme and since I’ve just sent the story out to the second round of test-readers (and since I’m trying to become more comfortable with self-promotion) it seems a good time to be a meme-sheep. I almost thought about doing it about Book 2 instead, but the questions fit better with a more or less completed project.1. What is the working title of your book? Daughter of Mystery Considering that it’s now part of a thematic set with the titles of its two sequels, I think it’s gone beyond “working title”.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Since I was keeping a meta-diary about how the idea developed when I first started writing, I know fairly precisely, but I’ll give you the slightly fuzzier version. One of my guilty pleasures in the Regency genre collided with a fantasy novel I read that was so close to being the story I hoped it would be that I was ten times more disappointed than if I’d read a book with no promise at all. And I decided that I needed to buckle down to writing the stories I desperately wanted to read: fun, semi-fluffy, fantasy/historical adventures with characters a modern lesbian could identify with, without having them be modern characters stuffed into a non-modern setting. And then I got a scene in my head and started trying to set up the context for that scene.
3. What genre does your book fall under? This is actually a tough one. It’s a romance. No, it’s an alternate history fantasy. No, it’s an adventure full of intrigue and mystery. It’s solidly a “genre novel” in the sense of not being "literature", but it doesn’t see any reason to be restricted to just one genre.
4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Heavens, what a thought. I have no idea. But wouldn’t it be fun?
5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? The one-sentence cocktail party pitch that I’ve been using is: a Ruritanian Regency lesbian romance with magic, a mystery, and a bit of swashbuckling. That’s not the synopsis because it doesn’t say anything about the story, but I’ll let it stand at that because otherwise it would be a very long sentence.
6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Er … what a startlingly false dichotomy! I don’t have representation and since I’ve pretty much decided to start with the specialty small presses, there’s no need for it. But I definitely plan to go for professional publication, not self-publishing.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? I can answer this with precision, thanks to that aforementioned meta-diary. I started writing it in November 2007 and finished the first draft on the last day of 2011. So that makes it 4 years and a couple of months.
8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? If there were other comparable books, I wouldn’t have felt quite so driven to write it.
9. Who or What inspired you to write this book? Me. My desire for fun stories with characters I can identify with.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? Probably different things than would pique my own! I suspect that few readers would be interested in knowing the precise set of phonological-change rules by which I developed the Alpennian language out of Latin and Langobardic. But perhaps I could start a competition for who can identify the second same-sex romance in the story (other than the main characters) and provide the one key piece of evidence that makes it obvious in retrospect.
