As RuPaul said in To Wong Fu, "A thing of beauty is a joy - for exactly twelve months." Last October, my one year publishing contract for The House on Shipwreck Hill expired. It was one of the last books published by Manifold Press, as that small team of folks putting out queer fiction in their spare time, for the love not the money, made the sad decision that they could not continue.
So I had a decision to make. Find a new publisher, or let the book go out of print. So I settled in and read the published edition. I was pleased to discover I don't hate it.
However.
It is the book the publisher wanted, rather than the book I had envisioned. Looking back on the nearly fifteen year process from initial vague idea, through character and plot development, I have to say that the end result is something I'm no longer happy with. So I've made the decision not to shop it again, but to let it die a natural death.
So the store link on Goodreads won't work anymore. Why is the book still there? Goodreads never deletes a book. Ever. I suppose the same will go for the lackluster reviews. If anyone liked it, they didn't bother to say so. Rather strange how that works, sometimes.
While it might be tempting to rage about wasted effort, I've never felt that about writing. Looking at the "finished" product eighteen months on, considering what I had to leave out - and put in - to suit the publisher, it was a tremendous learning curve. Now that I've moved past it, I can consider all the material, both published and still sitting in my files, for what it truly is. It is all backstory. The novel itself, even in its original, unpublished form, is really an origin story. In fact, it is many origin stories woven together, all of which needed to be written in order for me to understand my characters completely. Given the tons of material I have with this family of characters, which has grown, generation by generation right up to the present day, I'm shelving the idea of linear chronicles in favor of the mosaic approach I'd originally intended.
Meanwhile, I'm practicing the mosaic form with a different family of characters, in a different magical world, and that's the book I'll eventually shop to a new publisher.
So I had a decision to make. Find a new publisher, or let the book go out of print. So I settled in and read the published edition. I was pleased to discover I don't hate it.
However.
It is the book the publisher wanted, rather than the book I had envisioned. Looking back on the nearly fifteen year process from initial vague idea, through character and plot development, I have to say that the end result is something I'm no longer happy with. So I've made the decision not to shop it again, but to let it die a natural death.
So the store link on Goodreads won't work anymore. Why is the book still there? Goodreads never deletes a book. Ever. I suppose the same will go for the lackluster reviews. If anyone liked it, they didn't bother to say so. Rather strange how that works, sometimes.
While it might be tempting to rage about wasted effort, I've never felt that about writing. Looking at the "finished" product eighteen months on, considering what I had to leave out - and put in - to suit the publisher, it was a tremendous learning curve. Now that I've moved past it, I can consider all the material, both published and still sitting in my files, for what it truly is. It is all backstory. The novel itself, even in its original, unpublished form, is really an origin story. In fact, it is many origin stories woven together, all of which needed to be written in order for me to understand my characters completely. Given the tons of material I have with this family of characters, which has grown, generation by generation right up to the present day, I'm shelving the idea of linear chronicles in favor of the mosaic approach I'd originally intended.
Meanwhile, I'm practicing the mosaic form with a different family of characters, in a different magical world, and that's the book I'll eventually shop to a new publisher.