The Dust it Off BlogHop and a little news

I’ve signed up for the dust it off bloghop being hosted by Courtney and Theresa. Head on over and sign up, they have some great prizes, and who doesn’t want to talk about their old projects.

The first day, May 3rd: We want you to post a 1-2 sentence pitch (Great way to practice pitches) about the shelved WIP.

The second day, May 5th: Post your favorite excerpt (300-350 words)

The third day, May 7th: Post what you learned from this WIP. You become a stronger, more rounded writer which each manuscript and we want to know what this particular work taught you.

The novel I’ve decided to pull out and dust off is probably to be expected: The Accidental Godmother. I wrote this novel in 2009. I spent most of 2010 writing a sequel, then decided to clean up the typos and query it. To say that may have been premature is a lot like saying there are some ideological differences between republicans and democrats: the biggest understatement of the year.

But today is Pitch day, so I won’t go into the shortcomings of my first foray into query/agent submission land (that way lies madness).

Title: THE ACCIDENTAL GODMOTHER

Pitch: Tessa Rapporin is about to graduate high school with a dire need to become an animator, a crush on Jason Garvy, and a serious case of princess envy. When her crush crushes her heart, Tessa lights out of the graduation dance and runs into the strange new boy in town doing a light show in the park. Only it isn’t a light show: he’s making a magical portal and Tessa gets sucked into a world of princes, Kings, faeries, and wizards, but even in the magical world, Tessa isn’t a princess. She’s a Faerie godmother, and they never get happily ever after.*

Okay, that’s a pretty long pitch, but that’s basically what I was using to lure agents to read my little novel (sighs from an overdose of nostalgia). As you can see it lacks a number of things, like motivation and stakes, and even with these shortcomings, some agents thought they’d like to read some pages…let’s just say that’s where the party ended.

If you’ve been around my blog for a while you recognize this as the piece I agonized over (was that really only a little over a year ago??? It seems longer).

And my news:

I don’t know why I feel compelled to give everyone updates on stuff, but I do. Last week I typed my very favorite words: THE END. That’s right, I polished of the Super Hero Novel of Awesome. Since it is a first draft, I happen to know that it’s full of crappy-crap and stinks to high-literature, but it’s a finished first draft. Ah, I love drafting.

But then I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall, what do I do now? I must have a drafting project on my plate. Seriously, it is the strangest thing, but I get shit done when I have a draft in progress. My productivity in every other venue of my life goes through the ceiling when I have a drafting project I’m excited about because I use the draft as a carrot: finish writing that science paper and you can have two uninterrupted hours of blissfully enjoying your characters in a world unlike this one.

So I need a draft. They help me. And I’m resurrecting THE ACCIDENTAL GODMOTHER. When I stopped querying, I knew that what that manuscript needed was a third to first person POV change. I needed to restructure the story and motivate my character so she was doing something and not being tossed around on the tides of Circumstance. Yes, the ending worked well, and even my toughest critic found he had a hard time critiquing because he was enjoying it so much, but the beginning… well, let’s just say it needed help. So I’m starting over from scratch with a POV change, a story restructure, and a lot of enthusiasm. I even have a shiny new title, but it turns out I’m really secretive about my titles… how silly is that?

*that's my original pitch and by no means an indication of my current ability to write a pitch or even the right pitch for this novel.