Oh My Daisies!

Or as Ella would say... 'crap!'

I finally bit the bullet and sent my manuscript off to two publishers this week. I have to admit, it's been ready for a while now, but I was too chicken to send it. I kept telling myself that I needed to add a few thousand more words, even though, deep down, it was one of those projects that practically wrote itself, and too much tweaking with it would have ruined the voice. Sure, I edited a few things out, and added little bits here and there, but really, there was never any chance that the story would have an extra twenty thousand words added to it.

The story is a fast paced, mad-cap romp, and aside from a few minor adjustments to do with timing inconsistencies, a truck-load of excess wordage would have removed a lot of the mood.

It's not perfect - of course it's not - but this first submission is the first step on the road to publication. It'll never be accepted (frankly, if it was, I'd probably die from shock - just how many projects ARE accepted first time around?), but if nothing else, it's a learning curve. And while I wait (anything up to sixteen weeks!!), there are things to be done. *nods*

I've tweaked the heading on this page to reflect the present change in circumstances, and I've spruced up my author page on facebook with a shiny new banner. While writing my query, I added a few things to the book blurb, and it occurred to me that the very first sentence would actually make a good tag line. When researching marketing and the like, I kept seeing the word 'brand' being bandied about, and I wanted to do something about that immediately. I didn't quite know what it would be, but the thought was lurking in my brain nevertheless.

So I now had a tag line. I even googled it to make sure that nothing else came up too prominently, just to reassure myself that it hadn't been used before. So far, so good. Now I needed a theme, and I thought... hmmm... STARS! (My brain is a bit odd sometimes, but that's a whole other blog).

Why 'stars?' Well, to be fair, it took a while to come up with the idea. It was only as I uploaded a basic picture to photobucket (a purple background with the tag line in a pretty script), that the idea formed. Looking through all the editing tools on the site, I spent some time adding different effects and what not just to see what would happen. Eventually I came across a 'space' feature, and I heard a little 'ping!' in my head. (I did! Honest!) One of the more famous themes from Fairy Tale World is wishing upon a star, and, after having made that connection, my banner was born.

I might be biased, but I think it's rather nice. It could do with some more 'prettying' up, but I like the way it turned out regardless. As a side note, I seem to have a slight obsession with all things purple. Not only is the banner purple, but so is the background for this blog. And my other Writing Personality - the one that (occasionally) writes fantasy - has an entire book theme centered on purple. Maybe there is a reason for this, but I'm not going to look into it too deeply. I just like purple.

Anyway, thats my news at the moment. I won't say the names of the publishers that I have submitted to, but shrewd people who know me might take a guess. And that's the way the way it will stay... that seems to be the way it works in this publishing game. Nothing named until contracts are offered, and that suits me just fine.

I have a short list of publishers to send to for round two of the submission process, but I am going to wait for rejections first. Which I am pretty sure I will get if they base their decision on my synopsis - the nightmare of which deserves a post all to itself. *snort* I was so tempted to add a couple of sentences at the bottom of the darn thing:

Please don't refuse on account of this synopsis. It sucks, and I know it. But the manuscript is much better! Honest!

Not sure that would have helped though...