Well, That's Done

 At 5:30 PM last Sunday afternoon, I finished a draft of a book I've been working on for four years. 143 Canterbury Road. Elevator pitch: A disgraced college student moves into a rental house, unaware that a crime committed there years ago will impact all the present-day inhabitants.

I would just like to point out that it took Julia Child eight years to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she had two co-authors. And one of those co-authors started the book ten years earlier. Not that I just finished writing a cookbook.

Nor can I say that I worked on 143 Canterbury Road exclusively for four years. I started writing and publishing short humor and essays on the Medium platform during that period. I spent a lot of time last summer editing The Mother Suite, which was published at Literary Mama in December. I've made some feeble attempts to be supportive of other authors here at Original Content during that time. I've taken advantage of the great opportunities to attend Zoom workshops these last three years. Someone in the family had a baby during that time. Quite a significant number of family members had Covid during that time, which didn't really require a lot from me but was distracting. 

Still, I've been working on this freaking thing for four years, and it feels it.

Another Significant Change

Earlier this year, I said that I was going to focus on adult writing in 2023, which is what 143 Canterbury Road is. So there's a change.

Another change that should be more significant: Unless something big happens careerwise, 143 Canterbury Road will be my last novel. I will tinker with and continue to submit the five unsold book-length manuscripts I've written since before 2008, but otherwise, I'll be committing to the kinds of work I've had some limited success with during that time and try to expand on that line of work. 

But Not That Significant A Change

Writing novels is grueling--staying in the world of your story and keeping track of all the different threads that hold that world together is hugely demanding. It's not worth the effort for books that don't sell. Writing short-form work--and studying it and reading it and researching markets for it and spending time marketing published work on social media--will be as time consuming, but it will be a different type of work. 

And because it's different that's exciting.

But, first, I have to finish some clean-up work on 143. Then on to new things.