Okay, I admit it. I was pretty down when I wrote my last post. That was about three months ago. I was tired of waiting to hear back from my agent about his progress marketing the 'epic' I completed in November. These things take time. The good news is that the rejection letters I've seen so far have been quite complimentary. The editors like the book, but they are having a hard time placing it into a specific genre. This is a problem with the modern day book business. Genres have been compartmentalized so much more now. I expect that in the future we'll have genres like 'Fantasy for Twenty-One year olds, not Twenty-Two, nor shall the age be Twenty, Twenty-Three is far too many...' You get the picture.
I'm coming out of the funk. Two things have happened to help extricate me. First, I have been working with Bloomsbury's copyeditors on Avery McShane and the Silver Spurs. It's looking good. I have also seen the first drafts of the cover art, and we are starting to work on the map of Campo Mata. My editor also informed me that the book will be put up for Waterstone's Children's Book Prize - so that's nice. Because of the prize rules, they have moved the publishing date to January 6, 2012 - also nice.
Second - bouyed by the Bloomsbury activity - I completed my sixth complete manuscript: The Pirates of Xingu. I am very happy with the story, the characters, the whole enchilada really. We'll see what my agent thinks of it. I sent it to him this week. It's another adventure story, set in the late 1800's. More on that later.
So, I'm snapping out of it - and it's about time.
