{"id":1039,"date":"2010-03-22T11:51:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T18:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2010-03-22T11:51:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T18:51:03","slug":"book-2-finished-and-sold-or-rather-the-other-way-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=1039","title":{"rendered":"Book 2: finished and sold, or rather, the other way around"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned previously<\/a><\/span>, I’ve been busy finishing up my current project, and so have been somewhat quiet on this blog lately.\u00a0 It has been a difficult novel to write, and the ending proved to be the most difficult part of all.\u00a0 I don’t expect any book I write to be easy, and this was no exception.\u00a0 First of all, it is told in 1st person, present tense, and the main character is a viking princess.\u00a0 As I am neither a viking nor a princess, this proved to be a challenging character to get inside.\u00a0 There were many times where I said to myself, “Just make it easier and tell the thing in 3rd person.”\u00a0 But that is not what the story called for.\u00a0 That was not the voice I heard telling it.<\/p>\n

The other difficulty came from the story itself.\u00a0 I felt a constant sense of tightrope-walking, of balancing tensions and contradictions.\u00a0 The novel is set in ancient Norway, but is not historical.\u00a0 It involves Viking warriors, but the main character never goes to sea.\u00a0 It is mythic, but not a fantasy.\u00a0 It is a mystery, but in the end the answer to the mystery isn’t what’s important.<\/p>\n

That’s all I’ll say about it for right now.\u00a0 I’ve sent it off to my agent and editor to see what they think.\u00a0 I’ll send it to a few trusted readers for their feedback.\u00a0 And then in a couple of weeks I’ll come back to revise it.\u00a0 I think it’s about 85% there.\u00a0 I don’t really think in terms of drafts.\u00a0 Until the book is done, it’s just a building under construction, with some wings complete, and others still scaffolded and covered in fluttering plastic.<\/p>\n

But the interesting thing has been finishing a book that has already sold.\u00a0 At the end of last year, I sent a partial manuscript to my editor.\u00a0 She liked it, and so Scholastic bought it along with another, unnamed novel.\u00a0 The idea that I was now essentially being paid to write, rather than writing and hoping to be paid, was a shift in thinking for me.\u00a0 A few years ago, Martine Leavitt gave me one of the best pieces of writing advice I have ever received.\u00a0 She said, “Give yourself permission to treat writing as a career.”\u00a0 Which I really tried to do, even though I wasn’t published and it didn’t yet feel like a career.\u00a0 But now it does.<\/p>\n

While I let this new book rest for the next few weeks, I hope to blog a little more regularly.\u00a0 I have a couple of friends who have been waiting very patiently for me to read their manuscripts, stories I’ve been wanting<\/em> to read but haven’t had the time.\u00a0 I hope to do some work on a new website I’m designing and trying to build myself (we’ll see how that goes).\u00a0 And then there’s my next book, which I’ll probably start researching for and thinking about.\u00a0 So I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been busy finishing up my current project, and so have been somewhat quiet on this blog lately.\u00a0 It has been a difficult novel to write, and the ending proved to be the most difficult part of all.\u00a0 I don’t expect any book I write to be easy, and this was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mtjQ-gL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}