The Cagey is Almost Done

I am very pleased to report that my caginess about MagicalNovel is nearly done. Scholastic has given me the okay to reveal the details of my next project this Thursday. That is barely any time away from now! That is practically now!

But I'm still impatient.

So I shall tell you things that MagicalNovel is not. It is not the sequel to LAMENT & BALLAD. That's REQUIEM (briefly known on Twitter as WinterNovel), and I'm working on it on the weekends and it will eventually appear. It is not a sequel to THE SCORPIO RACES or FOREVER (these things will not happen).

And I shall tell you something that it is: namely, a project I've been cooking ever since I was 19 or 20, back when I was not a good enough writer to pull it off, an origin story that might sound similar to THE SCORPIO RACES'. What can I say? I wrote lots of crappy novels with good ideas back then. I have in fact been carrying around a hand-written draft of this manuscript through four moves, written in a journal which pretty much begged for something like MagicalNovel to be scrawled in it.


Now, MagicalNovel doesn't resemble that old manuscript very much, but the central conflict and most of the main characters' names are unchanged. Even back then it was the most ambitious thing I'd ever tackled, and even using everything I learned so far, it is possibly the hardest novel I have ever written, a fact I hope will not be obvious on the pages.


So, guesses? Closest to the actual novel will get a prize that I haven't thought of yet. Something prizey.