One Step Forward....Twice Shy

As I announced on Facebook sometime ago, I signed with a new literary agency: Sterling Lord Literistic.

I still have the same, wonderful agent, Martha Millard, but she's joined with bigger forces, with the hope to do bigger and better things.

When I first heard the news that Martha was leaving her private practice to join an established agency, I have to admit I had two thoughts at first: 1) Literistic isn't a word, and 2) OMG she's going to dump me like hot potato lead balloon.

Literistic is still a very hard thing for me to write without cringing, but Martha hasn't dumped me. In fact, when I called her office, we had a nice talk about what I need to do to get my career back on track. In a surprise to no one, the answer is: write something sellable.

I've known this, of course. My trouble is 'once bitten, twice shy.' In particular, one thing that always ends up happening when I chat with my agent is that she enthuses about Tate and the sort of fun, kicky things Tate has written. I can hardly blame Martha for that. Tate is by far the best selling stuff I've ever written. Tate is still making us both money.

I had an epiphany after hitting this same Tate wall with Martha....

I've figured out that the problem with Tate is that I've never quite understood what it was about those books that made them so popular. I'll be honest, it was desperate times. I was facing an early retirement when my then agent, John Morgan, suggested I try writing a vampire book. We'd met at a WorldCON and I'd confessed that vampires were my guilty pleasure. He told me that vampire books were super-hot at the moment (and they were), and later called me up and said, that if I were serious about writing a vampire book, he'd be willing to re-jigger the contract so that I could. This is when I hired Martha and the rest, as they say is history.

So, although the idea for the Garnet Lacey books were all mine, the impetus and direction of them was not.

Similarly, my later editor, Anne Sowards, really wanted me to try my hand at a YA vampire book (do I need to say that Twilight was popular at this time, too.) I wrote the proposal and all that, but, once again, the PUSH to write this particular stuff came from outside--specifically from my publisher/editor.

Precinct 13 on the other hand was something _I_ thought would be fun. Well-recieved or not, it ended my career.

Thus, I think, subconsciously, I've been afraid that my impulses are crap. Or, rather, weird and fun (and possibly award-winning, ala my science fiction), but decidedly NOT best selling.

This has been a really huge part of my inability to write original fiction. Or, perhaps, one of the MANY reasons I've been struggling. Naming it seems like a good first step to curing it. One of the other things I've decided to do is to just go ahead and NOT trust my instincts. For the next few weeks, I've decided that every couple of days, I'm going to go to one of those plot generator things and press the button. Whatever comes out, I'll try to write.

Why not?

I figure that my brain will resist a simplistic plot, anyway, and anything is better than nothing. And, it's sort of guaranteed to be stupid, right? So, I don't have to worry that the plot is stupid. It already is. I just need to write it.