The Books in between

In between the BOOKS. There are the books.
Entire manuscripts completed,and sweated over that for whatever reason, didn’t work.

I have four of them.
They came between The Curious Misadventures of Feltus Ovalton and Ashes, Ashes, and I easily loved them as much while I was writing them.
You have to love an idea whole-heartedly and with passion or you will never complete it.
But just loving it is never enough.
Sometimes that little germ of an idea never becomes anything else.

Amazingly (or perhaps stubbornly) I tend not to realize that until I’ve written “The End”.
And even then I may still insist that it will somehow miraculously come together.
This was particularly hard with Feltus because it had the potential to become a series (AND the publishers were willing). I wrote three other Feltus adventures over two years (each one coming in at around 100,000 words) and they all languish in a dusty pile at the bottom of my filing cabinet.
Then I wrote something else.
It didn’t work either.

I do think that sometimes the approach is just off, and a book can eventually be salvaged with a lot of hard work, but sometimes it just can’t.
There is no difference (at least that I can decipher) in how I write a book. With all of them, I am consumed with excitement and the story.
So it should work out, right?
Nope.
You might wonder why I keep going then?
Because each completed manuscript hones my chops (always wanted to use that phrase tho’ I’m not sure what it means). I become a better writer from the act of writing. And that makes me happy.

And there’s a certain amount of magic involved.
Seriously, I do think something magical happens with a well-written, conceived book that allows it to live in a way as its own entity. It breathes. The story continues after the reader is done.
They are only words on paper but there is something organic about them.
Think of books you love. They are old friends. They offer comfort. An escape.
When it does happen, and everything lines up, it is the most thrilling feeling in the world.

If I were a dog I would look like this.