Perspective Manuscript

After a couple of days away from the second draft of Perspective, I gave it a thorough read from end-to-end, fixing the odd typo and clumsy writing along the way. I then sent a copy to my son to see what he thought of the changes from the first draft. We had a really good chat about it for a couple of hours over the weekend, and I came away with a few more changes I wanted to make. Nothing major, mainly some minor tweaks to the last couple of chapters and one small extra scene in an earlier chapter which acted as a nice counterpoint to the new final paragraph.

So we're done. I've prepared the full formatted manuscript, plus an extract of the first three chapters ready for submission. The synopsis is written, as is the base covering letter that I'll create personalised emails for the agents I decide to contact. I've had both of these reviewed, so I think I'm just about to see if anyone other than me might be interested in reading my novel.

I'm pretty proud of Perspective. When I set out, I had no idea how it would turn out, nor quite what was going to happen. Other than a few characters, the theme, the setting and a rough structure to the novel, I let the rest happen naturally. What would I expect my characters to do?

I felt I learnt a great deal while writing this book, about myself as well as improving as a writer. I really hope I can reach a wider audience with this, so will try to go the more traditonal publishing route for now, rather than self-publish. We'll see. I'm a little too close to the work right now to be objective. Guess I'll just wait for feedback from my shortlist of agents when I send it to them, probably from tomorrow.

Then it's back to The Skein. I'd been struggling to make headway with this before I started working on the second draft of Perspective. Although I liked the story, the way I was looking to tell it felt a little routine. It wasn't interesting me enough to do it justice. However, I had a breakthrough yesterday while chatting about it in the car with my son. I've now got a new way to frame the story, with two primary protagonists having their own journey through the story, that should make it much more effective. It'll need a lot more planning, but is just the challenge I was looking for.

First...time to attack Agent Hunter and come up with a shortlist of agents to contact.