The Silver Lining Gets Silverer. Or Something.

As my loyal blog minions are probably well aware, the publishing contract for Playing With Fire fell victim to a merger between publishers a few months ago and was dropped. And in this blog entry, I mentioned that, while I was disappointed, I saw this as a golden opportunity to revisit, revise, and revamp the book. I'm usually pessimistic to a fault, but the only way to keep from losing my mind over this was to stay as optimistic as possible that it would, in the long run, work out for the best.

Now that I'm knee deep in the revision, I swear I want to send a thank you note to the editor that knocked it back.

I liked the story before, I'm loving it now. It's currently sitting at exactly 60,000 words, which is a full 10,000 beyond the final word count of the original...and I still have about twenty chapters to finish. This book could, very possibly, wind up at or near 100,000. Of the 60,000 I currently have, 20,000 of that is completely new material: Either chapters rewritten from scratch or new chapters that weren't in the original at all. A secondary character has been added. Another makes a few more appearances and has a somewhat bigger role. A scene that relied too heavily on coincidence has been summarily axed.

Even better, the male main character has pretty much shoved me aside and said "Now STFU and let me show you how this is done." For those of you familiar with the story, yes, Ian Black gets more screen time. And yes, that means what you think it means.

So, in spite of the disappointing circumstances that led to this revision, I'm having a blast with it. The cancelled contract was, as I suspected, a setback, not a kiss of death, and Playing With Fire is not doomed to the Wangstbasket.

Only time will tell if Playing With Fire 2.0 is worthy of publication, but I'm so much happier with the story now. I'm guessing it'll hit the query-go-round in September, possibly August depending on how much work I get done while I'm traveling. Then we'll see what the future holds, but I'm optimistic. When the contract was first knocked back, my optimism was mostly a means to avoid being depressed. Now, I'm genuinely excited to see what happens once the book is finished, and the silver lining is becoming more real by the day.

So, to all the writers who read this blog, even something as disappointing as losing a contract can ultimately turn out to be a good thing.

And, if nothing else, it gave me a chance to spend some more time with Ian Black...