a dream deferred

I have avoided blogging about the progress towards/away from publication of my romance novel -- it's like dating around, you don't want to scare off potential suitors by blogging about the trauma you experience at the hands of other suitors. But, perhaps now is the time to give an update, since many of you care (or at least profess to care) about whether and when I'm going to get published.

So the short answer is that it looks unlikely that my first book will be picked up by a publisher. My agent and I have certainly reached the end of the road in terms of the publishers we submitted to; there is another group that we could submit to, but given how relatively positive the rejections were, we're confident that some of the editors would want to see my next work, and we would rather sell to one of the top houses if at all possible.

However, while the rejections were v. nice and encouraging, they were still rejections. In two cases, the editors really loved the book, but the sales or marketing teams wouldn't get on board. Ultimately, there's not much I can do about it except write book two and keep focused on the future.

So that's the story -- no more talk of publication until I finish Madeleine and Ferguson's book. It's coming along okay, and I worked on it tonight for a bit, but I need to get cracking if I'm going to finish in the next month or so. Thanks for your support, and I'll keep you posted on te second one!

Other than stressing over whether I'll finish this book, today was fine; it was nice to get up at 6:45am and still make it on time for an 8am meeting, so I'm glad I moved down here. I had a series of general meetings and two meetings with the big boss, as well as lunch with Heather (aka dear respected madam) -- with all the random stuff I had to do today, it was good to take a break from meetings to have a proper lunch. After work (and being in the office for thirteen hours), I went to Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park, where I had an excellent sandwich and wrote a couple of pages of the new romance novel before throwing in the towel. And now, even though it's not even ten o'clock, I'm going to go to bed; I have to be in the office by 8am tomorrow, and I might as well indulge my jetlag since I'm about to go eight hours in the opporsite direction and just confuse myself entirely. Goodnight!