The first book I ever wrote and actually finished came from me wondering what I’d do if I only had 48 hours to live because a meteor was on it’s way to earth. It was The New Pillars of Creation and then it was Planet Billionaire.
The pitch: A woman finally had the perfect life, but in two days a missile will destroy the earth. Determined to escape it, she kidnaps convinces an astronaut to help her escape the blast by hijacking a wealthy man’s abandoned space shuttle, but they didn’t know it had a pre-determined destination.
Planet Billionaire was revised once or twice and queried a bit before I decided that, hey, this book isn’t right for the market. In hindsight, the story itself needed work and the genre wasn’t right.
Do I think it would be great now?
Yes.
Am I going to re-write it?
Absolutely not. Maybe in the future.
I still LOVE the story, don’t get me wrong, but I think there needs to be a story-level change and potentially make it more sci-fi because it was too… something.
After that book, I felt defeated. It was 2019 and I was still fresh out of college and I didn’t want to write anything else because maybe my writing wasn’t good enough and maybe I needed to give up.
Fast forward to 2020, I think, I wrote With the Band. A photographer wins a contract and gets a chance to go on tour with a mystery up-and-coming artist backed by one of the biggest labels. Everything is on the up and up and she can finally pay her rent for a few months and actually make more than enough to live. The only problem is she gets to the pickup location and the artist has changed the game. His album isn’t finished and they’re going to an upstate cabin for a month before the tour. It’d be fine if it wasn’t the same man that walked out of her life two years ago.
That story was life-changing because it made me realize I could write another book. I signed up for Danielle Valentine’s Street Team and it was like a mini revision course. We work-shopped our stories and I still use some of what I learned all those years ago.
After I tried to revise With the Band, I realized I hated that it was dual POV and needed to take it out and decided—eh too much work.
I never queried it. I kept saying I was going to go back to it, but then I started another book.
CHURCHBRED.
My lowkey favorite child, but she came out of nowhere after listening to Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, and I craved a biker romance with a sheltered preacher’s daughter. It devolved from a simple romance to something much darker.
The current pitch: A sheltered preacher’s daughter who doesn’t believe in God finds reprieve in the arms of a local biker, but their clandestine relationship comes at a cost and unravels her family’s secret plans as blood and desire crash through their hillside town.
I revised the hell out of this novel and then I tinkered with it forever and queried and got a whopping 57 rejections. I got close a few times, especially with pitch events, but ultimately the clearest rejection I got was “I can’t place this in the market, but I love the writing/story/etc.”
I have no doubt about any of my stories, but especially that one. I need to change how I pitch it and find more comparative titles (comps). Who knows, maybe the market is ready for it now.
I mean, there’s Dominion by Addie E. Citchens, there are two novels by Deesha Philyaw that are just perfect, and there’s Sierra Simone. I just need more like that. We’re actively watching the rise and fall of Christian nationalism, maybe the market is ready for a preacher’s daughter doing the horizontal tango with a biker.
Either way, I felt discouraged but I didn’t up. I think I was so ready to move on to the next story because I proved to myself that I could write another book and I could revise it and I could query it and I could get rejected and I could keep living.
I took a bit of break and poured myself into other creative paths, like my photography and even short stories. When I finally dove back into long-form writing, I wanted to write something lighter.
Lo, and behold, I wrote something dark, again.
Originally, ‘Not a Pretty Fall’ and then ‘Not Checking Out,’ but it came during a dark time and I haven’t gone back to it.
The current pitch:
Junelia vows to throw herself off the bridge steps from a world-renowned boutique hotel. If all goes to plan, she’ll live a life of luxury for a week and won’t have to check out, but a pesky hotel manager and resurgence of an abandoned passion tries to convince her to stay.
I wrote the zero draft last year and threw it as far from me as possible. Spoiler alert: it currently has a happy-ish ending, but it was still a heavy one and it’s subject to change. It was strange because I always have an idea of what format I want the story to be, but this started as a short story then I wrote it and realized it’s too long. Maybe it’ll be a novella, but then with the changes I want to make, it’ll probably be more than that. However, it’s still too heavy for me to even read and get in that headspace so I moved on to something lighter, something more fun, something I could get into…
May is Due South!
Here’s the pitch: An abruptly terminated lease sends a New Jersey woman to a small coastal town in South Carolina in search of one-dollar houses, where she’s immediately met by winding oaks, kind locals, and a man she can’t stop thinking about, but is this southern hospitality too good to be true?
Guys… I love this story. It’s everything I want to read and allows me to express my own woes into a character’s experience, but make it more dramatic and more fun. Either way, I drafted it, didn’t love it, but there was so much more to be done—I was just glad to be done.
I took another break and then I tried to do other things and that didn’t work well. So I went back to it, but even now, I am still revising. I re-worked so much in the beginning, like twice. Then I finally decided that I need to take a break from it. So I’ve been on and off with this novel. As of August 3rd, I am supposed to be working on it again.
As for next projects, I need to go back to With the Band and Not Checking Out at some point. I would LOVE to re-work Planet Billionaire into something, whether it’s a screenplay or a new novel. Any new ideas are just hanging out in the ether, but I strongly believe I can’t move on until all my projects are brought up to a certain level. It may be to my own detriment—stay tuned.
Hope you enjoyed learning a bit about my works in progress—or not in progress.
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