The good news is I didn’t have to wait very long to hear from the folks at Albert Whitman on my new picture book (2 1/2 business days, to be exact).
The bad news is it still needs work. Quite a bit of work, actually. And while they offered a number of specific suggestions, I’m not sure what to do.
I’m also really excited about my chapter book series…this is a much better idea than the one I was trying to write before. I don’t want to say too much about it yet because 1) if I talk too much about a new project too early I start to lose steam; and 2) I don’t want to jinx it! I really, really like this project! And it’s coming very easily. I’ve made more progress on this idea in the last three days than I ever made on the other one. But I know I’ll be getting my MONKEY MAN sequel back for revision any day now (I know…I’ve been saying that for about two months) and I’d really like to get this proposal done before that happens. So I decided I was just going to keep working on the series proposal for now and put off the picture book for a couple of weeks…(why pull my hair out when I can work on something that’s practically writing itself?)
…but then I woke up at 5:00 a.m. this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. But rather than get up, I tried to rewrite the picture book manuscript in my head (I’ve pretty much memorized the e-mail of suggestions I received yesterday). I didn’t get anywhere, but I tried. The problem is I really like the beginning and I really like the ending and they suggested I come up with a whole new framework for the story. Is that even possible with the current beginning/ending? (I’m not good at setting things aside…)
So then this morning I decided to send it to one of my best critique partners (hey, she offered BEFORE I asked!). She’s also really good for bouncing ideas off of and letting me know whether I’m heading in the right direction or not. So even though I wanted to put this manuscript aside, the manuscript doesn’t seem to want to be put aside. It wants to be fixed. And…I may have some ideas for a new framework that MAY allow me to keep my beginning and ending. We’ll see.