The Forgotten Manuscript

Hello, all my pretties. Stay a while and we'll talk.

You know how it is when you write so many novels and you can't snag the interest of an agent--or whoever--to take it on? So, you shelve it.

I've got a lot of those. But one mss., which I had started way back when dirt was practically invented (and authors could approach publishers, even be invited to New York to have a meeting with them--those were the days!), and it wasn't good enough, I put it away. Then, I took it out after many years and rewrote it. Rewrote it some more. I did almost snag an agent, in the 90's, but she really didn't think that vampire novels sold that well (Anne Rice was doing really well at that time, and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was hot, and a slue of movies on vampires were out *sigh*). So, after being so horribly rejected I put it away. Um, in case you didn't know--I really hate rejection.

The book's title was "Vampire Legacy". It was very racy, and it is a police procedural written in 3rd person with several POV characters. It was too long, though, so that sort of put off the agent. I also had a lot of characters in it and could probably have pulled some and really tightened up the writing. But, I was still in the newby stages. Learning my craft. I'm a slow learner.

I took my beloved, ancient (paper) manuscript out this morning. I began reading the third chapter. By golly it sounded pretty good and so entered it into a doc. I've been reading through portions of it, this week, and I really believe if I worked on it I could do something with it. Re-name it, of course, because it's too close to my first vampire novel. Which is okay. I'm sure I can come up with something.

So, what does one do with an old mss., which is, by the way, all jumbled up because I think I was putting it on a disk, either that, or rewriting the hell out of it. I may post some of it on Lorelei's Archives. Maybe. But my main goal is to figure out what the hell I was doing with it. I always make notes on my projects. I'll just have to dig them out.

Any suggestions? I'd like to do something Indi, but I don't know if I can upload with such a slow modem. Hope you're all having a nice weekend. The weather here in Illinois could not be better, very fall-like!