ellen mcbee

So, I sent my thousand words off to an agent yesterday. I have been through the manuscript of What You Stand For about six times the past week, tightening up the main plot, tightening each sub-plot, reading for character, for humor, for consistency of names. In any case, it’s finished. For now. And I’m sending it out.

Meanwhile, I was planning to start the sequel, and I have some scenes written for that. I’ve now got the vague idea that I might write out the rest of a draft as part of NaNoWriMo this year. But I have heard some good reasons not to start the sequel right now. Mainly that if the first book requires some serious rewrites and changes, I don’t want to have to make huge changes to the second book.

What to do?

Well, the Poland project comes to mind.

This is another New Adult (I think), but this time it’s a historical. It’s about young people in World War II Poland, who made up huge chunks of the resistance. So I’ve started reading and researching, and it looks like it’s going to be a lot of researching and reading before I’m ready to start writing a story. It’s pretty much an untold story in the west, owing to Poland being a Soviet state immediately following the war. And the betrayal of Poland by the Allies, and all. People like to think of World War II as having been won, but I’m questioning that conclusion now. If you lost huge chunks of the world to the Soviets, does it count as victory? Not to mention the devastation of Europe. Warsaw for instance was pretty much flattened during and after the Warsaw Uprising (not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).  If the city is destroyed, have you really saved the city? 20% of the population of Poland was killed; have you saved the country if all those people are dead? Not to mention all the concentration camps and extermination camps and the machinery of death that were built in Poland.

I guess these are the kinds of questions fiction is for.

Now I just need a plot. And some characters. And a title. Also I’m starting to think my Google search history is probably looking strange.

I’m still in my existential angst, but now I’m thinking that maybe my decision to make the manuscript into a romance was a little premature.  But I got some really good ideas, namely that there needs to be more conflict with my sorority and fraternity and that it needs to take longer to mesh the two groups into one team.

I just attended a Webinar by Gordon Warnock on New Adult, and I’ve read Deborah Halverston’s Writing New Adult Fiction, and honestly I think both of them are describing a type of New Adult that’s not really being published yet.  But I also think it’s the kind I’m writing, and the kind I’d want to read.  So I’m going through What You Stand For again, and making it funnier and more conflict-y (is that a word?).  Because honestly, young people are funny!  It seems looking back that we laughed all day long.

And there can still be *love* and there can be serious big thoughts and all the other stuff.

So, short entry today, but I have a lot of work to do!