Fulfilling My New Year's Resolution 2013

About three and a half years ago, I wrote a novella based on this short piece of flash fiction, which was originally based on doing what I do best in my spare time: people watching.

The original plot of that piece of flash fiction was something that was pretty basic and somewhat overused: obsessive love. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less, and as you can see by the comments left at that post, everyone agreed that it was a pretty decent piece of prose, also nothing more and certainly nothing less.

By late December, I had managed to write a roughly thirty page novella, details of which can be found here, broken link and all. And up until recently, the hardest part in writing this novella, was trying to come up with a decent title for it, which after six tries, became "A Shadow Warrior's Redemption".

For the next couple of years, I would periodically tweak it before sending it off to the only part of my writing life in which I have a sparkling .000 batting average: writing contests. Eventually, I got fed up with having a .000 batting average with that story (really, all of my stories that were submitted to writing contests), and after doing one last edit to keep myself occupied while the glacial wheels for publishing my book creakily completed its one and only rotation, I stuck it in my world famous (to me) slush pile of semi-ignorance.

Fast forward to late 2012.

While I was posting a short series on what slush novel I should work on next, an unexpected offer happened to pop up in my other online home (Facebook). So being the flexible writer that I am, I quickly switched gears and pulled out my novella. After giving it some thought, I decided to try something a little different. I had been writing my personal slush crime novel in the first person/present tense for the past several months, and after working through a few kinks, I decided to try the same approach with an already completed story.

So I proceeded to spend the next month re-editing/re-writing my entire novella in the first person/present tense p.o.v. Being pretty stoked about what I had accomplished gave me enough motivation to write out a super short synopsis (678 words) in the first person and the query letter, with a 79 word synopsis, all in the span of about a week and a half.

With everything all set and ready to go, I contacted my friend to ask if her offer was still valid. Sadly, things went bump with her (she was very unhappy with her current publisher), and thus, the offer was no longer valid.

Expressing sympathy for my friend's predicament (about two months later, another friend went through something much worse with the same publisher), I nevertheless decided to soldier on and within a week, I started querying the novella. I immediately sent out one query to a publisher that was looking for novellas, and while I was deciding who to query next (one will definitely be sent to my current publisher, as they're now reopened to some types of submissions, and one will not be sent to that anonymous publisher I had previously mentioned), I also decided to revisit the idea of doing what I did with Line 21 back in 2011 when I had begun querying that novel: create a page to chart the journey to publication of A Shadow Warrior's Redemption.

Thus, I present to you the reading public, the static page for my latest project, A Shadow Warrior's Redemption. Just like with Line 21, you'll be able to follow the journey of ASWR to publication. I don't believe I'll be able to duplicate the success I had querying Line 21 (struck gold on the 13th query), but I do believe that I will strike gold sometime this year with this novella.

And thus, fulfill for the 3rd consecutive year, my New Year's resolution of getting at least one story published.

2011: Short story entitled "Red Stripe"
2012: Commercial debut novel entitled "Line 21"
2013: Will it be ASWR?