30 Plus Attempts When One Would Have Been Enough

For about the past ear or so, I have written over 30 versions of the same story. Well, I say written, but I mean I have begun writing that many versions of the same story and completed one manuscript, which I evidently wasn't happy with because it ended up in a stack of a half dozen or so partial manuscripts on a file box in front of the dining room window where it's been quietly collecting a fine layer of dust.

Yesterday, due to more snow and a little ice, I grabbed the one completed manuscript from the stack, sat down and began reading it through. I'm 1/3 of the way through (it's nearly 300 pages typewritten single-spaced)...and the story I didn't think was going anywhere has really surprised me. I think, once I've read this through, I may be able to tweak it to include elements I incorporated into other versions of it that I liked, but that didn't make it into this version since I hadn't thought of them yet. I can also lose some f the content to make room for these other elements.

It'll be a big piece f work, but I've done stuff like this before...hacked two versions apart and sewn them seamlessly together as one novel...I am the Dr. Frankenstein of stitching parts of various versions of novels together to make a whole. "It's alive!"

I think the only other novel of mine that went through more than a dozen versions after originally being conceived as a short story or novella, was Life Skills. There are four short stories that go together, plus a novella with the same characters, plus a Christmas story that was tacked into the back of the novel as a stand alone holiday story set a few years into the future. (I did the same thing with one other novel, added the stand alone holiday story at the end, and that was Talon:The Familiarity of it All)

While on that kind of novel/short story/novella linked stories, The Subtlety of Light and Shadow, a romance set in an art community in the Adirondacks, has a re-envisioned novella called Not Always Black & White which is included in Love Me Knots, an anthology of love stories. Rex Royce was my first antihero- a guy you hate, at first, but who is revealed for who he really is through his developing relationship with a young woman, Lucie Palmer, who takes a job in his gallery and becomes his muse. This earned high marks from four of five judges in the Romance Writers of America Golden Hearts contest in 2015, but irked the fifth judge no end who did not see Rex as a romantic hero. It made me question that judge's position on a romance novel judging panel because Rex has some similarities to Rhett Butler. That judge probably would have disliked Rhett, too! Not all romance heroes are 100% lovable good guys.

Which brings me back to Memento Mori: Garnet & Quella. Garnet is flawed, but so is Quella. It's their flaws that draw them together and make them shine in one another's eyes. That and the fact that their namesakes back in 1873 were romantically involved, but he died unexpected after a brief illness, and she died seven months later in childbirth. In the present day, Garnet and Quella are attempting to piece together Garnett and Quella of 1873-74's brief history as a lovers. Quella in the present day is sensitive to the ghost of Garnett who is attached to her Garnet in the present day. Garnett wants them to find his Quella who seemed to vanish after death.

Memento Mori: Garnet & Quella, is the first in a series of romances in which ghosts play a role.

Anyway...30 something attempts, most written after the complete manuscript was finished and then tossed aside as not good enough, I am taking a second look at that novel and finding it really wasn't as bad as I thought it was.