Novel "finished!"

I did it! I wrote "The End" on the novel I started November 2009 for NaNoWriMo! This is great news because I have an appointment in 2 1/2 weeks to pitch it to an editor from Tor at the Willamette Writers' Conference. That gives me time to clean up the manuscript and write a pitch and a one-sheet for it.

Oh, and this whole "pitching" process scares the pee-diddle out of me. It took me 36 years to get over the pain of rejection via snail mail and email, but now I've signed up for a crash-course in face-to-face rejection. This may sound overly pessimistic, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I'm considering these pitch sessions as practice, and as another writer friend put it, a chance to write "I met you at the 2010 WWC. Here's some new writing of mine" in a future query letter.

I am going to pitch my 2009 novel Liz A. Stratton Closes the Store at this conference, too. It's much more "done" than Something, but the pitching is going to be no less scary for me.

But none of this takes away from the good news that I have now finished two entire novels! Something weighs in at 95K, which makes it my longest work yet, and I think it's a fun read. It's a complete departure from LSCTS. Something is a story about a dragon that shows up in rural Oregon (in fact, the county I live in). I think I'm going to pitch it as a cross between the movie Outbreak and the Pern books by Anne McCaffrey. The story includes a medical mystery, a veterinary mystery, a May/December romance and, of course, a dragon.

Now I get to edit the book, which I find fun. Not as fun as crafting the story, but fun in a different way. It's a different hat, which I like well enough, especially when I'm not wearing it to correct student papers.

That's it for now. ta
m