I Just Asked To Be A Writer

So I had planned to hammer out a chapter of Godswar, maybe two. The characters have just entered the swamp of Yvan god of rot, and have discovered a ruined city that had been swallowed by the swamp, while being chased by Yvan's vile servants, Joshua has just been bitten by a bog wolf, and might bleed out.

These parts of my novels almost write themselves, I have set myself up with a ton of possibilities, great characters, and a wonderful setting where almost anything can happen. I am sure my imagination will run wild once I get to actually writing them. I didn’t write any fiction this weekend, not a word. That is the first time this has happened since I started trying to write professionally.

What happened was that I was looking over a few websites of YA publishers. This is a pretty common thing for me to do. I am a children’s librarian, and it gives me something to do online at work, that doesn’t feel like work.

Anyway while looking over these websites I found that one of them, that publishes a shared world, doesn’t want you to write a book in their world. If you are interested in writing for them you send them a writing sample and they hire you to write a book.

This seemed like a great use for the nearly 200,000 words in novels I have sitting around waiting to be published. So I gave the first three chapters of The Laws of Summer a solid edit and prepared all the other stuff I needed to, cover letter, biography, etc.(One company asks for a fromal book proposal and a sample, so I had to come up with the idea for a novel and an outline, without ever writing any of it)

Then I looked at other YA publishers and I found two more that do the same thing. It was awesome. The best part was that I read books from all of these publishers as a child or a teen. I am very familiar with their worlds, and their books.

So I spent the weekend, writing book proposals, and preparing samples of my writing. It was a different experience. For some of the up and coming authors who read my blog, this might be a good avenue to get your first book published. Check out some YA sites and see what the guidelines are, sending book proposals takes time but it doesn't take nearly as much as writing the novel.

Today I sent one book proposal and two requests to be a writer.

I'll keep you posted on how it turns out.