What Goes Around

Terry here, with our question of the week: Do you have old unpublished manuscripts that you might revive? Why did you abandon them? What would it take for you to go back to them? A few years ago, I bought a new desk.

I decided it was a symbolic gesture that deserved something grand. For me, that was weeding out old manuscripts. I promised myself I could keep anything that looked promising. 

 Mind you, these were books that landed good agents, but the agents were never able to sell them. One major publisher kept one for a year before “reluctantly” saying no. Others wrote things like, “love the plot, not the characters,” or “loved the characters not the plot.” Or, as one agent who rejected one of the books put it, “The contrivances are too ample.” (Loved that line!) I was always puzzled why the three books that found good agents couldn’t find a publisher.

 Back to the weeding out process: When I started reading the old manuscripts I discovered why they hadn’t found a home. Most of them were godawful.

I didn’t hesitate to pitch them in the trash. The mystery to me is why they even found agents. I suppose the writing itself was okay, but the books were derivative, or boring, or stupid (a critique word I would never use on anyone else’s work). It was clear to me why it took six novels before I “hit” with the Samuel Craddock series. 

 But I did keep a couple of manuscripts. They need a lot of work, but they have a kernel of “something.” I periodically daydream about overhauling one or another of them. Why don’t I? I’ll give you an example. The first book one is a book I wrote many years ago that went through about twenty revisions—and I mean complete revisions. It went from being a female amateur detective to ending up as a male cop in a small California town on the coast. Along the way, the amateur sleuth became an artist, who would become the love interest of the cop. The last version was pretty good, except for one glaring problem: The solution to the crime was ridiculous. Preposterous. Impossible. And the problem is that I’ve never been able to think of a way to end it that makes sense. So it sits there, an “almost.” 

 Another had a pretty good story, but the detective was either too quirky, or not quirky enough. I never could figure out which. And like the other one, at the end it kind of ran into the weeds. 

 That’s not to say that I haven’t read books with outlandish endings that made no sense, or that I haven’t read books with detectives who didn’t quite have that “certain something” to make them interesting. I have. Which is why I sometimes fantasize that with a few tweaks they could be good books. 

 So why haven’t I tackled them? Because I’m too busy with current projects.

I’ve just completed the editorial changes for my next Craddock book. I’ve just turned in a standalone to my agent, who has asked for a few changes. I need to write the next book in the Craddock series. And I’m working on another standalone. Oh, yeah, and I have a new series coming out next spring. Who has time to go back and rewrite history?