Chapter Two of Code Name: WILLOW is up on my website! Go read, then come back here to talk about it.
If you missed reading Chapter One, no fear. It's still up. Each chapter stays up once it goes up so that anybody coming to the story late can easily catch up.
4 comments:
What a great idea, Paula! I enjoyed your first 2 chapters. Good job at building suspense and anticipation - can't wait until next week :)
Oh, Paula, I remember this story. Never understood why HQ hadn't bought it. It's a good as I remember, if not better.
Yay, comments!
Carla, to answer your question, basically there were two big problems with the story as far as Intrigue was concerned. 1. The fact that the heroine was a former president's daughter (the editor felt it was too politically volatile, considering at the time our last two presidents, Clinton and GW Bush, had had daughters around the same age as my heroine would have been at the time she was the First Daughter, and she thought people would connect her too much to either Chelsea or Barbara or Jenna) And 2. She thought that Remy being a teenager would make it a hard sell because readers seem to prefer small children rather than older kids.
There were probably other nitpicky questions we'd have dealt with in editing, but those were the two main objections.
She and I discussed revisions, but as you read further into the story, you'll see why changing either of those two points would fundamentally change the story. I had to decide whether or not to dedicate myself to what would amount to a page 1 rewrite on a story I'd already rewritten three or four times over the course of seven years. I finally decided to just put it in a drawer and move on.
But when I realized I was going to have more than a year between books (Sept. '08 to Jan. '10), I came up with the idea of serializing one of my existing manuscripts that I knew I wouldn't be getting published anywhere else. So...hello Free Fiction Friday. :)
Their lost, our gain. I'm looking forward to Friday for more than getting off work. LOL!
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