I have bad news and good news.
Bad: My publisher, Five Star/Cengage, is ending its mystery line and going forward only with westerns and Frontier Fiction. Those writers who had mysteries in the queue but no contract yet must start the search again….or self-publish.
Good: The novel I submitted to Five Star in October (Wishing Caswell Dead) fits the criteria for Frontier Fiction, therefore is still under consideration.
Bad: The novel I’m currently revising is a contemporary mystery. The other novel that’s almost a complete first draft, is also a contemporary mystery.
Good: I have options for these novels. I can start the search for an agent. I can submit directly to traditional publishers who accept unagented authors. I can bite the bullet and spend the money for editing, cover art, maybe formatting, and dip my toe into the world of indie-publishing.
Bad: I still don’t have this website/blog fixed up the way I want it.
Good: I’ve cleaned out the stuff that wasn’t working. Now I’m doing my WordPress homework and searching Plugins to find what I need to make the site my own. This takes a lot of time, but it’s kind of fun. And learning new stuff causes synapses to fire and new connections to form so maybe my aging brain will behave better than my aging body does.
As some of my writerly friends have said to encourage me: “When one door closes, another opens.” I’ve heard this said before but didn’t know the source or the context, so I looked it up on Brainy Quotes. It goes like this:
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
That’s pretty good advice, especially for those of us caught up in the rapidly-changing world of publishing. We might want to take an hour or so to moan and groan about the thing that has gone wrong today. But that’s it. Once the hour of whining is over, we need to move on, stay alert, see what others are doing, start thinking outside the box. and forge a new path. Okay, that might be an annoying list of cliche’s, but they tell the truth. Move on. Just do it!