Which One?

The first Wednesday of the month is when the writers from the Insecure Writer’s Support Group get together and discuss our recent successes, our struggles and failures. If you’re a writer and want to play along, check us out and sign up here- http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to diving back in and submitting queries to agents again. I’m ready to have other writers look over my query letter and after that feels tight and polished, putting my neck on the block. Rejections sucks, but not as much as I anticipated. It was easy enough to separate rejection of my writing from rejection of me as a person, which was surprising. I expected to be deeply hurt. Maybe I had already set myself up for failure. Maybe I thought no agent would be interested in the story I was selling. I’m not sure I was confident in my own work, which makes it very difficult to convince others to take a chance on it.

I feel I have moved past that fear, finally fully behind my own writing, which makes me ready to expect someone else to be as well. Instead of looking at my writing and only seeing the weaknesses, I am able to see the strengths, the things I do quite well. The issue this time won’t be confidence, it will be which book to submit.

I have two novels ready for submission and they are vastly different types of stories. The first is more “literary” to loosely use that term. It is about relationships and memory, how we create them, preserver them, and how we easily misread them. It is a great story, but by no means a page turner. The second is all action with elements of science fiction. It is much longer as well. They are both my writing style, and strangely enough, I like them equally. If I had my way, they’d both get a chance to be read.

Sadly, unless I’m going to self publish, I have to chose what kind of writing style I want to put forward to agents. Do I want to be seen as a serious, literary writer or someone who writes more speculative fiction? It matters. It dictates the course of my life from this moment forward (at least in a professional sense). So few professional writers have successfully changed direction and not sunk in the effort. I know it is foolish to act as if my “future” in writing is even a possibility at this moment, but…

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.