Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Resurrecting old works

Recently I've been spending a little time going through my file directory of writing projects looking for works that for one reason or another were abandoned without ever being completed. The reason for this is looking for additional material to publish without the strain of creating something from scratch.

These stories aren't bad. In some cases it is like seeing an old friend, one that I really liked but that I fell out of touch with. Mostly this was because the story and I ended up not seeing eye-to-eye on how the it was going to proceed. 

A big reason for abandonment was that I was mostly writing as Cricket Starr at the time... that's my erotic romance pen name and a Cricket book required a great deal of sexual situations. Not all stories lend themselves to that level of erotism so unless the story fit into one of the selling series I had such as the Futuristic Gaian stories or the Paranormal Hollywood After Dark, I didn't have a good place to market it.

One such story is "Dancing the Knight Away." Originally this was supposed to be an erotic novella about a young romance author at her first romance convention and her sexual adventures with a hot cover model. But a funny thing happened... the heroine turned out to be a really sweet lady and the hero a nice older guy who makes a bet with his roommate that he can get her to dance with him before the end of the convention. It was fun and a little sexy, but there wasn't nearly enough reason for these two to be warming a bed together when he couldn't even get her out on the dance floor. 

So a Cricket book it wasn't going to be and I didn't have a good market for it any place else. Rather than spend the time working on a story that I couldn't sell to one of my current houses and was too short to be sent to a publishing house I wasn't associated with. It was contemporary, there weren't any paranormal elements, and while I loved the characters, they just weren't going to cooperate with me as far as the sex was concerned.

So I abandoned my knight in costume armor and lady author to work on more profitable projects. 

But thanks to Indie publishing I no longer need to be concerned about simply adding this nice little novella to my list of publications. I can go back, finish off the rough edges of the manuscript, and put it out as one of my contemporary romances. I've already got the rights back to a story I had with Ellora's Cave from their Blush line that was mis-authored as Cricket Starr. I say mis-authored because it was originally a Janet Miller book at Cerridwen and I never changed its sex level to that of the Cricket level of erotism when Ellora's Cave folded the Cerridwen books into their erotic line. So there has been much confusion about that book over the years.

My intent is to launch Christmas With Sarah next month once final proof-reading is done, and have Dancing the Knight Away ready to go a week or so later. Then if I can find a third book to release... well you get the idea. I want to see if I can't build some momentum for these contemporary stories that I really like... even if there isn't a fang or spaceship to be found in them.

Cheers,
Janet Miller

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