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« on: December 29, 2010, 02:45:37 PM »
Hey all,
I have been quiet the past two weeks. Between work, the holidays, and the fiance having a terrible cold, I've been pretty busy. But I think my schedule is settling back down, so I thought I'd get back to posting. I have an update from the agents that requested partials and fulls from me and I'm interested in what you all think.
I'll start with the good news. The agent that requested the full from me gave me quite a bit of feedback. She went out of her way to say that she liked my writing style and thought the manuscript well written. Unfortunately, it went down hill from there. I only posted the first few chapters here, but one of them was a flashback chapter. I know some (Asmodean in particular) do not like flashbacks. Apparently, agents don't either. She said that she liked the concept behind my story, but felt that the flashbacks pulled her away just when she was getting into the book and that it ended up feeling more like a character study rather than a novel. She had told me up front that as she has 40+ authors already she would have to love the book to represent it.
The other agent that requested the partial got back to me with somewhat of a form letter. There was a little personal note that said he thought it was going to be more literary than the type of fantasy it actually was and it wasn't something he represented.
I was pretty bummed about all of this at first, but on the bright side the first agent obviously thought my writing was on par, even if she didn't like my concept. The first agent had also requested a query before asking for the full. The agent that said it wasn't his style only heard my pitch at World Fantasy and hadn't seen my query. So I guess it was a case of me not researching enough to find the right agent and the agent getting the wrong impression from my pitch. Or it was just terrible, haha. The bottom line is agents wanted to see my work and that feels pretty good. One step up the rung.
Anyway, after a lot of thought, I've decided to revise my work again. I didn't think that flashback chapters were all that unusual (Scott Lynch uses a similar approach, and Pat Rothfuss's approach, while radically different, is almost entirely flashbacks). The agents seemed to think otherwise. I'm not so stuck on myself as the artist to not heed their advice. Out of the 40 some chapters in my novel, about a dozen or so are flashbacks. I'm going to attempt to pull out the main message I wanted to convey with each flashback and put that in either through dialogue or in very brief bits scatterred throughout the story (like the main character dreaming as he has nightmares and/or thoughts that occurr to him in situations). I am guessing this will drop the wordcount from 145k to about 130k, tighten up the prose, keep the pace moving, and most importantly, not pull the reader out of the book.
Thoughts, criticism, and advice from those who might have experienced/be experiencing similar situations is very much appreciated. :-)