Some of you may have heard the term R&R in the publishing world. It means revise and resubmit. An agent I sent a PB to about 6 months ago rejected it and requested other work. So I dug around to see what I had because I was still writing my YA rom com and I had self-published the only other novel I had that I felt had some worth. I decided to send a manuscript I had completed back in 2014, and she liked it…
BUT
She wanted me to rewrite it and resubmit it. Well, I had not looked at that manuscript in years and was not sure how I would change it to suit her request. But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got about the possibilities of taking these characters in a slightly different direction. So I agreed. That’s when the real work began.
Before diving into to some full fledged edits, I had to think about the new plot direction. She wanted my main character to have a worthy goal (sound familiar?) so in order to flesh the whole thing out I created a shot sheet. You all know I rely on the short sheet to put my books in order. But before that, I created a simple outline of what was going to happen, then I could decide how much of the book would actually need a rewrite.
I realized that for my new plot, some of the chapters could remain, but needed a little adjustment.
After I determined my direction in the outline, I sent it to her for approval. I did not want to start writing if she didn’t feel the direction was what she had in mind. Once she approved, I got started on the shot sheet.
During my rewrite, I realized I wanted to make a few characters deeper and to do that it was going to take more time, so I wrote her back and told her my plan and she agreed.
Well, I finally got the new plot in place, rewrote the old chapters I planned to use and moved them to more effective places in the book. I even stole a scene from another finished manuscript since it had not been published and made sense for this book. I also had to write new chapters. And to be honest, I was only able to keep the first 8 chapters before I had to write brand new ones. Then I was able to rearrange about four others, so technically speaking, I basically wrote a new book because I ended up with 22 chapters.
So after working on it for March and April, I finally sent her the synopsis. Not the book. Just the synopsis because, again, I was not going to hand over a manuscript she did not want.
Once she saw the synopsis, she was very happy with the change in direction, so I sent the entire manuscript today. Now we will see what happens.
Will keep you posted.
Leave a Reply