What comes next?
The manuscript has been frozen, my publisher has submitted it to the printer, the books have arrived, 143 buyers have been acquired, softbacks have been shipped, and I’ve gotten ego-pumping rave reviews from my readers. “Agnes Limerick, Free and Independent” is now a part of the past – creatively speaking, of course. Now it has become a product that I must hock, hock, hock. Please buy it! Please buy it! Pretty, pretty please!
What no one particularly knows is that I cannot stand selling anything, because in order to be a good salesman, you must manipulate another human being to do something he or she may or may not want to do. And that I cannot do.
Agnes (the novel, the story, the character, the altogether) is a product of the Writing Salon. It began with Writing Salon courses, it was nurtured by Writing Salon teachers and students, and it became a mature manuscript during the evolution of more than a dozen Round Robins. I didn’t dedicate the novel to the Writing Salon, but I would’ve – if I hadn’t come across someone, the piano teacher who became my inspiration for the character Brian Larney, who really, really deserved the dedication more than anyone. No one knows that I struggled with the dedication, either!
I love being a part of the Writing Salon community. This stretch between Round Robins has been particularly long – what is it, six weeks since the last one ended, Jane – but I have a confession. There are days I just don’t feel like being creative, like creating new characters and new storylines in response to Jane’s prompts. But I do it anyway, because gosh darn it all, I just gotta (that’s not my voice – but it’s someone’s whose cute and perky but male and old). No one knows that I, too, fear the blank page – but only because as I get older, I tire more quickly, and it takes more for me to confront a new job, a new task.
What comes next? Do I write a second novel, now that the first is published?
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