Wednesday Q & J: October 18, 2023

Q:  You love to dig into your drawers of unsold manuscripts to revise and find new opportunities for them. What’s that process like?

J: Sometimes an old manuscript is a surprise. I will pull one out and read it to find I have grown enough in confidence and talent to make it shine where before it only sort of shimmered.  Alas, sometimes I cannot, for the life of me, make it better. Sometimes the kind of storytelling in the manuscript is no longer in favor or the market has moved on. I read enough in the fields I write in to be sure of this.  So… sometimes an old manuscript becomes a new opportunity and sometimes it is time to say, “this one is not going to go anywhere.”