The Devil is done

I just finished my latest (and final) revision of The Devil You Don't Know and shipped it off to my new book editor.

I rewrote the beginning completely, rewrote most of the middle, and tinkered with the ending until I was mostly satisfied. I'm now convinced I will never be completely satisfied with any book I write. I can accept that.

I added two brand new plot lines. I also found my theme and polished it until it emerged. I cut another five thousand words from the manuscript in the process. It was the latest of several cuts over the past few months.

Five thousand words. Think about that. More than two chapters, gone in five days.

So the book that stood at a whopping 145,000 words when I finished the first draft over a year ago now stands at a relatively svelte 107,000 words.

Now all I have to do is rewrite the query and write a new synopsis. Oh, and wait for the new editor to rip it to shreds.

Once those are done, I think I'm ready to take this baby to New York City.

Then I can get back to my new book, and do it all over again.

Different story, same writing?

My new book is sleek, sexy and damned dangerous. It's very different from The Devil You Don't Know in that it contains lots of, well, sex. And like its predecessor, it also contains violence. And plain weirdness.

I love it.

But as different as it is in my head, as I write it, it's starting to sound ... familiar. I realize that we all have our own unique writing styles, and that a lot of what we write is going to be similar to other things we've written.

But I want this one to be different. Unique. Not like the other one, you know?

So I'm finding myself angrily deleting anything that sounds even remotely like it came from the first book. I want this one to be more lyrical, more of a psychological thriller. I want it to be chilling and poetic.

I mean, I want it to read like a cross between John Updike and Neil Gaiman. (Like I could pull that off.)

Still, that's what I'm shooting for. To a certain degree -- probably because I'm being so vigilant about it -- I think I'm succeeding.

My question to you, dear Blog Friends, is this: Does everything you write end up reading more or less the same? And if not, how do you manage to write different works differently?

Searching for the right project

As most of you know, I finished my first novel a few months ago and have been mired in query hell ever since. I've started three new projects since then and shelved them all -- including my political thriller that now sits at 20k words.

The first thing I started after finishing The Devil You Don't Know was what I thought was going to be the sequel. Then it occurred to me that it might be a bit, um, presumptuous of me to begin a sequel to a book that may or may not get published. Frankly, it seemed like a waste of time.

But the opening scene, a school shooting, was by many accounts one of the best things I've written since taking up fiction writing three years ago.

What to do?

Well, the weeks off this summer seem to have proven fruitful. I had the most wonderful idea for a new book that can use the opening shooting scene (which I posted on this blog a few months ago) in its entirety.

I suspect I was putting so much pressure on myself to succeed at the next book that I was being overly cautious about what to tackle next. I've decided to keep the other two and finish them later. But I'm pursuing the new book, which has a working title of Empty Spaces.

Sometimes I think my problem is that I have too many ideas. Each one seems new and fresh and exciting, but after a few weeks of writing it, I think of something better. Sigh. I know I need to pick one and focus on it (while continuing to query TDYDK).

So. That's what I'm doing. How about you guys. Do you have trouble deciding what to write next? Do you only work on one project at a time? Or do you have several cooking at any given moment?