Maybe This Time I'll be Lucky

I’ve been a little silent here lately. June was such a busy month with the conferences and all the blog posts that I decided to relax a bit for the remainder of the summer and work on some other projects. Once I got Whisper of the Woods off to my publisher (my Cry of the Sea sequel), I knew my next project was to dive into revising my Middle Grade novel Dragon Surf and get it ready to start submitting to agents and publishers.

Dragon Surf has had a long road from idea to finished project. Back in the beginning of my writing career, when I still wrote lots of short stories and thought I would be a huge success as a horror and/or fantasy novelist (for adults), I penned a short story about a bunch of young men who get drunk one night and head down to the shore for some night swimming. Soon they find themselves terrorized by a dragon that lives in a cave nearby. This story was so awful, it wasn’t even worth submitting. I didn’t even make it clear if it was contemporary or set in a medieval type of land. Some of the character names were just… weird. I don’t have it anymore, thank goodness.

A few years later, when I had decided my path should be writing for kids, I approached the story idea again. I changed it to a contemporary short story about two boys who sneak down to a beach on a foggy morning to go swimming. A dragon appears in this story as well, but instead of terrorizing them, he saves them from drowning. I titled the story “No Lifeguard on Duty”. I never knew what to do with this story as it didn’t fit with any of the children’s magazine guidelines, so it sat on my computer for a few more years.

In 2009, an author I followed was having her fantasy story published by Stone Arch Books, a publisher that focuses on Hi/Lo stories for boys. I rewrote my story as a chapter book of about 40 pages and submitted. They weren’t interested but encouraged me to come up with some other topics. That’s a long story in itself, which ultimately wound up with the creation of my other novel On the Water, no longer a Hi/Lo for boys but an Upper MG for girls. Yeah, my writing life takes turns.

So, No Lifeguard sat again. In 2013, though, I decided to take my fledgling chapter book and pump it up into a full Middle Grade fantasy novel. I wrote an outline and got it ready for NaNoWriMo. I completed it at 55,000 words that month.

But then Cry of the Sea came out, and I sold a book to Schoolwide Inc that needed revisions, and I rewrote On the Water twice, and I wrote Passing Notes, and I wrote Whisper of the Woods… Talk about letting a first draft sit for a while. Finally, this summer, I got the chance to take a look at my book. I was pretty happy with it, actually. I tweaked, clipped, added, and slashed. Changed the title. Except for the final line, which I still hate, I’m feeling pretty good about it.

I sent Dragon Surf out for its first submission last weekend. Who knows when or if it will sell? But I’m happy to have finally found a version of this story that I think is sell-able. We’ll see, and I’ll definitely let you know.

If you have a revision story about your book, I'd love to feature it on the blog. Email me donnadriver68 (at) gmail (dot) com

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