- Joined
- Dec 18, 2006
- Messages
- 3,348
- Reaction score
- 854
- Age
- 67
- Location
- Ontario, Canader
- Website
- www.chumpletwrites.blogspot.com
I'm stuck. Majorly stuck.
I have two WIPs. Both are sitting at around 40K. Both have a setting in Spain. Both were started around the same time.
That's where the similarities end. I don't know which to pick up and finish. They pull at me while I'm falling asleep. They float in front of my eyes while I drive to work. But I don't move forward with either.
One is a romantic thriller set in Barcelona and the Pyrenees. A vacationing Canadian gets mixed up with a bunch of Basque freedom fighter wannabes. While helping a guy named Sendoa recover a stolen painting, she comes to grips with her own lost heritage. I have severe plot problems with this one, and need to do massive research about the ETA and corruption in Spanish politics.
The other is a women's fiction about two single parents who chance to meet thirty years after they had attended the same high school in Spain. She remembers him, but he doesn't at first remember her. The story is told in alternate POVs and time periods.
In his POV in present day, he supports her while she works to fight her son's cancer, since he had lost his wife to breast cancer.
With her point of view back in the 70s in Mallorca, Spain, she struggles with painful shyness while thrust in an alien culture with a poorly equipped mother and a busy, absent father, not to mention an obsession with a boy who doesn't know she's alive. This half of the book has a distinct YA flavour.
I don't know which novel to finish first. I don't know where my strengths lie. Thriller or Literary? Which will catch the attention of an agent or mainstream publisher?
If I pick one, will I be stuck with the genre and not allowed to explore the other?
Rant over.
I have two WIPs. Both are sitting at around 40K. Both have a setting in Spain. Both were started around the same time.
That's where the similarities end. I don't know which to pick up and finish. They pull at me while I'm falling asleep. They float in front of my eyes while I drive to work. But I don't move forward with either.
One is a romantic thriller set in Barcelona and the Pyrenees. A vacationing Canadian gets mixed up with a bunch of Basque freedom fighter wannabes. While helping a guy named Sendoa recover a stolen painting, she comes to grips with her own lost heritage. I have severe plot problems with this one, and need to do massive research about the ETA and corruption in Spanish politics.
The other is a women's fiction about two single parents who chance to meet thirty years after they had attended the same high school in Spain. She remembers him, but he doesn't at first remember her. The story is told in alternate POVs and time periods.
In his POV in present day, he supports her while she works to fight her son's cancer, since he had lost his wife to breast cancer.
With her point of view back in the 70s in Mallorca, Spain, she struggles with painful shyness while thrust in an alien culture with a poorly equipped mother and a busy, absent father, not to mention an obsession with a boy who doesn't know she's alive. This half of the book has a distinct YA flavour.
I don't know which novel to finish first. I don't know where my strengths lie. Thriller or Literary? Which will catch the attention of an agent or mainstream publisher?
If I pick one, will I be stuck with the genre and not allowed to explore the other?
Rant over.
