Hi. I'm Michael.
I'm a retired educator who's always been a writer, and now I'm trying to find my way in the publishing world. I just signed up for the 2YN course (that's what drew me to the Forward Motion site). I found out about it from a post in our local (Houston) NaNo forum, and came here expecting a one-off project created by some well-meaning individual (and I'm sure you are, Lazette), but I also find this whole community of writers. Yay!
I've completed two novels, and have been attempting to find agents for them. One of them,
If a Butterfly, is a very long (240K words) character-driven novel about people in the path of a butterfly migration, and others who become connected to them in various ways. Part of my pitch for it is that it's like six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, but with a butterfly.
My newest one is a thriller,
The Jagged Man. I'm currently shopping it to several agents. It's closer to the target length at 120K words. It has a feisty heroine, her historian boyfriend, and they are matching wits with an 8,000 year old sociopath. The logline for it is "The Jagged Man is Dorian Gray without the picture, Hannibal Lecter without the jail cell."
I'm in the middle of writing another thriller which takes place in modern times in England and France, and involves induced amnesia, the Norman Conquest, the lost years of Jesus, Roman England, the Bayeux Tapestry, and the Thorn of Glastonbury. It's going to be very complex, and (at the moment) is still somewhat unformed. It has a long way to go.
I tend to write a lot of verbiage (as you can probably tell from this post), and then throw tons of it away when I edit, but the editing seems to take forever (years, if fact). I would probably not do that as much if I pantsed it less, so that been one of my recent goals (preparing more, writing slower, editing less).
I'm looking forward to meeting all of you.
Michael
