Keyan Bowes

I recently finished writing my second YA fantasy novel, with a working title of Joel Thomson and the Twelve Impossible Tasks. It's set in San Francisco, and has selkies, chupacabra, a minotaur, and much, much more...

It was fun to write; at only 50K words, it was a fairly easy run. My wonderful writing group critiqued it; I made the obvious edits after their feedback, and am mulling over the deeper changes they suggested. I also have a couple of reliable readers who are checking it out for me.

What I do, once I have a draft I'm reasonably happy with, is upload the manuscript to Lulu.com instead of printing it. That way, I get something that handles (and stores!) like a book instead of a folder full of paper. I label it DRAFT of course, and keep it in the private section; I don't want it to be considered published. But it is really really neat to have it in this convenient form. I suspect it's only a matter of time before agents are going to ask for manuscripts like that, instead of the box full of double-spaced printout people are still shipping around.

I have to credit my Clarion-mate Nick Wolven with the Lulu idea. He told me that it was the easiest way to get people who weren't actually writing-group members to read a work.

At some point, I'm going back to querying agents. I started, got cold feet, stopped.

It's a lot less fun than writing.