Kairos Progress: Whoa Nelly.

When I first started After Hours, my goal was to keep a weekly diary of the progress I'd made in getting Kairos published. My plans were to try traditional publishing first, so that you guys could see the querying process firsthand,  since many readers on Wattpad don't know how to find an agent or find the process intimidating. If/when traditional publishing didn't work out for me, I'd move onto self-publishing. 

Well, all of that went out the window relatively quickly when Wattpad approached me about representation. An agreement to allow them to shop Kairos to a partner interested into turning the book into a digital short snowballed into something much bigger. I'm not going to go into lots of details here because a) I'm not sure if I'm allowed to, and b) none of these deals are set in stone yet. All I can tell you is that there's multiple deals involving the book, and as of last week I'm submitting chapters of Kairos to an actual publisher for editorial revision. 

It's really exciting. It's also really scary. And while I'm thrilled that there's been real interest in my book, I'm also kind of disappointed because I set out to teach you guys a thing, dammit! I wanted to show you the typical process a book goes through and instead this happens. It's like trying to show somebody how to make a cake and a souffle comes out instead. 

But! Now that I know exactly what the heck is going on with Kairos, I hope I can start making regular updates here again. And the first thing I want to talk about is something I've learned while dealing with publishing: Keeping your narrative simple. 

K.I.S.S. = Keep It Short, Stupid

When I first came up with the idea for Kairos, I envisioned a whole series. Many books. There were so many possibilities. But as I started to research publishing, all of the advice I read made one thing abundantly clear: Do not, under any circumstance, mention to a publisher that this is book one in a series. 

On the whole, publishers do not like series. It makes sense from a business standpoint. For someone to enjoy book #2 in a series, they're probably going to have to read book #1. So each new book in a series presents diminishing returns. 

With that in mind, I set out to pack every last idea I had for a time travel dating service into a single novel. And the result was a hot mess. 

If you're focusing on a novel that's under 100k words, you should probably stick to no more than three plots: The main goal, and two subplots. Any more and you risk the narrative becoming over-complicated. (Hi, first draft of Kairos.) Any less and your book will probably feel sparse and boring. 

There's a real temptation to try to make your book everything to everyone. Don't. You're not writing some holy text here. Pick out the messages and motifs that are the most important to you, and work on those. Save everything else for another book. There can always be another book. 

In my situation, my editors responded that they loved the idea of the book and wanted to turn it into a series. Yes, flying in the face of all my research -- they wanted a series. They also thought the book was too complicated to follow and thought I should save some ideas for book two ... I swear, I could've cried. I think I might have cried, a little, and it was the day before Thanksgiving here in the U.S., so my fiance was a little confused when he came in and found me sobbing into a bowl of mashed potatoes. 

Don't sob into your mashed potatoes. Keep it short.