{"id":123,"date":"2013-06-28T20:09:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T20:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chimneyrabbit.com\/?p=123"},"modified":"2013-06-28T20:09:01","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T20:09:01","slug":"back-in-the-saddle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/?p=123","title":{"rendered":"Back in the saddle"},"content":{"rendered":"

So this week I started to write my next book – working title, Tales of the Ancient Rabbits<\/em>, a sort of stand-alone prequel to The Chimney Rabbit<\/em>, set in the same world, but in a different country and with a different set of main characters.<\/p>\n

I had pondered whether my next project should have been to cut The Chimney Rabbit<\/em> into two separate books, but I decided that if I thought a shorter book would be more likely to get published, I should write something specifically to that length rather than try to hack an existing book in two. I could have made it work, but… I think it’s better to be moving forward than looking backward. Tales of the Ancient Rabbits<\/em> is planned to run to between 30,000 and 40,000 words, considerably shorter than the 70,000 of The Chimney Rabbit<\/em> and 77,000 of The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I haven’t completely forgotten my first book, though. Last weekend I did send The Chimney Rabbit<\/em> out to some more agencies – probably its final round of agencies before I put it away in a digital drawer and concentrate on future projects. They say it’s incredibly rare that your first book gets published, which is a shame, because I have a lot of belief in that book. If The Chimney Rabbit<\/em> doesn’t find an agent or publisher, it also means that The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice<\/em> will never be published, either – which is also a shame. Especially since I think it’s a better book than my first one. Should I have written a sequel to an unpublished book? Maybe not. Maybe it didn’t make commercial sense – but it was a story I wanted to write, and when it comes down to it, I’m more interested in telling stories than anything else.<\/p>\n

So, onto my next story. Typically, though, after several days of immersing myself in Tales of the Ancient Rabbits<\/em>, I woke up this morning with an idea for a completely different story, with characters and setting and themes all fully-formed in my over-active brain. I’ve written down a bunch of notes (I use Evernote<\/a> for notes – I like to use my Nexus 7 for note-taking, and it works really well on a tablet) so I’m ready to get started on it when I’ve completed my current project.<\/p>\n

Apparently it happens quite a lot that someone will contact a writer and say “I’ve had a great idea for a story – why don’t you write it, and we can split the proceeds?” This always amuses me – coming up with ideas is the easy bit! The hard – and time-consuming – part is getting the words down on paper.<\/p>\n

I could come up with ideas for books two or three times a week, but that doesn’t do me much good when it takes months to write a single novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So this week I started to write my next book – working title, Tales of the Ancient Rabbits, a sort of stand-alone prequel to The Chimney Rabbit, set in the same world, but in a different country and with a different set of main characters. I had pondered whether my next project should have been… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37h7H-1Z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}