The Novel and the Contract
Over Christmas 2010, Redefining Evil was declared a winner of the fantasy contest and was offered a formal contract in January. For most of 2011, I brutally revised RE mostly under my own guidance and nobody else's. The story really began to lose the last of its ties to the manga. I would take out some 30-page sections and very little of the dialogue or action would remain untouched. The dialogue, which had to that point tried to maintain some of the lightness for the manga, was parsed down to suit the tone of my narrative.
For the first half of the year I furiously revised, expecting to turn my improvements back to my editor, get them back, and do it all over again.
Fast-forward to mid-October, and PYP was planning on cutting down on its contracted authors, having over-burdened themselves with manuscripts that "needed too much help." I was waiting for word from a handful of slushpile editors that had taken on my novel to read and critique.
Around November 2011, I was informed my contract with PYP was being removed.
It ultimately came down to the word of slushpile editors that believed my novel needed too much work to be dealt with at the time.
I was never particularly angry; I wasn't overly crushed by this news. Let's face it: I was a 20-year-old doing very well in college, learning a lot about, well...everything. To have had this kind of intimate work with editors on my own writing was and is an invaluable experience, especially while I am still so young.
I am not someone with single-minded interests in one thing or another. I'm an award-winning artist; I've got a lot of experience in research and applied psychology; I write when I feel like it and I write what I feel like writing.
What's more is that the fact that this opportunity did not come through is not, in any manner of speaking, the end of Redefining Evil. I have always said this is the project I will never really let go. I will always come back to it. I firmly believe it will be something, someday, to a lot of people.
Yeah - writing this is mainly for my own sake. For validating my experience with the editing/publishing industry, for validating my worth as a person and a storyteller. But I think it's also important to declare my strength. I will not stop writing. Ever.
