Choosing the hills to die on

The Old Races deal has been this very exciting saga, and I’m going to use it to illustrate how, as a professional writer, you ought to choose your hills to die on. Also to tell you about how cool my agent is, and the sorts of things that go on behind closed doors while you’re trying to work out a book deal.

So this is how it went (cut for length; LJ readers can click through above):

What Jenn and I had heard from Matrice on HEART OF STONE hadn’t sounded particularly promising–they weren’t sure it was fantastic enough for the Luna line or romantic enough for another Harlequin line, but Matrice wanted to hold on to it a little while longer and discuss it some more. So I figured, no sale there. That’s part of why I pitched the book to Betsy Mitchell at RMFW.

Came home from the conference and Jenn called that Monday to say, “You and I have to talk.”

And I’m thinking, oh, CRAP, did I really step on agenty toes by pitching at the conference? Augh! I’M SORRY I’M SORRY DON’T HATE ME I’LL BE GOOD! when Jenn says, “Luna’s made an offer on Heart of Stone.”

We spent a little while going, “Buh!” after that. :)

What they offered was a 3 book deal, mass market paperback, back to back to back release at the end of 2007 and in early 2008. Financially it was a solid offer. They’ve treated me *extremely* well at Luna, so that was obviously an highly positive aspect. They wanted all the books by June 2007, so they could all be put out rapidly. (I said, “What year is it now?” Jenn: 2005. Me: I can do that.)

What they wanted: to sex it up a bit. To, in fact, have Actual Sex as part of the storyline (you should’ve heard Jenn say that, too: it clearly had capital letters. Actual Sex.). Not necessarily in the first book, but in the trilogy, certainly. Actual Sex. More sexual tension, and Actual Sex.

And this is where you decide whether this is the hill to die on or not. Whether this kind of change to a book is going to do something to it that will make it something other than the story you want to tell. HEART OF STONE had already been through two significant revisions–one in which I wrote over a hundred pages of new material, and cut at least forty pages, another in which I cut another twenty-five or so pages. A great deal of work has gone into that manuscript. Whether I want to tackle another major rewrite is an important question, and could very well be a hill to die on. It was, at the very least, a hill to consider. I said, yes, I think I can do this, and Jenn had a couple of titles that Matrice and the other editors had suggested as research material, so I went out and bought and read them. (I actually got to buy and read romance novels as research! Do I have the most awesome job, or *what*?)

And then I went back to Jenn and said, “Hoo boy.” Because the romance industry’s idea of sexual tension is not my idea of sexual tension. In one of the books, the sexual tension was the hero and heroine’s tingly bits tingling every time they looked at one another, although when they did have sex it at least had character development and story motion involved in it. In another, the hero and heroine jumped into bed in about chapter five and had enthusiastic sex for the rest of the book. This was not, in my opinion, sexual tension, and I told Jenn I saw some of what Matrice was after (a deeper emotional connection/awareness of attraction/etc on the characters’ parts), and I could write a sexier story and up those quotients, but it was not going to look like a romance novel. I put forth early Anita Blake as an example of what I thought of as good sexual tension, and said if Luna was good with me writing it my way, we’d have a deal.

So Jenn went back to Matrice with that, and this is where my agent is worth her weight in gold. It was really *really* important to me that we not have any crossed wires on this, because I really very much did not want to say, “Sure! I can do that!” and have them expect something that looked like a romance novel and me turn in something that looks like my writing. I’d rather not have the deal than have the expectations be screwed up, and if I couldn’t turn in what they wanted, we were all better off with no deal.

The upshot was Luna asked me to revise the synopsis with an eye to the emotional conflict changes that I’d make, and to rewrite a scene to bump up the sexual tension so they could see what I’d do with it. I did that, though by that time I was pretty nervous about the whole thing, and I wasn’t *entirely* happy with the scene rewrite, because, as Jenn said, it was out of context at that point. Still, although I thought it was kind of stiff, I also thought it showed I could do what they were asking, and it got sent off to Matrice.

By that juncture I’d committed to the rewrites anyway. I’d brainstormed with people and discussed the story and thought about it a *lot*, and I could see a lot of ways that the rewrites would make it a deeper and more exciting story (no pun intended). So by then I *really* wanted them to buy it, because I was going to do the rewrites anyway. :)

And now they have!

I think it’s incredibly important as a writer to be able to say, “Hm, ok, can these changes be made without diminishing the story *I* want to tell?” and be open to those possibilities. Sometimes the answer’s going to be no, but in this particular case, not only do the changes not harm the story, I think they’ll improve it. I think it’s really interesting, with this book: it’s been through huge changes already, and is going to go through more, but I really feel like the core of the story hasn’t changed. I’m still working on the same book, with the same plot and the same characters. It’s just that … everything else has changed. :)

But then, you know, that’s a good argument for why it’s titled HEART OF STONE. *wink* :)

I’m deeply, *deeply* appreciative toward Jenn, who did a lot of legwork on this, and who was really there to play the go-between and make sure everything was clearly understood before we went forward. I suspect this was not at all a difficult deal in the scheme of things, and it didn’t even actually *seem* difficult to me, but it was certainly the most complex deal I’ve had, so having somebody on my side to keep an eye out was a really wonderful thing. I yam a lucky writer. :)