I’ve pretty much known what was wrong with THE TRIAD SOCIETY since I finished the first draft of the manuscript. It’s taken all this time to articulate what’s wrong with it, but there is a reason I did not launch immediately back into revision. There was something seriously wrong. I knew it. And I needed to be able to say what it was before I started revising.

The setting sucks. You would think this to be a hard thing to have happen given I’m writing TTS in the same setting as WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING. I’ve already built the setting, how could it suck? Well, for starters, that book isn’t published. It’s written but there’s nothing to say it’ll ever see the light of day. So here I am writing another story assuming that WCONH has already been read? Ridiculous. Not that I did that too much because TTS is set on the opposite side of the Crescent Sea. It’s a pre-steampunk society. Very different from Andaria in the east.

But that wasn’t all. There were scenes from my original concept of the story that never made it into the finished draft but should have. Perhaps not where I thought they’d go, but they need to be in there. The pacing is too fast and too many things happen in convenient successive order and all these things could happen anywhere because I haven’t given any consideration to the setting and how it would affect people’s decisions.

In summation? It’s pale. It’s a pale representation of a story that should be flush with depth and description.

I’ve started noting specific instances that I made a mistake and how to correct them. I’m getting exciting about the story again because I think I can fix it and make it awesome and people will love it and that would be awesome. WHEEEE! When I get excited, I start thinking of what comes next in the process. I thought it would be fun (and helpful) if I wrote a query for THE TRIAD SOCIETY and through it up here for criticism. Certainly it would be good to get a few drafts under my belt before I start the process in earnest. (And yes, I’m aware of the query forums on Nathan Bransford’s boards but have had mixed results with the comments posted in response.)

So I began to craft my query. I’ve already done one (terrible) query for this manuscript, so perhaps I could build off that failure. …god I hate querying. All that excitement over getting back to this ms has totally evaporated. I hate writing queries. I am so ridiculously bad at it. The male hero rescues the princess? Really? That’s the trite you want to send in buster? Well no, that’s not really story. Sure sounds like the story. It’s more nuanced than that. Nuanced my ass, you just wrote a rescue the princess damsel in distress story. Get out of here hack.

Sigh. Another reason I want an agent who I will work with for a long time? As soon as I get one, I never want to query again. Ever.

So no, no query for TTS today. It’s for the best. I would not want to violate rule number 1 (only work on one ms at a time and don’t switch until the first draft is complete). Still, I was excited for a little bit.