I now have three partials out to agents, which puts me at a crossroads as far as my completed novel goes. I could continue to query additional agents, but my gut says to hold off. See how this goes.

Which means that now, I wait. For quite awhile, probably. Months, probably.

So, the next question becomes: what do I do in the meantime, in my “for me” writing time, while I wait?

I’ve got two other novels outlined that feature the same protagonist as my finished ms, but I am inclined to go off, right now, in a completely different direction. This is partly by choice. I want to add another basket for my eggs. But also, a new character introduced herself to me over the weekend, and tonight, I met one of her companions.

I’m going back to them in a minute. But in the meantime, I am actually feeling a bit nervous, because I don’t know where these two are going to take me.

Contemporary literary fiction, being post modernist, is often stitched together by absurdity; absurdity serves as a kind of surrogate plot. I don’t aspire to be a literary novelist, however. I want something much simpler (ah, yes, “lower,” lol): to tell stories. I want to tell stories and get out of the way in the telling.

So I have this woman. She’s divorced, I can see where she’s landed, I can hear her voice. But I don’t know her story. That’s what makes me nervous. It would be easy to fall back on absurdity, and it’s funny to find how tempting that is, at my age, this distant from my twenties & from college. I’m having to make myself not write, as I hunt about for the story, lest I begin filling up pages with absurdity, which will pass the time, but what good is passing time when the end of it all is a select all/delete?