The book in the drawer

Orpheus

This is one of those projects I suspect many — if not all — writers have ... the big unpublished novel.

I wrote this complex thriller in 2013, then went away and did other things, then came back and revised it, and revised it, and nine drafts later my agent unleashed it on the world …

Six rejection letters later it was still sitting on my desktop, seemingly unwanted. I forgot about it. Pretended I hadn’t wasted months of my life on this ludicrous project. Did other stuff. Then I dared to show it to a writer friend of mine, who read it last autumn. He really liked it. Then I showed it to someone else, whose opinion I also trust.

She really liked it, too. I concluded I was showing it to the wrong people. People who didn’t seem to mind what was apparently wrong with it — unless there was nothing wrong with it. Does anyone know anything?

Perhaps not.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I am going to give it one more chance. Perhaps Orpheus has a future in some form after all ...

Perhaps it will emerge from the shadows under another name …