Another Kick at the Publishing Cat

These last few days I've been reorganizing my priorities, having made a decision to try one more kick at the cat regarding a novel I finished two and a half years ago.  That novel is Pete's Garage, which is a story about a singer who lost his vocal cords in an accident years before buys an old hotel and transforms it into a practice studio for musicians.  And strange things happen, as more than just ordinary musicians turn up.

The book is humor through and through, and was written from my memories of a place that used to exist in downtown Calgary called Connections.  It was a crummy, ramshackle building where the soundproofing was bad and you could hear the band practicing in the next room over ... unless you were practicing too.  The novel goes back - for me - to the days when virtually every friend I had was a musician.

I am not a musician, never have been.  But I have generally liked them as people, probably because like me money has never been a priority for them.  Mostly, Pete's Garage is a fantasy about how I sometimes think life might be like spent around musicians.

It follows some basic rules for writing.  The characters and motivations are something I know and understand.  The setting is simple, inward-looking and controlled ... virtually every scene happens within or immediately adjacent to the hotel.  Therefore the hotel can really be anywhere.  It's described as "... this side of Jersey Shore facing Arthur Kill," which I don't explain in the novel but can be placed somewhere across the thin strip of water from New York's Staten Island.  But it could just as easily be in any big city.

I'll be talking here and there about getting it ready for sending out to publishers.  It has gone the rounds before, but I'm not convinced its dead.  I'm going to rework some of the first three chapters, pay out the cash and send it to probably twice as many publishers as I did before.  It would be nice if  finally someone were to pick it up and actually read it - and then want to publish it.

Ah, a writer's life.  Soon there will be rejections once more.