If at first you don't succeed...

Along with the rest of the economy, publishing seems ready for its last rites.  The industry's solution  is to downsize, refuse to look at new manuscripts and depend on established authors with name recognition. One look at the NYT bestseller list confirms this.  This skittishness is contagious and  agents have caught it too. So far, there's no vaccine. 

So, instead of stubbornly continuing to subject myself to the query, partial, full, six-months from start to finish rejection dance I've  been doing, I've concluded that for whatever reason, DO-OVER just doesn't do it. In another time, perhaps it could have. In  2009, no. 

I've started a major rewrite to turn it into a (don't gag) romance. That's one  category that consistently sells more books than any other. Escapism, anyone? I've read enough romances to become familiar with the genre's required elements and I'll see whether mine can fly or crashes  and burns. Regardless, I'm happy to be back in Alex and Diego's world. I missed them.