Is It or Isn’t It?

Somebody asked me the other day about the headline on my website:  “Not Just Another Lost Gold Mine Story”

Well, beyond the obvious answer (it isn’t!) … there is a story behind the comment. 
I had entered The Fever in a contest where the winners would be considered for distribution to movie and television producers. Hey, I thought, The Fever would make a great movie! In fact, when I was first attempting to write the story, I seriously considered doing it as a screenplay instead. But in the early days I was just as successful in avoiding writing a screenplay as I was in avoiding writing a novel.  

Anyway, one aspect of this contest was that they would give you feedback on your submission. They did. They pointed out that it looked like a good story and all but it seemed to be “just another lost gold mine story.”

“Great,” I thought to myself, “I knew I should have rewritten Freaky Friday instead!”  

Oh, I’m fairly pragmatic about such things, and saw this feedback as more of a problem with my submission materials rather than the quality of the work itself. I think submissions like this are a bit like grant writing, there is an art to it and it is a skill I haven’t quite mastered, along with writing book blurbs and good headlines I guess. 

 But there you have it … I wanted to emphasize the fact that it ISN’T just another lost gold mine story. The hero Sam realizes he has become stagnated and his isolation is holding him back. He finally figures out that he HAS to change or he’ll never find what he’s looking for.  

I think that’s good advice … I probably need to change the headline and blurb to something new before too long.  

Thomas Fenske http://www.thefensk.com