Dillemas....

Today I came across a dilemma I thought I had gotten past many times before. But it has reared its head again.

I discovered a whole host of new Agents' blogs out at blogger.com. One of them started to talk about Young Adult Fantasy, and portals. My ear perked up.

But it quickly fell down. The agent was saying that its general consensus of editors and agents that the story line of: Child in our world accidentally steps into portal into new world, where something happens and the child becomes a hero is DEAD, DONE, BURIED, PLEASE-NO-MORE.

This sucks - my book has a lot of that concept (except for the becoming a hero - My characters, while maybe heroes to each other, are not heros of the world. Oh, and my characters willingly CHOOSE to go to another world, not accidentally. And my other world is not a fantasy world in the sense that there are castles and knights and elves). I do use a portal, and there are swords, magic, and arrows involved.

So the question (or dilemma) becomes, do I write for publication (What I think the agents/publishers want) or do I write what I want to write, and damn the publishers?

If I stick to the "I write what I want to write" then my stuff needs to be so outstanding, so well written, and so original that it grabs and HOLDS the agents/publisher/editor's attention. If you ask me, personally I don't think my story OR my writing is so great as to do that over the 50 a day other queries that come to these poor agents. I am sure there are a lot of english-department-of-Harvard-Degree people that are writting things much better than mine.


But I feel that if I write for what I think the market wants, I am losing myself. Or rather, I am writing for the wrong reason. When I write my novel, I am putting part of my soul into it - the part of my soul that saw this imagery in my head and translated it to english words to put on paper. Maybe, I feel that not writing what I want to write is selling myself short.

I think that the best thing for me to do is write what I want to, and be true to myself. I fear that this will indeed drop my chances of landing an agent/publisher for the Afterlife series. But then again, I don't really expect that the Afterlife series will be my "breakout" series anyway. I think, if anything, it will be the 5th or 6th novel I write. While that sounds like a lot of writing, it is, but what else would I be doing?

EDIT - I have decided to keep my normal god given name, unless my agent (if I shall e'er nab one) advises me to do differently.