J.Q. - Ch.8 - Sneak Peak

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A small part of Ch.7 edited as a fairytale.

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The second edited version of Janus is finally complete.

This ongoing project has been in my life for more than a year. It has broken any previous records of mine for amount spent on any written story of mine. I kept writing Janus in different places in Greece, in every possible hour of day or night that I can remember. There have been times that I went back and deleted chapters because they drove me to dead ends. This may be the story that it mostly wrote itself. Whenever I wanted to go somewhere else, the story dragged be back to the crossroad that I took the wrong path and I started all over again, discovering the story as if I were its first reader.

Early on, from the first chapters, it has been a story of monumental rejection and deep inside I loved this crazy story a bit more. Being a ghost writer for quite some time, I enjoyed being paid and my drafts getting hundreds of thousands "likes" and "shares". (I didn't mind at all that my real name wasn't attached to them, because that was my job, to write and sell the content along with giving up on any rights on it.) I hope that everyone comes at a point when he/she can really live that enthusiastic acceptance; it's deliberating in a way. Once you get a taste of it, it doesn't matter as much as before to become a "viral thing", a "trending story" e.t.c. It's similar to sex. When you are a virgin all that you can think of is to have sex. Once you had sex, you become picky in time; you want to enjoy good sex. If this is not possible, you prefer to have no sex at all. Or have in any case you feel like it! Hands down, I agree on every consensual sexual act among adults.

So after Janus was rejected by all of my friends who preferred my funny short stories to that weird, complicated, absurd story that made no sense to them, I took it to a paid creative course. I already knew the forms, the myths, learned the plot lines, read the books and had decades of writing behind my back so most of the things told, I knew them before start writing Janus. I had been studying the rules of writing for years. I went for a professional opinion on this specific type of writing. The tutors were great and kind people. To make a long story short, they saw Janus' opening and told me that this would never be a story for a great audience. It wasn't in a clear genre with a big follow-up group, had no potential for commercial profit e.t.c.

It wasn't heartbreaking. I already had the input from my beta readers and I had the tools after the workshop to write a proper query and a synopsis. I searched for agents that were looking for works at a genre similar to Janus' and went for it. Janus actually is a hybrid of genre's with the ones prevailing being those of scifi/cyberpunk and neonoir. Go figure... while most people do not know what cyberpunk and neonoir are at the first place, not to mention reading them. But it's like love. It doesn't matter what other people think as long as you love it.  ---->

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