Good news is bad news

I'm half-way through revisions on The Early Fox. I am appalled at how slow it is going.

At the same time, I am learning so much. I've not really engaged with a text at this level before. I've revised at the top level, when major plot points were obscure or dramatic arcs were broken, and I've spent time in the trenches of sentence-level fixes, but what I got from my beta reader is in the space between those. That was where her notes were focused. And that is the stuff her notes gave me confidence to attack.

And one of the things I'm seeing is that I've gotten stronger as a writer, with this being my tightest book so far. And that I've finally found the heart of the series. This just works better; the mystery format, the smaller-scale setting, the personal fears and doubts, the pressure and suspense. All of it works better for me than the over-the-top Indiana Jones type stuff I originally aimed this series, and this character, at.

I really should have been remembering how much I liked Travis McGee and Jim Chee,  Spenser and V.I. Warshawski. Not Lara Croft and Sydney Fox. (Well, okay, I like them too. But maybe that isn't what I like to write.)

Especially now, when the amateur sleuth has gravitated towards people who have technical skills. Sometimes directly adjacent to police work (such as forensics, for Temperance Brennan), sometimes not. And, probably due to increased female readership (and female writers), not just an increase in female-led stories, but a shifting away from primarily fisticuffs to more social skills.

The genres always bleed into each other, as do the characters. V.I. is about as hardboiled as they come.

In any case, this works for me, and I would love if I could just crank them out. And I think there's a market (as much as there is a market for anything, in this attention-deficit, AI-flooded present).

Trouble is, the other books aren't a good fit. That leaves me in awkward position.

***

I haven't had time to do full research on re-staging into "mystery-suspense," but a brief session with Publisher Rocket. I thought the metrics on Space Opera would be better, but turns out they are both flat for growth, the average earnings are similar, but the competition is actually a bit stiffer in Space Opera. In the right category of Mystery you might only have to sell a hundred books to get into the top 10.

But then, Project Hail Mary currently dominates in both categories. Which tells you a lot about how firm Amazageddon is with this category and keyword stuff.