"Getting my novel about a wizard published" by Neil Benson

I am writing a novel about a young female wizard who works for the Department of Homeland security. She and her partner, a former special forces officer, prevent terrorists and terrorist wizards from killing people in this country and destroying our property. You're writing a wizard novel, someone might ask. Sure, I am very familiar with the young lad named Harry Potter. It is imperative to make my story about a wizard clearly different from the Harry Potter novels.

There are other difficult challenges in writing such a novel. When I go into the local library, or to Barnes& Noble's, I see many novels that have a plot  in which the protagonists fight terrorists. To get the reader's attention, most of these novels describe terrorists who are about to blow up this country, the world, or maybe even the entire universe. Al Qaeda is far more successful in fiction literature than it is in the real world. But that's the way it has to be, because nobody wants to read a story about terrorists who hide in caves.

Even if I create an exciting, well written novel, "getting" it published is far from assured.I read that there are approximately a 100,000 books published in this country each year. However, most of them are written by writers who have a history of other published books. Very few literary agents will read a novel written by an unpublished or unknown author.Fortunately, there are small presses who are willing to read the first 20, 30, or 50 pages of a novel written by an unpublished author. Unfortunately, there are many other people writing novels very similar to mine regardless of how unique I think it is.

Why do I spend hours each day writing a novel when the odds of it being published are not in my favor? I write because I enjoy it and it affords me the opportunity to be creative. For me, it is far more fun to write about  imaginary people who are capable of unimaginable acts, than writing reports to enable my corporation to keep the Medicaid project. That's an entirely different story, one that I will never write.