Wanderer returns

I have been much absent lately, due mainly to two things, but mostly to my finishing my novel and considering where to try and place it. One editor has seen it, and considers it too short to market successfully. I've already expanded it a little (just a few thousand words), but now I feel a little stuck. Those few thousand words I am confident have improved the manuscript, but they really do feel like the end. It's still a pretty short piece, at just 50,000 words, give or take, but it feels done. Anything more, other than window-dressing (adding, as suggested, a certain amount of local colour to certain scenes), I can't see being able to add without having to create a completely different book.

What I'm interested in, is I know lots of authors out there have lots of finished novels that don't see publication. If you're one of these authors, with a publishing deal and a moderate amount of success, how do you view those past novels? Do you feel any of them are sitting there waiting to be picked up and dusted down (see David Mitchell's Black Swan Green as a for instance), or have you moved on; are they old news? (Roger Morris sounds like he has hundreds of completed manuscripts just hanging around intimidating the elderly neighbours).

Oh, I've also spent the past five months or so working on this, which has just gone live. Nice to finally have something out in front of the crowd at least.

Birthday books

This past Bank Holiday I entered the realms of the thirty-somethings (waves to Aliya and Matt Curran). Along with a nice novel rejection, I also got a couple of books. Two more dissimilar tomes it would be hard to find. The first, which I am reading at home, and only on sunny days, is Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, filled to the brim, Veggiebox fans, with jams, curly kale, potatoes, meat puddings, pig-socks, roly-poly's, stews, honey, berries and other rural delights; the second book was Russell Hoban's The Bat Tattoo, which is resolutely urban and so far--I'm at the halfway mark--is firecracking with brilliance, but is a bit scanty on the food front. There's a fair amount of alcohol though: Jack Daniels, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir. For anyone that hasn't read him, Hoban's post-millennial work puts me in mind of Jonathan Carroll, only without the talking dogs.