The Process Continues

It took me a bit more time and effort than I had hoped, but I've finally gotten moved back down to Texas for the last year of college. Actually, I should have more time to work on my various writing projects now than I did while I was fighting fire in Oregon. Something about living out in the woods and not having reliably stable power kind of screws up anything resembling measurable progress.

Despite the fact that classes have already started, I'm continuing the process of looking for an agent for The Serenity Solution. I have one submission that I'm still waiting to hear back on, and I spent much of today preparing another one to go out, hopefully in tomorrow's mail. This one includes two things I've never had to do before (in my admittedly limited experience): first, I had to trim my synopsis down to two pages. It wasn't as hard as I thought it might be, but it certainly feels... lobotomized. Secondly, I had to come up with a one-paragraph pitch for the entire book, which doesn't give away the ending. In other words, it looks like something you'd see on the back cover of the book. Thankfully, I've already taken a few shots at that in my own attempts at shameless self promotion, so all I really had to do for that was trim it down and make it look a little more professional.

In the course of sharing my triumphs and woes with a friend over the summer, I hit upon a possibly reason why my first two submissions might have been met with polite rejections: they both relied on my selling myself and my work solely through a one-page query letter. Kudos to anyone who can do that, but let's face it: I'm a newbie in this field, and I'm no salesman. I found myself following the train of thought that just about every hopeful author has: "If only they'd take a look at my book..." Well, as it turns out, a lot of agents ask for a writer to send part or even all of their manuscript along with their query letter. The downside is, such agents often take longer to respond, but this is far outweighed by the potential benefit: they're much more likely to actually look at your book. Following this line of reasoning, both of my last two submissions have included parts of my book. The first asked for the first ten pages, and the second requested the first three chapters.

Keep in mind, if your work has any hope of passing the test, it will have to be just as well written as a work that gets sold only by a query letter. The reason agents request only the first part of a manuscript is to see if you can get the reader hooked right from the start. If you can't, they're not going to keep reading the manuscript in the dim hope it will pick up somewhere around Chapter Ten. So, here's hoping I can get the agent hooked with the first three chapters of my own manuscript.

In other news, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what project I want to work on next. I haven't made any progress on the potential sequel to The Serenity Solution, though such a work is planned. One project I was working on over the last half of the summer is another military(-style) sci-fi thriller tentatively code-named "Contagion." I say tentatively because at this early stage, I don't even know if that name would fit it well. I do have some brief character bios drawn up, and some things I'd like to see in the plot. Lately, I've been thinking about going back to one of my old medieval fantasy projects and rewriting it. I've been wanting to do that for a long time, but it got put back on the shelf by TSS. That project right now is going under the guise of "The Bounty Hunter Quartet," with the original project planned as a series of four books (hence "Quartet"). Anyway, I'll keep you updated on those as progress arises.

Next time I post, I'll try to put up some more of the promised information on The Serenity Solution. Hopefully, I can get back to my once-weekly posting schedule now that things have calmed down a bit. "Hopefully" being the operative word there...

Just My Luck...

First of all, apologies about how long it took to make another post. I didn't get my usual days off, so I ended up working for two weeks straight.

On the submission front, some news to report. My second query letter was met with a polite rejection, so now I'm on to the third and fourth options on my list. Right now I'm getting everything together that the various agents want to see. How in the world I'm supposed to summarize a 179,000 word novel in two pages is still beyond me; it took me an hour and a half just to trim a quarter page off my original summary to make it fit within a 3 page limit for the first agency I submitted it to. Anyway, hopefully, my third submission will be in the mail by tomorrow, and the fourth by next week.

I was trying to work on a sequel to my finished novel, but just my luck, all the ideas I've been able to come up with are for a completely unrelated book. In fact, I'm thinking I might actually try to teach myself screenwriting so I can sell the idea as a movie. But this is all just in the brainstorming phases right now, there's nothing definite set up with that. I think my brain needs a break from the Serenity Solution "universe," because try as I might, I just can't get myself to focus on it. And there's about twenty other projects I'd like to be working on. Yeah, just my luck.

Fanfiction.net Link

While some of my close friends and family might be familiar with how I write and what I write about (when I'm not working on The Serenity Solution, anyway), I realize that most of the visitors to this page probably have no clue if I can even string together a story. Due to the fact that I want to keep any possible problems with publication rights to an absolute minimum in the event I can get this novel published, I can't share parts of The Serenity Solution itself.

I find that one of the best ways to keep my skills sharp is to work on fanfiction. Fanfiction, of course, is creating an original plot within an already developed setting, world, or universe, and often using already established characters. This alleviates the burden of having to create new settings and characters, and allows me to simply work on creating a solid plot.

At the end of this post, you'll find a link for my profile on Fanfiction.net. From there, you can browse the stories I've written, in case you're interested in how I write. I've completed a couple Star Wars stories, and one based on Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, which was also a television show. I started one based on the Halo games, but haven't finished yet due to more pressing projects (and I didn't plan the plot out very well before I started; I need to find the time to actually rewrite it).

Feel free to leave comments on the stories at Fanfiction.net, or you can do the same here on this post. Enjoy.

Fanfiction Link

Now It Gets Real

Most of you probably don't know this, but two weeks ago I mailed my first query letter to a prospective agent, regarding representation for The Serenity Solution. This came after a month of getting my manuscript as ready for submission as I possibly could, and another 2-3 weeks of searching for agents who I thought would be a good fit for representing the novel.

Yesterday, I got the response back from the agent. It was a form rejection. Basically, "Thanks for your query, but your project doesn't interest us at this time. Good luck in the future." On the surface, it seems like it would be pretty depressing, but I'm choosing to look at the positive aspects of it.

First, by daring to send a query, I put myself ahead of the vast majority of writers out there. I got over the fear of rejection and I let someone else see what I can do. This is one of the first steps in the transformation from "writer" to "author." I'll never sell a book if I don't let anyone see it.

Second, it's keeping me grounded in reality. Sure, it would be great if I got an agent for my first book thanks to my first query letter. But then that could give me unrealistic expectations for the long road to publication ahead.

Finally, it's helping me to learn more. Not necessarily about what I did wrong, if I did anything wrong to begin with (a single form rejection by itself usually doesn't give you much information to go off of), but it is forcing me to explore other options. Mainly, I wrote a second query letter, changing up my approach to better fit the new agency that I'm querying. The more I do this, the easier it will hopefully be in the future.

People have told me they're sorry I got a rejection letter. As much as I appreciate their sympathy, I'm not sorry I got one. Every author has gotten at least one. Most have gotten many, many more. I look at it as part of building my experience. Plus, if I ever need to start a fire and I run out of kindling, the paper will be handy...

Today, I queried another agency, this time by email. Hopefully, I won't have to wait two weeks to get a response back, but we'll see. Of course, I'll keep updating this blog on the process, whether I move forward or have to go back to square one.