March 2024 in Review
Hello Funny People,
The Sleepers Wars: Book One Alpha Wave by Jonathan Maberry & Weston Oches
Gator Country by Rebecca Renner
The Year's of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro
Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
After the whirl of last month, I hardly expected my birthday month to be an eventful one. Yet, it turned out to be quite fun indeed.
Report from the Query Trenches
While it took me longer to complete than last month, I managed to send out a total of thirty (30) new queries this month.
I'm sure you're all thinking, "Wait a minute, Ian. I though you said you were going to keep things limited to 10 queries a month? Why the sudden jump?" One word: rejections.
I sent out the bulk of these queries over the Saint Patrick's Day weekend (most on that very day, in fact). Then, partly to my chagrin, partly to my relief, I got about seven rejections over the course of the week of the 18th, nearly all from this recent batch of queries. Several came in on the 18th, a couple came in on the 21st (my dad's birthday). So, my old habit of immediately resubmitting something that was rejected kicked in. The minute those Rs came in, I was scrolling through my database looking for more agents to pitch to and sent those out, many the day I received a R. And then some of those came back with fast Rs too. One agent I pitched one of my manuscripts to rejected it the same day I made the submission. So, naturally, I submitted that manuscript to another agent.
When these things happen at such speed, of course, the numbers add up fast.
Don't get me wrong though. I'm not upset by this. This is part of the process. Besides, I had a feeling my fantasy novel was out of vogue at the moment, so the fact that so many people keep rejecting it fast doesn't surprise me. And you can't take this personally. If the agent doesn't think they'll be avle to sell gour manuscript at the moment to a big publisher (that is their job, after all), there's nothing you can do to change their minds on that fronf. You just have to keep rolling with the punches. As far as I'm concerned, it's their loss. But, it also doesn't mean I'm going to give up on my project either. It's good, and I know it.
QueryTracker, the only web-resource I use in this process at the moment, regularly sends out notices informing account holders (the basic version is free), when agents who use their site to accept submissions open to queries AND (broadly), what they're looking for, genre-wise. Those emails have been handy to check against my own database for names I knew weren't open back in January and new names I didn't know about back then.
This month, however, I opted not only to continue querying my fantasy novel, but I also decided to send out a few more queries for the Space Opera. Understand, I still haven't heard back from the agent I got the full request from, but when it comes to querying, it's always best to hedge your bets. So, that's what I'm doing. It seems as though agents (based on Manuscript Wishlists I've seen), are more hungry for Space Operas than fantasy. That sucks, of course, but that's the caprice of the marketplace for you. As I said last month, the point of having all these manuscripts is to get an agent; which one achieves that aim is less important.
As of now, I have a total of twenty-eight (28) still active queries out there still being considered. And with April here, it won't be long before I add to that total.
#AmWriting: The Novel Arena
Things have been slow on the portal fantasy as of late, much to my personal irritation.
When I began, I thought I'd switch the viewpoints back and forth between my two central viewpoint characters from chapter to chapter. Then, after seeing how short some chapter would be, I reconsidered given how short some of the chapters would be. Only recently did I again reconsider and switch back to my initial conception of the novel. As a result, I've gone from having seven (7) chapters to five (5) chapters to nine (9) chapters to twenty-two (22) chapters.
I think I've at last settled on the form the novel should take, but I'm still feeling my way through it.
In the meantime, I've returned to working on the revisions for my neglected second fantasy novel. It's been pure joy being back with this set of characters, including my long-time collaborator, Boltstone.
Revision is always much more fun than drafting; when you're drafting, you're putting down something imperfecf, but when you're rewriting, you're making that imperfect thing bettter. For the most part, I've been working to clear out the passive voice (very little of which made it into the first draft, to my credit), and clearing away the filler words (just, that, really very, actually, etc ), to bring the word count down at little to give myself wiggle room. At the moment, it looks as though I might end up cutting nearly 9000 words on the first pass, but I've only just reached the middle of the novel. Once I finish this round of rewriting, I have two.major developmental overhauls I want to put in place
1) Add Futher Interludes. At first, I only used this device of veering away from my main story to probe the mind of the book's second protagonist. However, given my tendency to under-describe, I realized I could use these interludes to also world-build this corner of my fantasy world by showing (always better than telling), what other people who live in and around this place do.
2) Rewrite the Last Three Chapters from Scratch. I knew in first draft that I'd made a mistake with those final three chapter by breaking away from the pattern I'd established throughout the book (mainly because I was eager to finish this book and could see the end in sight). In the time since concluding the draft, I've figured out how to amend my mistake. And I plan to amend it. To my credit, only having to rewrite 3 chapters compared to rewriting ⅖s of the book I wrote before this because they were so terrible is a sign of improvement. If nothing else, craft-wise, I'm improving on that score.
#AmWriting: The Short Fiction Front
I did indeed complete my swan song short fiction piece. Unfortunately, to my great chagrin, it didn't end up being a novelette. Instead, it wound up as a short story. A long one (6k), but a short story nonetheless. It seems as though I've trained myself for so long not to write a story to that length that, even when I try to, I still can't do it. In a way though, this is a good thing. While the story is indeed a long one, it's nonetheless short enough to be considered a several markets I'd be gladdened to receive an acceptance from, including Clarkesworld, Apex, F&SF, BCS, and Hexagon. It's unlikely, of course, that any of these major venues will take it, as my past record illustrates, but it can't hurt to attempt the submissions.
I also made the decision to return to another old idea set in this same world and rewrite it from the ground up. That story will more certainly be a short story, and if I do it right, it should pan out well. We shall see of course.
Miscellaneous
As I mentioned at the start of this post, this was my birthday month. I'm officially 31 now, and so far, it's not too bad. My family and I had a dinner at a local Mexican restaurant to celebrate (arguably the best place to have a birthday dinner if only for the free tequila shot they give you at the end of the meal). After emptying two pitchers of frozen margaritas we were all...quite happy afterwards.
As far as gifts, the best part had to be the books.
First, my brother completed my hardcover collection of Brandon Sanderson's four secret projects from last year by giving me a copy of The Sunlit Man. I also received my copies of the newly released Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison and the newly rereleased reprint of Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury put out by HarperVoyager in the UK.
He and my sister also gave me—as has become tradition—two new t-shirts.
The first one reads: WRITER: BECAUSE BLEARY-EYED LUNATIC OBSESSED WITH IMAGINARY FRIENDS ISN'T A JOB TITLE.
The second one reads: WRITER'S BLOCK: WHEN YOUR IMAGINARY FRIENDS WON'T TALK TO YOU.
Despite my issues with writing this last month, I have managed to keep up with my reading. And this month's reading has been, to say the least, eclectic.
Military SF at its punchiest. Theropod aliens. Super-powered super soldiers. Living light straight from the stories of Jirel of Joiry. An explosive start to this new series by Maberry and the late-Oches. I'm not sure how many books will follow or how Maberry plans to proceed with his collaborator and friend now gone, but I'm invested and would love to see the series continue. Fingers crossed 🤞
I've been looking forward to this book for a long time because I'm lucky enough to be able to call Rebecca a friend by correspondence. How best to describe it though? Imagine if Truman Capote had written a true crime book about poaching in the everglades that combined the nature writing of Rachel Carson and the native folkloristics of Zora Neale Hurston, and this would be the result. Narrative nonfiction at its best.
The first volume of Caro's projected trilogy in five volumes about the life and times of the 36th POTUS. This volume covers his life from his childhood in the Texas Hill Country to his first failed bid for a US Senate seat prior to WWII. Even if you don't come away liking LBJ as a person (and he is quite difficult to like), you will come away understanding what drove him to be the person he became.
I've been looking forward to reading this one since it came out last year. Baldree brings us back to the world he created in Legends & Lattes for another adventure with Viv the Orc. She isn't the same person we knew though. Here, she's younger, brasher, and eager for a fight. However, we do get a glimpse into where her ideas of retiring to run a coffee shop might've come from as her time in the seaside town of Murk introduces her to a calmer way of life. Crisp dialogue, warm-hearted humor, vivid muscular description—Baldree reminds us all why we fell in love with his work all over again.
I'm also looking forward to what the outcome of the Nebula Awards will be. This is my second year as a voting member of SFWA, and many of my choices made it from the longlist to the final ballot this go-around, including works by my colleagues P.A. Cornell, Renan Bernardo, Ai Jiang (longlisted in 3 categories this year and nominated in 2 categories), and J. Diane Dotson, whose YA debut The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern from Android Press, is up for the Andre Norton Award. I tend to vote for people who I think a) deserve recognition for their efforts and b) whose careers I know will benefit from the award. All the people listed above fit those bills (imo), but we'll see how the chips fall.
Finally, I'd like (again) to congratulate my long-time friend by correspondence, Alan Mark Tong, for achieving a major milestone this month.
10 days before my birthday, Alan sold his first piece of fiction, and I couldn't have been prouder of him. One of the truly universally beloved figures in the online #WritingCommunity (the rest of us run our faces too much to be beloved), Alan has worked so hard and so long to gain traction in his career. And after a lot of ups and downs, he finally succeeded. May it be the first of many to come.
— IMC 🙃
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