done finally
Took a bit of a break. In my defense, during that break, I finished book 2.
Feeling a bit dead inside, which I think is pretty par for the course. Dreading querying like a porcupine quill to the pussy. Very tired and unsure and what-is-art-anyway about it all.
Here’s the thing, though. Somewhere in this blog I said my deadline for book 2 was spring 2025. Guess what time it is? Spring 2025. It’s not actually that impressive that I stuck to a writing deadline, I’m not notably terrible with those, but I am in fact going to cling to this W with white knuckles. The fact that I managed to scrape together a book 2 after book 1 hit the ground with little more than a dull thud and a puff of dust is pathetic… and mortifying… but also pretty admirable. No one wanted it or asked for it, and I’m doing it anyway. I am once again hopped up on hubris, ready to peddle my wares with manic intent in the marketplace of free ideas that has already told me not to let the door hit me on the way out once.
And now I’m back, tired as ever, with a slightly more marketable idea in a slightly more readable package, with a slightly higher chance of catching an agent’s attention… maybe.
I expect much of this blog’s focus for the next few months to be on the world of querying. I wasn’t really querying Don’t Worry anymore by the time I started this blog last May, had already given up that dream, so what a perfect opportunity this go-round to capture just how terrible and ego-shattering and mind-numbing and existentially depressing the querying process is. The publishing world, even to someone who’s barely scraped the surface like me, is not for the faint of heart. Once you start to dig in on things like what actually is genre and what actually is a “good book” and is that the same as a “sellable book” and if a novel gets written in a forest and no one is around to read it, is it even a novel in the first place… you can imagine how hairy it gets. Plus, no point in pretending otherwise, I’m still licking my wounds over Don’t Worry. The thing is, though, you either keep writing or you don’t. Some days I feel like I’m at “don’t” status, but not fully, not yet. Round two, comeback kid, can’t have a sophomore slump if you never had a freshman hit, right?
It’s difficult to parse at this time how successful I feel novel 2 is. And when I say successful, I mean judging it on my own storytelling abilities, not any kind of mainstream marketability. The fact that I conceived this novel with marketability in mind absolutely hurt the final product, but I’m not sure how much, and I’m also not sure how much I was able to eventually buff the majority of that out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what I think are the best and most interesting parts of it are likely the parts that will turn a lot of agents and potential readers off. It is interesting, though. I think it has a unique perspective that, while somewhat controversial, is still quite empathetic to the overall human experience. Then again, I would say the same about Don’t Worry, and look where that got me.
I like the characters a lot. This novel is populated with complex, weird, unsavory, sexy, competent, crazy, unpalatable women, most of whom are kind of bad and mean. But I really love all of them and their difficulties and their rough edges and how sometimes they are bad people, and some of them feel bad about that, and some of them don’t. Again, this isn’t actually that different from Don’t Worry. I’ve said before that writing DNA is very strong, and I am making an excellent case for that claim here. There’s even a rom-com-dram-vom! If that ain’t classic saltyfeathers, I don’t know what is.
This isn’t meant to be a full update. Last time I spoke into the yellow void I left on such an intensely dour note, even by my generally dour standards, so I did want to get something marginally more uplifting and exciting front and center, now that I have something marginally more uplifting and exciting to share.
Similar to Don’t Worry, I’m planning on giving novel 2 about a year in the query pan. Between now and then, however, I do expect to keep writing short stories/novellas, probably more similar in tone to Rat on a Horse than Come This Here July. I’m sure at some point, novel 3 will begin to crystalize in my mind and then that will take precedence. Until then, expect to find me here in the yellow void as well as writing what is likely going to be more entries in the woefully underpopulated “goofy lesbian erotica” genre on ao3.