Hello, dreamers. Last week was productive, and unexpected. I spent time not only taking notes for my next novel, but also dug into the querying for Pioneers. There’s a lot to do again this week, so here’s what I’ll be up to:

Pioneers

As planned, over the past week I’ve been listening to episodes of “The Shit Nobody Tells You About Writing”, in preparation for writing my query letter. It’s been highly informative, but it led me to one, seemingly obvious question: what is my book about?

And suddenly it occurred to me that I didn’t have a concise answer.

I’ve spent years working with this story (including all the research and notes leading up to it). I know the plot by heart, know the characters so well they might as well be my friends. But, well, turns out I didn’t really know how to boil it all down. It felt almost like a disservice: all that time and effort to weave together a strong, engaging plot, and now I need to distill all of that to a few sentences.

But in today’s literary world, the ability to quickly pitch a novel is crucial. And every pitch starts with the “elevator pitch”: a brief one-to-three sentence description of your book. In order to sell this book to agents, or anyone else, I need to be able to talk about it. I need to quickly and concisely describe the basic plot, the characters, and the themes behind my work.

So, I opened Google docs, and created a new file, simply titled “Talking Points”. I started by writing out questions someone would likely ask about my book. Then, I answered them. I tried to keep things simple and direct, limiting my responses to two brief paragraphs at most. And frankly, I was surprised at how well it worked. In my field, I’ve long been told that one of my strengths lies in being a good communicator. It felt good to finally transfer that over to my writing.

What’s more, as I wrote out my answers, I realized I could see the foundations of a query letter. My responses felt like the bare bones of what I’ve long been told is a successful query.

Obviously there’s a lot more to do. I still haven’t actually started the query letter itself. And the initial letter is only the beginning, as each letter will need to be tailored to the individual agent it’s sent to. But, for the first time, I don’t find the prospect intimidating. Amazingly, I’m actually looking forward to writing my query letter. And that is a welcome change of pace. For the first time, I find myself more excited than scared by this process.

Aquarius 1

As of Friday night, my character notes for Aquarius 1 are complete. For now, at least. My current plan doesn’t call for any characters beyond those I’ve already sketched out. Over the coming week, I’m going to go over my other notes: setting, tech, biosphere. But those were never really a concern. Science is easy: it’s not made-up, it simply is. That means all that’s left to do is get stretched out.

For those who may be new to my blog, since I’m a huge baseball fan I use a lot of baseball metaphors. In Major League Baseball, starting pitchers typically handle the bulk of duties on the mound. A starter is expected to pitch through about six innings and throw around 100 pitches. That’s a serious workload, but they don’t just go out cold and start doing that. During spring training, starters begin throwing shorter innings, more modest pitch counts. Over the course of spring, they gradually increase their pitch count, a process called getting “stretched out”.

For me, writing goes much the same way. When I haven’t written in a while, it’s easy to crank out a thousand or so words of flash fiction. But to write a novel, I need to maintain a stable narrative through over a hundred thousand words of text. So, before I sit down to write a novel, I need to get stretched out. To that end, over the coming week I’m going back to my daily sketches. But this time, my goal is to write complete pieces. I plan to allow myself to go back to sketches throughout the day, and across multiple days. With any luck, by the end of the week I’ll be stretched out and ready to start writing a novel. And I’ll have a few short fiction pieces to shop around to boot.

New Content

So, last week I finally reintroduced myself to the world. And frankly, I’m surprised by the response I’ve received. Traffic on this site had increased, and I can’t help thinking my reintroduction had something to do with that. It makes sense, I suppose: I’ve seen a lot of stuff recently about how, in today’s literary world, readers must be drawn not only to your work, but to you.

This week, I’m going to resume posting. For the time being, these posts will be irregular, starting with a series on music, which I’ve been researching lately for Aquarius 1. I do have plans to resume some of my monthly posts in the near future, most notably “Sci-Fi Reviewed” and “Science in Fiction”, both of which have been popular features in the past. But going forward, this blog will function more like most other authors’ pages: personal blog posts along with periodic announcements about new projects and offerings. I may eventually offer new free short fiction, but I have no timetable for that to happen. I expect Aquarius 1 and querying for Pioneers to soak up the vast majority of my writing efforts for the rest of the year.

Either way, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me in the coming months. Until then, dare to dream. – MK