Hello, dreamers. Last week was rewarding: I spent the week working on my new short story, and I’m pleased with how it’s progressing. This week will be a transition for me, as I move from preparation into the next phase of my writing year. That said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Unstuck

Work continues apace on the story I’m currently calling Unstuck. After months of spinning my wheels, having a hard time hitting on a story, this one is up to 5,000 words and counting. At the moment, I’d say I’m about halfway through, fast approaching the climax.

What’s most rewarding is that I have a clear path forward. As this story is meant mostly to help me get stretched out, that’s really the important part. Obviously I want to tell a good story, create something engaging that can be shopped around, something readers will enjoy. But even if all Unstuck does is help me get back into the swing of following a tight narrative, it will have served its purpose.

Overall, already this story has been a lot of fun. For a while now, I’d lamented that many of my short fiction pieces over the past six years have lacked many of the elements I enjoy writing most: mystery, horror, explorations of human consciousness. This story has all of those, and all of the themes evolved organically. I love this story, and can’t wait to see where it takes me from here.

Despite the success of Unstuck, however, I’m not convinced I’m ready to begin writing a novel. Thus, I plan to at least attempt a few more short pieces this week. Hopefully by week’s end I’ll be fully prepared to dive into Aquarius 1.

Querying Pioneers

After immersing myself in writing for the past two weeks, I’m ready to get back underway on querying. I plan to spend some time early in the week listening to “The Shit Nobody Tells You About Writing”, while rehearsing my “elevator pitch” and reviewing my talking points.

The goal of this is to get to the point where I’m “conversational” in my book, as I’ve been putting it. As with Wide Horizon before it, I’ve spent a lot of time with Pioneers. I’ve worked on it enough that I know the plot by heart, and could easily talk someone through it from page one to The End. But for this to work, I need to be able to succinctly summarize my story. I need to be able to lay out the key points of the plot and characters while showing what makes this story unique, all within a few paragraphs.

So, this time around I’m going to approach things from a different angle. I’m going to use my talking points as a sort of scaffolding: the bare bones of a query letter. Hopefully, this will allow me to do something I struggled to do years ago when briefly querying Wide Horizon: write a query letter that really sounds like me, instead of sounding like a bland library description of a book, or an over-the-top jacket blurb.

My loftiest goal in querying for this week is to actually have a query letter I’m happy with by the end of the week. Based on past experience, I believe this is very optimistic. But I pride myself on being an optimistic person. And right now, for the first time, I really believe I can do this.

New Content

Last week, I ended up abandoning plans for a Thursday Feature, opting instead to pen a brief piece in memory of Pete Rose, and the complicated legacy he left behind. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you give “Pete” a look, and see Charlie Hustle through the eyes of the city that never stopped believing in him.

For the time being, I’ve found that two posts a week (including this one) seems to be the number that works for me. It’s the maximum number of weekly posts I can do justice to while still devoting adequate time to actual writing. As things currently stand, this website is the cornerstone of my public platform, which makes it crucial to maintain regular posts. However, now that I’m actively writing, while trying to balance that with query prep and getting into a new novel, my time is at a premium.

To that end, for now I will likely continue to limit myself to two posts per week. I may still post additional pieces, spontaneously and without warning. So keep checking back each day. And as always, dare to dream. – MK