Hello, dreamers. So, last week I passed an important milestone: for the first time this year, I got to write “The End”. It’s always a big moment for a writer: no matter how many times you write it, there’s a sense of satisfaction that comes with completing a story. Good or bad, you saw it through to the end. And that means something.

I spent the rest of the week on daily sketches, but found it frustrating. Though I liked what I was writing purely in terms of the prose, none of the story ideas really clicked with me. More and more, I began to realize I’m ready to move on. Aquarius 1, here I come. That said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Querying Pioneers

At this point, I’m halfway through October. Agents are re-opening for queries after their summer hiatus, and I’ve spent roughly a month taking notes and working on how to sell my novel. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

So, this week my first priority is buckling down on query prep. I devoted some time near the end of last week to refining my elevator pitch and my talking points, changing things around based on what I’d head on “The Shit Nobody Tells You About Writing”. This week, my goal is to have a completed query letter, one I’m happy with, by the end of the week. It may sound unambitious to hope to crank out a 300-350 word document in a week, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

My intent is to use my talking points to construct an impactful elevator pitch, and then use that as the foundation upon which to build a query letter. Once the query letter is done, I’ll be passing it off to a few fellow writers for a critique. I will then move on to my synopsis, which I hope will be less painstaking. All the while, I’ll be checking on my target agents, seeing if any of them who’d closed submissions have re-opened for the final months of the year.

My goal, as it currently stands, it so fire off at least five queries by the end of the month. As this will occupy much of my efforts for the rest of this month, I’m planning to make periodic posts documenting my querying journey. You, my valued readers, will be invited along with me, as I work to push Pioneers out into the world.

Aquarius 1

By the end of last week, I finally felt it: that itching on the back of my neck. It’s a familiar feeling: a story begging to be written. I’m not sure I’m fully ready yet, and may attempt a few more daily sketches early in the week (with the temperatures plunging, I won’t be spending as much time outside). But I’m already feeling the beginnings of the story, forming in my mind. I can see and hear it, and that’s where it starts. It’s coming.

Over the coming days, I’m going to review my notes. In order to write this story, I need to immerse myself in its world. I may not get to actual writing this week, or perhaps even next week. But this story is begging to be told. And I’m eager to tell it. Once writing begins in earnest, you can look forward to the resumption of my weekly “WIP” posts. They may not be posted on Wednesdays as they once were, partly because I’ve found Wednesdays tend to me my days of lowest readership. But they will happen.

Turn of the Century

Lately, I’ve been taking a look at my various outstanding projects. It’s something I often do when preparing to throw myself into a new novel project: see if there’s anything that jumps out at me, something I can catch on and write through, before a big new project starts eating my life.

That has led me back to arguably my biggest outstanding project: a series of novellas I’ve collectively titled Turn of the Century. For those new to my site, Turn of the Century is a series of short works set in the common fictional universe of most of my fiction, which I call the Dotiverse. The stories follow the lives of men and women living around the dawn of the 22nd century, providing a snapshot of human life in a future where humanity’s conquest of space has begun in earnest.

I spent the early months of this year plugging away at the project, before I hit the brakes and opted for a full reboot of my writing efforts. But for those anxiously awaiting this first glimpse into the future of Pioneers, your ship (or spacecraft) will soon come in.

Over the coming week I plan to spend any spare time I have amid work, life, and other writing projects to going over the series of novellas. At present, I plan to release the first story, Endurance, around the holidays. From there, I will release subsequent stories through the midpoint of next year, ideally releasing the last one or two at the height of summer reading season.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be making a post introducing prospective readers to the series, its lore, and its installments. This will be a stand-alone post; at present, there are no plans to reintroduce my weekly “Self-Pub Sunday” posts. For the time being, pursuing traditional publication for Pioneers will be my primary focus. However, be advised that I will be revisiting my current self-pub library over the coming month, and may remove some titles from publication. So if you’re eager to get your hands on some of my published fiction, there’s never been a better time to head on over to Amazon. You can browse my current and upcoming self-pub titles here.

New Content

As I mentioned in my post on Saturday, this week I’ll be starting a brief series of posts on my research into the history of music. Our journey will begin this week with a post on how music became global, and the innovations that led to that. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed researching them.

Aside from the aforementioned upcoming posts, I don’t have anything planned. Though I’ve felt a bit guilty about that lately, I was encouraged by something Bianca said on the latest episode of “The Shit Nobody Tells You About Writing”: make time in your life to write, and let nothing get in the way of that. By and large, my posts on this site are meant for communication: a way for my readers to connect with me. I don’t consider these posts part of my actual writing, and do not count them toward my daily word count. My time is limited, far more so since my life changed dramatically three years ago. In the end, I can be a writer or a blogger, I can’t be both.

To that end, for now I will continue posting sporadically. There’s no need to plan this out, at least not right now. But keep checking back each day. And as always, dare to dream. – MK