Hello, dreamers. Christmas has come and gone. For those who observe, I hope you had a pleasant holiday. But for me, the work resumes. I have a lot to do as this year enters its final days. And I intend to send 2024 off with a bang. That said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Querying Pioneers

I’m on the home stretch. As of this writing, I have only one chapter left to work on, along with the epilogue (of sorts). Once that’s done, I’ll almost certainly have made the last major changes I’ll make to this novel. Surely, I’ll have made my last major changes before querying.

That said, however, I still have work to do. Once I’ve finished the final run-through, I plan to take a day or two away from the story (with New Years coming, that should be easy enough). After that, I’ll be making my final editing pass. I have a few minor issues of continuity to double-check, a couple minor issues with capitalization and word usage. The biggest hurdle will be formatting: after a great deal of consideration, I’ve decided to go through and adjust all the margins to conform to standard manuscript format. It’s a minor issue, and one that may ultimately have no impact on the querying process. But the way I see it, I want to give myself every chance I can get. The last thing I want is for an otherwise interested agent to be turned off by a minor issue with formatting (which pervades the entire manuscript).

Once that’s done, I’ll be diving right into query letters and synopses, as well as revising my list of targeted agents. The clock is ticking, and I still have a lot to do.

Short Fiction

Another week of daily sketches has produced so intriguing results. At present, I have at least two sketches from the past two weeks I’m actively working to expand into short stories.

One of them, currently titled Sand on the Brain, begins with a lone freighter pilot who’s been experiencing a wide range of psychological disorders. Over the course of the story, she learns she’s been infected with a silicon-based virus, which is basically trying to figure out how her brain works.

The second, which I worked on the past few nights, is tentatively titled The Cold Brutality of the Void. It follows an investigator and his partner as they track down a pirate ship that’s been stealing air and water from passenger vessels ferrying people between Earth and Mars. This one has really caught me, as it’s the first time in years I’ve written a detective story, and the first time I’ve written one in a science fiction context. It’s become a sort of exploration of the pathology of crime in space: the detective muses on the casual brutality of crime in space. He also worries that the disconnect he feels from victims is eroding his humanity.

This recent hot streak bodes well for the months ahead. As my longtime readers will know, I often spend time working on short fiction early in the year. And as most of January will be devoted to querying and self-pub works, focusing my actual writing efforts on short subjects should fit better with my workload than trying to push myself back into a novel.

New Content

Amid all the holiday activity and my flurry of writing, I ended up not making any further posts last week. But this week I’ll be back at it. Watch tomorrow for my “Year in Review” post; my first in a while. I’d gotten away from them over the years as I often felt I didn’t have much to talk about. But not this year. I’m back at it with a vengeance, and feel I’ve earned the right to toot my own horn.

On Friday, I’ll be posting my next “Dear Sir or Madam”, updating readers on my querying efforts, and starting with some encouraging news from the past week. I’ll also be making the promised next “Self-Pub” Sunday, where I’ll be talking more about the upcoming second installment of When We Left Earth, as well as announcing a January book sale. So keep reading, happy New Year, and dare to dream. – MK