Hello, dreamers. It’s now been two weeks since I sent my first round of queries. They say the waiting is the hardest part. I’ve been dealing with it by telling myself that this early on, no news is good news. And by looking ahead. As I always say, the work of an aspiring writer is never done. With that in mind, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Moving On

Over the past week, I began the “Pioneer Sessions”: a planned months-long effort to revise the course of my series of novels to account for changes made over the course of writing The Ursa Frontier. Thus far, this effort has helped me locate some of the important questions I need to answer, and begin building a new creative framework.

In the midst of all this, I began a new project, which I hadn’t anticipated.

And Every Day After began organically over the past several weeks. The first stirrings were a series of daily sketches in which I began writing about Randall Holmes, and several other Pioneers characters. Initially it was scattershot: I was hopping around, different time frames and settings. But all the stories had one thing in common: they all took place after the first novel.

The result is what will become a series of short pieces, mostly following Holmes but also checking in with several other characters from The Ursa Frontier. My intention is to use this project to bridge the gap between that novel and the next, showing how the lives of the characters develop and diverge as humanity fans out through the cosmos.

At present, I’m not writing this with the expressed intention of publishing, though I won’t rule it out by any means. At most, I’m currently planning to reserve it as a sort of perk for my beta readers: a privileged look into the lives of the characters they’ve come to love. First and foremost, this is for me: a chance to learn for myself what happened to the colonists of Samarkand, and what lies ahead.

Querying The Ursa Frontier

It’s week two of my query process. No rejections yet. So far, so good. I guess.

This is a frustrating point in the process for me, because for the first time I truly feel paralyzed. I already have a number of ideas for further improvements I can make to The Ursa Frontier. And I’ll surely get the chance to try them, as it’s considered good practice to edit between each round of queries. However, I’m currently at least two weeks away from the earliest point at which I can expect to hear anything back.

It’s unlikely that any of these first agents will be interested in even seeing my full manuscript, much less offering representation. But the fact remains that I’ve sent my work out for their review. My fear is that if I make any notable changes to any part of the manuscript currently out on sub, it will look like a sort of bait-and-switch. Thus, I’m forced to regard any portion of the MS I’ve submitted in a query as effectively “frozen”. So any changes I might want to make anywhere within the first four chapters (yes, one of the agents asked for the first four chapters) must be either delayed or carried out in a separate file, which sounds needlessly complex.

Knowing what I want to do and being unable to do it is like having a persistent itch I can’t scratch. It’s aggravating. Part of me wishes all my first-round agents would send form rejections today, just so I can move things along. But I have to be patient. And I can be. I can be patient. Of course I can. Who says I can’t?

In this regard, And Every Day After has been a godsend. Something to do with my idle hands to keep me from taking a sledgehammer to my MS before I hear back from anyone.

But thoughts of The Ursa Frontier are intrusive. I’m currently playing around with what would be an earth-shaking alteration to the novel. If I pull the trigger on this, it would completely change my querying, even requiring a complete rewrite of my synopsis. It would require a lot of work, and I’d have a painfully narrow window to complete it.

At the moment, this project, which I’ve privately dubbed “Castle Bravo” (my nuclear option), is purely speculative. Confined to purely structural experimentation and notes. But if I’m going to do this, I’ll need to start within the next week or so. Deliberations over this project will likely soak up a lot of my writing time this week.

Short Fiction

Even as I wait to hear back from agents regarding my queries, I’m also waiting to hear back from the “Writers of the Future” contest this quarter, and I still have a story on sub with Analog. I’m doing a lot of waiting these days. It’s fine.

Though I would like to dive back into some of my short fiction projects, these have ceased to be the focus of my writing efforts for the time being. Henceforth I’m going to return to my usual routine, in which I devote a single day of the week (Sunday) to working on short fic. I still have a number of interesting projects extant, and I’m looking forward to writing around a bit, playing with them and seeing if anything shakes loose. But April is fast approaching.

For those unfamiliar with my writing routine, each year I work in phases, devoting certain months (or seasons) to specific types of projects. I generally begin the year working on short fiction almost exclusively, as much of my time is absorbed with querying (in past years, this was mostly research, and following other writers’ querying to get a pulse on the market). I devote the final months of the year to novel projects, save a brief pause in October where I return to short fic. Summer is devoted primarily to research for my next novel project.

As for spring, the months of April and May are where I begin looking for my next novel project. Generally, this involves reviewing the current state of the Dotiverse, and the planned novels in the series. Over the course of these two months, I review my concept notes, and anything I’ve actually written on the project thus far. I usually conduct what I call “Test Writings”, in which I try actually writing scenes or dialogue to see if I feel I’m ready to take up the novel.

At the moment, I’m regarding And Every Day After as a form of test writing. It’s me working my way into a new project, proving that I’m ready to write this. Hopefully, by the start of April I’ll be ready to start revising and fleshing out my notes for the next novel in the series, and the adventures of the Pioneers can finally resume.

New Content

So this week, I’ll be running another “Sci-Fi Reviewed” piece as my Thursday feature. I’m still working my way back into my regular posting schedule, and have yet to decide exactly when each month my features will fall. Please bear with me as I figure things out.

Unfortunately, I have an unpleasant announcement to make: given recent developments in the writing world, I’ve decided not to resume my “Flash Fiction Friday” posts for the time being.

For those who are unaware, this past week the writing community, and the publishing industry at large, was shaken by the revelation that Meta (the parent company of Facebook) had used an illegal online database of pirated literature to train its AI in writing. The Atlantic published a helpful search engine to allow writers to see whether or not their work was part of this massive theft. Turns out, one of my self-pub works was included.

WordPress offers the ability to track views on all of a writer’s posts, including countries of origin. Over the past several years, I’d noted periodic pulses of unusual traffic, which led me to suspect I’d been the victim of piracy. Now, I have confirmation.

This Wednesday, in place of my “Pioneers Sessions” post, I’ll be making a post on the effects of online piracy on the literary world. If you’re a longtime reader and enjoy my work, I strongly urge you to read it. Until then, dare to dream. – MK