Hello, dreamers. Having fully recovered from my illness, I finally got back at it this week, both running and writing. And both went…slowly. In both regards, it’s clear it’ll take time to get back into the swing of things. But I’m working on it.

We’re now almost halfway through the month of May, which means I’m starting to feel the crunch on my next round of queries for The Ursa Frontier. However, though I have a lot of work ahead of me, first and foremost I have some questions to answer regarding the direction of this project. That said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

Querying The Ursa Frontier

It has been eight weeks since I sent out my first round of queries, and the responses are trickling in. So far all three have been rejections, but as I’ve said, that was the expected outcome. After any round of queries, it’s good practice to revise everything; after all, clearly something didn’t work. And of course I’m already well on my way with that process.

However, I have run into a snag. Last week I completed another sweep, wrote and revised a new chapter, and expanded several scenes. And despite all that, My word count still sits below 80k. I’ll explain more this weekend in my next “Dear Sir or Madam” post, but believe it or not, short word count isn’t always a good thing.

You see, under normal circumstances, it would be good to have a debut novel that clocks in below 80k. However, right off the bat I’m telling agents my novel is A) hard sci-fi and B) multi-POV. Essentially, I’m telling them this book should be on the long side. If it comes in too short, they’ll wonder if I’m rushing the story. And frankly, that’s not an irrational fear, based on how things are going.

Ultimately, I’ve begun to worry I’m trying too hard to squeeze more word count into this story. I risk slowing the pacing to the point where everything plods along. And for a sci-fi story promising action and alien dinosaurs, that could be extremely bad.

So for the first few days of this week, I plan to step back and reassess. I’m going to review my notes (I’ve made pages of notes through this process). I’m going to make the remaining changes I’ve planned. Then I’m going to look at the path forward. At the moment, I think the best way to make use of all the extra real estate I’ve freed up by splitting this novel is simply to add more plot. As is the case with most of my novel projects, originally I’d had a lot of material to flesh out the story that either never made it into the pages, or was cut in editing. Enriching the interiority and providing more insight into characters is certainly good, but if that’s all I do to flesh things out, I run the risk of bogging things down with exposition.

At the moment, my plan for this week is to write at least a few additional chapters, fleshing out the plot. If I can get the story up to around 90k or so (which will probably take at least three new chapters), I’ll feel better about paring down some of the exposition and interiority. I intend to revisit several of the sci-fi novels I’ve read over the past year and basically dissect their plots, to sus out the pacing and determine where I sit. Then, I’ll be ready to forge ahead.

As it stands, I’m already rethinking the ending. After all, this was originally intended to simply be the first half of a four-part story. Seeing it now as not a part one and two but rather a complete story has me feeling I’m not ending things in a sufficiently auspicious note. Yes, the intent is for this novel to lead straight into the next one. But every novel should be able to stand on its own. I need to make sure this one does, before I go and start querying it again.

New Content

This week, I’ll be adopting my new weekly posting regimen. My new schedule is intended to increase readership, by providing most of my new material on the weekends when readers have more time to sit down and consume media.

While my “Writer’s Desk” and “Pioneer Sessions” posts will continue to drop on Monday and Wednesday respectively, my “Thursday Features” will become “Saturday Features”, and all future “Dear Sir or Madam” posts will fall on Sundays. So keep an eye out, and as always, dare to dream. – MK