Hello, dreamers. As of last night, I’ve begun prep for my next round of queries. I was pleasantly surprised that only one of the agents I’d planned to query is closed for the summer. After selecting another agent to round out the group, I’m ready to work on my materials.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve begun changing gears, shifting into a new project. That means a lot of research while working on short fiction and assessing all outstanding projects (something I try to do every few months). But while it feels good to have generated a fresh batch of short stories, the next novel project is paramount. Because in a way it impacts my querying.

“So what else are you working on?”

Years ago, while prepping to query Wide Horizon (I ultimately decided not to), I read a lot of articles on the query process. One in particular claimed that the first question any agent will ask after offering to represent an author is “So what else are you working on?”

They do this because, as I’ve mentioned before, a modern literary author isn’t looking to sell just one book. They’re hoping to form a long-running, mutually-beneficial business relationship with you; one that will hopefully mean many more marketable books and short stories. They want a series. They want collections. They want film rights. And they want all of that not just for them, but for you.

So, before you try to query a novel, one of the most important final steps is to start working on something new. After all, it’s easier to sell the first novel in a book series when the next installment is already complete (or nearly so). It shows them you’re serious about this, and ensures that both of you will have something to make money off of while you write the next book or two.

As such, this year my annual decision on a new novel feels more critical. After all, my eventual agent will want to sell my next book, too. And the one after that. Needless to say, amid all the work I’ve done with The Ursa Frontier over the past few months, the temptation was there to dive right into the next novel in the series. It’s mostly complete, and drafting of the subsequent installment has already begun.

But in the end, I went with Aquarius 1 for one simple reason: The Ursa Frontier could strike out.

I don’t believe it will. I’ve been told repeatedly it won’t. But even I’m not optimistic enough to embark on such an audacious undertaking without even considering failure. And if this novel does whiff out with agents, it would be pointless to try querying the next novel in the series. It wouldn’t work without The Ursa Frontier, and I’m not sure how well it would go over if I told my eventual agent they’d have to publish a failed novel before the one they just bought into.

Aquarius 1 offers a lot of advantages right now. It’s set within the overarching “Dotiverse” most of my recent works are set in (including The Ursa Frontier), which means it could open the door for me to publish the Pioneer novels somewhere down the road. But it’s set in parallel, not series. It follows a very different plot with very different characters. And I dare say it’s incredibly original.

Now all of this is not to say I’m making all my decisions on my writing direction based on marketing. I swore to myself a long time ago I would never do that; it’s a great way to produce canned, unoriginal fiction. I find Aquarius 1 intriguing. It has a female protagonist, two out of three POV characters are female. One of them is a mother (I haven’t had many parents in my stories, partly because most of my work was written before I became one myself). It’s a classic space adventure, a mission of exploration. It’s exactly the kind of story I’ve always wanted to write.

But the fact is, if The Ursa Frontier fails to turn any heads, I’ll need something like this waiting in the wings. It’s entirely possible that Aquarius 1, not The Ursa Frontier, will be my first published novel. Only time will tell. But if nothing else, this underscores one of the sea changes I’ve made to my writing over the past year:

I’m serious about this. No more long absences. No more hiatus. No more allowing myself to get discouraged or distracted. This is who I am. It’s what I do. And I will do whatever it takes to make this work. – MK