Hello, dreamers. After a long four months of querying, here I stand, looking forward.

I still have a long road ahead of me, but I feel more prepared to face it. The fear has faded, replaced with hardened determination. As I said in my latest “Writer’s Desk”, I have only two goals remaining for The Ursa Frontier this month: to rework the opening lines, and to come up with a new title. As of tonight, the former is done.

However, as I’ve said recently, this turns out to be probably the worst time of year to be sending out queries, so I’ve stepped back for a while. Thus, this will be my last “Dear Sir or Madam” post for a while, likely at least a month. So I’m going to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve done, what I’ve learned, and what still lies ahead.

The Story So Far

Of all my goals, writing or otherwise, for this year, easily the biggest was to finally start querying The Ursa Frontier. In that, if nothing else, I have succeeded. I spent much of last year deep in research, learning about everything from recent changes to standard query format to market trends. I listened to podcasts, read countless articles. All in preparation for the moment when I’d hit “send” on my first queries.

Starting in early February I returned to The Ursa Frontier for the first time since my initial editing. I made sweeping changes, removing superfluous exposition while injecting fresh interiority. The effort took more than a month; a lot longer than I’d hoped. But I got it done. Then I wrote a query letter, finally coming up with one I liked. And after doing my due research into target agents, I sent out the first round.

Obviously I wasn’t expecting a lot from my first round of queries. I certainly wasn’t expecting a flurry of full manuscript requests followed by agents clamoring to represent me. But not long after I sent out the first round, I began having doubts…

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve read about query letters is that writing one can tell you a lot about your story. At the risk of gross oversimplification, it serves as a very brief summary of your story; you have to introduce the plot and characters, hit the major plot points, and finish by teasing the conclusion. Among other things, I’d read everywhere that if you have trouble summarizing your plot in a query letter, either you’re mentioning unnecessary things or your book is too long.

While I dare say I did a bang-up job on my query letter (other writers who took a look at it praised it), it still felt like I was scrambling to cram all the important stuff into the plot paragraphs. By the end, I felt I’d pared things down to the point where vital plot was excluded. And it was still barely short enough. Since I’d already removed things I felt were crucial to the story, obviously I wasn’t trying to include too much. That left the second option: my book was too long.

The thing is, this had been a nagging concern of mine for years. As early as principal writing on the first draft back in 2017, I’d wondered if it would be best to split this book in half. But I kept telling myself No. This is the story. It’s supposed to be this long. I can’t cut it.

One of the many positives that’s come from the dramatic changes to my writing style over the past year has been a surge in confidence. Now that I’ve taken clear steps forward, I find myself willing to consider things I’d previously dismissed out of fear I couldn’t do it. So, only a month or so after I’d sent out my first queries, I began a massive overhaul: I split The Ursa Frontier into two stories.

Suddenly I was prepping to query a completely different book. When I decided where to split the story, I found the resultant halves were extremely short for works of hard science fiction. But after my work earlier in the year, I had a lot of stuff I’d wanted to do but couldn’t due to word count constraints.

So I began the most ambitious project I’d embarked on since the first draft of this novel. Over the course of more than three months, I expanded the story. I dove deeper into the characters, made them messy and flawed. I got into their heads, enriching the plot with the kind of interiority I’d always wanted to inject into this book. I wrote new passages, then entire new chapters.

The end result was a story that was somehow both the same and markedly different. The plot remains intact (half of it, anyway), but it feels more human, more real. I truly believe I finally have the very best version of this story to shop around.

I missed my spring window for queries as a result of all this, and now find myself in an effective “query dead zone”, but it’s hard to feel bad about it. After how much mental and emotional energy I’ve poured into this story, I owe it to myself to make sure I’m giving this my best effort. And I’d rather wait to query an excellent story than rush out there with a half-assed one.

So, for better or for worse, my query journey is being placed on hold. At present, I don’t plan to resume query prep until roughly one month from now. I may not be able to wait; writing isn’t an exact science. At the start of this year, I’d never dreamed I’d make such sweeping changes to a story that had remained largely unchanged since my initial edits. I hadn’t even anticipated this in the weeks leading up to it. But I’m happy with where I am in writing right now. Never before, in the years I’ve been doing this, have I had this much fun writing during the summer. And I have no interest in messing with that.

I’ve learned a lot so far, but my work is far from over. Until next time, dare to dream. – MK