Hello, dreamers. It’s officially September, which means query season is upon me. This is the week: I’ll be diving into the query trenches. I’m as ready as I’ve ever been. At last, I find myself looking ahead at querying with more anticipation than fear.

For me, September also marks the start of novel-writing season. However, there’s no clear deadline for me to begin writing in earnest on Aquarius 1. For now, I’m still stretching myself out, getting ready for the long-innings trudge that is writing a novel. Add that to my resumed short fic submissions, and I’ve got a busy month ahead. I can’t wait. So without further ado, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Querying Seven Days on Samarkand

This is it: on Wednesday, I will be sending out my first round of query letters for this manuscript. I have ten agents selected for what will almost surely be my only round of queries before the end of the year.

It’s been a long, hard crawl just to get to this point. I completely rewrote my manuscript, reworked my plot, then wrote a fresh query letter and synopsis. To say I am exhausted is to indulge in understatement. But it was all worth it, because at last I am truly satisfied with my work. However, the work doesn’t end here.

Once the queries are away, the waiting begins. Some of the agents I’m querying may reject my query almost immediately, but this time around I’m confident that won’t happen. So more than likely it’ll be at least four weeks before I hear anything from anyone. If I’m write about the job I’ve done this time, probably longer. If most or all of the queries take the full eight weeks, that puts me in November, which doesn’t leave much time to send out more queries if I want to revise first. So this will probably be it for this year.

In the meantime, I plan to continue working to increase my profile and generate hype, hopefully attracting agent attention in the process. Among other things, over the coming week I intend to produce an “Agent’s Guide”. A relatively recent innovation, agent’s guides are graphic slides meant to present a novel’s basic points to potential agents through eye-catching visuals. I’ve seen a lot of them floating around, and recently yet another new writing friend convinced me there’s value in making one. And of course there’s another pitch event; not long after I’d decided I’d done my last of them, I found an announcement on Twitter for #SciFiPit, which will occur on October 21. Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in.

Short Fiction

So my struggle story…was a struggle. As of last night, I’d written 5k words and had yet to get to the serious action of the story. It’s not uncommon for this to happen in a struggle story: I often have time locating the plot and drawing a clear line. That’s the whole point: to remind myself of how to do that. I’ll most likely be slashing a lot of what I’ve written so far. That’s not uncommon, either.

However I hit an interesting wrinkle yesterday morning, when a daily sketch turned into the start of a really good story. It follows a teenage boy living in a small farming town in Northern Ohio during an alien invasion. Though I always hesitate to abandon a struggle story, I couldn’t help myself. As of last night, I have a new short fic project.

The project may have changed, but the goal is the same: to write myself out of a hangover and get stretched out for novel writing. Therefore, this week I’ll be working on Bright Lights over Junction. Part of what’s drawn me to this story is it’s really unlike anything I’ve written before. I’ve seldom written contemporary sci-fi, usually set my stories on spacecraft or alien planets, and have barely even dabbled in YASF for years. Given the kind of novel I’m preparing to write, I think there’s value in stepping outside my comfort zone. Best-case scenario, I get yet another short fic manuscript to shop around this fall. Worst case, I still get myself stretched out, and have a fun Halloween surprise for my readers.

Website and Platform

So this Saturday I’ll be formally launching my Substack: Martians and Lasers. Two-to-three posts per week will cover the ins and outs of modern sci-fi writing, from exploring tropes and subgenres to the need for representation and presenting a believable future. I’m also considering posting short fiction, much of which will likely be moved there from this site (albeit with substantial editing). My first post on Saturday will simply be a welcome post, telling readers what to expect. Keep checking back here for more info on when you can sign up.

Also, partly as a consequence, I will be archiving much (if not all) of my short fiction work here on this site. So if you’ve enjoyed my short stories over the years, now’s the time to take one last trip down memory lane.

Aquarius 1

Amid everything else, the jury’s still out on whether or not I’ll do any initial work on Aquarius 1 this week, or what form that work may take. At the very least, I’ll need to complete Bright Lights over Junction first. However, I can feel it coming. I’ve already begun taking notes, composing bits of dialogue and setting pieces. And that has led me to a fateful decision: I will, in fact, be starting over.

Much as was the case on many earlier projects, I don’t plan to simply pitch everything I’ve written so far. Some of it will likely still make it back into the story. But the more I look at it, the more I see real value in starting fresh. I’ve learned a lot over the past year, and a major character swap I’d had planned has turned out to be far more tedious than I’d expected. I really think it’s best to start from scratch.

If all goes well, I may in fact be starting Aquarius 1 later this week, but there’s no terrible rush. I’d consider myself fortunate to knock out Phase 1 before the end of the month. And I know I’ll be more than a little amped up in the initial days after querying.

New Content

This week in my “WIP Wednesday” post, I’ll be getting back to Aquarius 1, and discussing my thoughts on starting over when writing a novel. On Friday I’ll finally be releasing my next “Sci-Fi Reviewed” post, where I’ll be looking at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the wake of its recent 33rd anniversary. I’ll be closing the week out on Sunday with a new “Dear Sir or Madam”, in which I’ll be writing about the “elevator pitch”, and its importance to querying writers. Until then, dare to dream. – MK