Hello, dreamers. The wait to hear back from queries continues. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t getting a little antsy. But work continues apace.

I have a lot going on right now. Over the weekend I wrote a number of blog posts, one of which will appear on the website for Galaxy Press sometime soon. I’ve been catching up on reading, and will resume comps research soon. And I’m working on a new short fiction piece. But querying remains foremost in my mind. So with that said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Querying Seven Days on Samarkand

Without intending to, I’ve found myself immersed in prep for my next round of queries.

While obviously I still have high hopes that my latest round will yield a request, as I’ve kept saying, it’s never too soon to start thinking about your next round. This weekend I handed my opening pages over to a new CP, whose feedback largely confirmed my nagging concerns. I need to find a way to inject tension and introduce stakes earlier.

As I explained to said CP (his name is also Mike, amusingly), the fact that my story is hard sci-fi places certain constraints on what I can do. For instance, it’s hard to introduce some unforeseen catastrophe early on in the story. This is a space mission, undertaken by an organization formed from the merging of all of Earth’s current space programs. All of that experience and brainpower makes it hard to believe, even eighty light years from Earth, that everything could be derailed by a simple “oops”. Besides that, something went wrong in space and now we’re doomed is a sorely overused sci-fi trope I generally avoid like the plague.

This isn’t a story where a bunch of rubes with no idea what they’re doing try something crazy, and it all goes predictably wrong. This is a story where a group of incredibly smart and talented people do everything right, only to discover no one could be totally prepared for what they’re facing.

So the alternative, which I’ve been playing around with, is to condense the opening chapters. It would remove some of the description of the interior of the Susan Constant, but I can always shoehorn that in somewhere later. While writing this novel, I prided myself on making everything go smoothly early on, in part so the “something’s wrong” part lands harder. But if everything’s going according to plan, there’s no reason I can’t just breeze through it, right?

This week I’ll begin playing around with my opening pages, seeing how I can shave things down to get to the juicy tension and stakes sooner. Once that’s done (and edited), I’ll be able to move on to my query letter. That, of course, will require fresh research into comps. But I’m working on that as we speak.

Inhaling

Over the past month or so, my writing output has slowed considerably. It wasn’t until early last week, when I abandoned my second consecutive struggle story even as I neared the end, that I began to understand what was wrong:

Creative fatigue.

I’d been writing almost non-stop for well over a year. In that span of time, I’ve rewritten the novel I’m querying twice, wrote a large swath of a second novel, and churned out over a dozen short fiction pieces (including the novella I was working on at the end of last year). On many occasions I was working on multiple pieces at once. I didn’t feel the burnout I’ve run into in the past, so at first it was hard to figure out why the words weren’t coming as fast. But I gradually realized I’d just run out of gas.

Matt Inman, creator of the web comic The Oatmeal, said it best: creativity is like breathing. When you create (by writing, for instance), you’re breathing out into the world. But you can’t keep exhaling forever, or you’ll run out of air and die. So now and then, you need to take some time to consume the work of others. To inhale.

So over the past week, for the first time since late 2024 I feathered the brakes. I abandoned the story I’d been banging my head off of, and went back to my daily sketches. Just a paragraph or two each morning. No pressure. The time in the afternoon I normally reserved for writing I spent reading instead. I finished a book I’d been plodding through, and began a new one. I’ve been watching some of my favorite sci-fi shows and films. At last, I’m inhaling, and it feels like it’s working…

Short Fiction

Late last week, I began a new story. Was it because I took my foot of the gas? Was it because I refocused on reading for a few days? Was it something I ate? I have no idea. But so far the story is going incredibly well. It’s flowing better than anything else has over the past month and a half. It’s dark and speculative, and I just love it.

I did get a rejection on a short story last week. But it was a personal rejection, which is at least a moral victory. I responded by subbing the rejected story to another magazine. The waiting begins again…

Upcoming Content

I have officially launched my Substack: Martians and Lasers. If you haven’t already, head to Substack and subscribe here. It’s free, and you’ll get lots of cool content you won’t find here.

For the time being, at least, I’ve decided to continue giving readers a schedule of my upcoming content here on this site. All upcoming posts will be available here unless otherwise noted. That said, here’s what you can expect from me in the week to come:

Friday: “Don’t Listen to Me”

Available on Substack

Don’t miss my latest ill-advised writing advice piece, where I tell writers why they should read strategically.

Sunday: “Dear Sir or Madam“

On Sunday, watch for my latest update on my querying journey, and learn what a query writer does when they run out of agents to query. Spoiler alert: try, try again.

It’s going to be another big week. So keep reading, and dare to dream. – MK