writing – Then They Kissed

Waiting

I think that writing a book might be the slowest way to go about getting a job.

The economic feasibility of said job aside (we all know that authors don’t really write because it’s fun or lucrative), it is an astoundingly slow process. Now, I write fairly quickly* and I’m still knocking out a full length draft in about three months. Self-editing until I’m happy with it takes a couple of weeks, beta readers take a week to a month depending on what’s going on in their lives,** and then there’s the entire rest of the process.

I have chosen to pursue traditional publishing, a famously nimble and responsive industry, because I’m aware of my weaknesses and I would do much better with someone else to handle 90% of the extrovert parts so that I might emerge from my cave with a new manuscript and then take my edit notes and scuttle back into the darkness. If I must do things that require either going places, or talking to people, I will require a very specific list of objectives, someone to ask exhaustive questions of before hand, and some degree of head pats afterwards.***

But the pursuit of traditional publishing means wading into the querying process, which I have come to understand over the last six months, is all of the least pleasant parts of job hunting, plus all of the least pleasant parts of online dating, combined into one activity where the average response time is six to sixteen**** weeks. Oh, and some people might not get back to you, ever.

I’m not going to try and claim that I’ve gotten better at waiting over the last six months; you don’t spend your entire life being bad at waiting and then suddenly git gud just because you sent your soul to internet strangers and are waiting to find out if they think it’s commercially viable.

The thing is, I handle waiting by doing stuff. My “stuff” of choice? Writing.

That’s how I got into this situation in the first place.

So now I’ve written two and a half more books while I wait.

They happen to be sequels to the one I am currently querying, and once the quartet is done, I’m finished with this particular world for a bit, so it’s not like I’ve got a backlog of things to query, but what if I did? What if they were all standalones? The stress of this hypothetical is upsetting, and it doesn’t even apply to me.

If someone does, eventually, decide they like me and my writing enough to work with me, when do I tell them about the looming tidal wave of other stuff I’ve written in the meantime? If the one I sent out today gets back to me in sixteen weeks, I’ll be well into writing The Bookbinder’s Guild at that point.

My choices are 1) continue writing and hope that no one accuses me of using AI***** and 2) idk, explode, maybe?

If no one has written a dystopia about how excruciatingly slow pipelines for artistic validation test the population for resiliency so they can resist the cyborg takeover, you should do that.

It’ll be at least a year before I can get to it, anyway.

Recent Writing

Wayne waved a hand down his body. “I’m not an outdoorsy guy. I’m an indoorsy guy.”

Aubrey smiled at the ground. “Well, thanks. I appreciate you braving the wilds on my behalf.”

“No problem,” he said cheerfully, stepping past her to continue down the track, one hand against the hillside. “I don’t mind visiting the outside. It’s just not my preference, is all. And I don’t have to be all that brave.” Wayne glanced back up the hill at her. “I’ve got you for that.”

What should we talk about next time? Let’s go with… writing advice. Yeah. That will no have no consequences, I’m sure.

Do good, friends.

*Or so I gather from the expressions on the faces of the people I have spoken to about it. The sharp intake of breath and the muttered “Oh, shit,” imply Some Things ™.

**They’re volunteers, as much as I want to loom over their shoulder like an SAT proctor, I’m not a monster, so I don’t do that.

***I can provide my own head pats, I am an adult, after all.

****Before this very day, twelve was the longest I’d seen in a confirmation receipt. I saw the sixteen and sighed. I have no idea what these poor peoples’s inboxes look like, but it must be hellish. When I went back to work after maternity leave, I just deleted my entire inbox; I wonder if that’s ever tempting to agents. Since I’m probably in some of those inboxes, I hope not.

*****Gun to my head, I’m not sure I could figure out what ChatGPT is, exactly. Is it an app? Is it a website? I’ve never been clear on that. I’m the wrong kind of autistic to be good at computers; that’s why I blog like it’s 2005.

Peanuts for Birds

There’s a lot of great things about living in Washington that I will never quite get over. For one, the water is actually blue here. If that sentence made you scoff, then you didn’t grow up next to a river called Big Muddy, and I love that for you. Every summer I go to Indianapolis on a business trip, and every time I get back and drive over the Sound, or the Columbia, or some random river or oxbow lake, I tear up a little bit because it’s so pretty.

For two, the number of crows — which I affectionately call “The Murder Rate” — is unreal. Those lil guys hang out everywhere. And like every good millennial, I aspire to a certain level of witchiness, and honestly, what could be better than befriending the local murder?

My office — this is going to sound unrelated, but it’s not, roll with it — is in one of those wedge-shaped rooms on the top floor of a house with one and half floors, and the window overlooks the porch roof. If I were younger, dumber, or had better health insurance, I could see myself spreading a blanket on the roof and hanging out there more; it’s got a slight slope, but nothing life threatening, even for my 30+ year old knees and budding back problems.

While I was sitting here, typing away at my lil werewolf stories, I noticed that there were a couple of crows — only attempted murder 😥 — who would hang out on the gutter, and I decided that this was my chance, and after copious internet research, I bought some bulk peanuts in their shells, uncooked, and every day I put a handful on the roof, on a wire cooling rack so they don’t roll straight into the gutter.

They were disappearing at a moderate rate, so I was hopeful that success was imminent, but the crafty creatures waited until I was not in my office to consume my tribute, and I wanted to make sure it was the crows before I decided what my next steps should be.

Alas, ’twasn’t the crows.

‘Twas the mountain jays.

If you’re not familiar, mountain jays are like blue jays that wear executioner hoods over their sick mohawks. Naturally, I love them.

Now, they are corvids, so this is not a failure, but they don’t really flock like crows do, so I shall have to scale my witchy aspirations appropriately. Jays are the sort of birds that hang out in pairs and divebomb anyone they think is an asshole, or anyone who gets too close to their nest, and they will take on anyone, of any size, with no regard for their personal safety, which I think is aspirational, personally.

I’m sure there’s room for some sort of urban witch with an unconventional pet flock, and perhaps, one day, that’ll be me. Stay tuned.

Recent Writing

“This will be war.”

Lucas sucked on his teeth and gave a disappointed shake of his head. “That’s a real shame; we’re so much better at war than you are.”

Next time I’ll talk about my tenuous relationship with audiobooks.

Do good, friends.

The Great ReWrite

As promised, let’s talk about the book, huh?

So when I wrote the first book, the one I am now querying, I hadn’t really planned anything for it. I had an idea, I wrote it, and that was that.

Except that there were just a few too many loose threads for me, you know? I had introduced several things that didn’t get satisfying resolutions, and I wanted to follow up on them.

So instead of writing a direct sequel, I took a side character who was in one chapter, and I wrote her story. Also a romance, but it introduced a lot more about the world, the magic, the hows of things, not just the whats. And when I got to the epilogue, I wrote in a hook that leads to the same place as the epilogue in the first book.

But I wasn’t ready to write that story yet, I needed to fill in some gaps, which meant a third book, to connect the dots from “I need a favor.” to “How do you feel about regicide?” so I snagged another minor character from book one, and wrote book three. Also a romance. It fleshed out the overarching conflict, the thing in the background of the first two books that was the root cause of the things that were happening.

These books are all a continuous story, but it’s happening in different places, and follows different characters. Book four brings them all together in one place.

Now, I wanted book four to be a romance, too, which meant centering one relationship. And I happily wrote the first 48k words, having a grand old time, and then I came to a chapter that was POV one of the main characters and I just wilted, because I had decentered that relationship from about chapter 3 onward.

Writing the characters from the previous books was like wearing comfy shoes and the new shoes are nice, and I love them, but man, once those boots are properly broken in, it sure is hard to justify wearing anything else, you know?

So I wasn’t writing a romance anymore, and I wanted to be.

And that meant that I had to go back from the beginning, and look at every chapter and see if I could rewrite it from the perspective of one of the mains. The main doc gained 4k words. My scraps doc now sits at 12k.

It sucked. There’s a lot in the scraps doc that I’m very proud of. Some of it has made its way back into the main doc in one form or another, but most of it is tucked away like a backstory. And that’s fine. The main conflict is between these two idiots, so what the rest of the cast is doing in the background can be implied, for the most part. I’ve kept POV chapters from the mains of the previous books where either 1) the events were too plot-crucial to leave out and neither of the mains were present, or 2) the POV character’s perspective is adding to the interpersonal conflict between the mains.

Of course, I’ve complicated this by needing to resolve the dangling conflict between each of the first three couples, and I’d really like it to end up shorter than 100k. There are other things I can do in this world, but this story needs to be done.

Mostly because I’m super duper over it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, and I want them to be happy (and they will be! Looking at YOU, S&S!), but I’ve got a gaslamp fantasy slow-burn romance about justice and revenge lurking just around the corner and I want to get to it.

A recent writing

Katie smiled almost fondly at the memory. “It was scary shit. You know, you can’t put an IV in shifters unless you also dose us with silver or aconite, and those aren’t long term solutions because of the toxicity, which meant that we were dosing her on the half hour to keep things level, and even then, the first few times she woke up already on fire.”

Next time, I’ll tell you about my attempts to make friends with the local corvid population.

Do good, friends.

Welcome!

Suppose you’re the sort of person who started writing romance novels because you turn to art whenever your life is unhappy or otherwise upset. Suppose you got fired eight months ago and found yourself with considerably more time to write. Suppose you finished your first book six months ago and started querying it. Suppose that querying is a slow, demoralizing process with contradictory rules, unclear expectations, and inconsistent feedback. Suppose you finish two more books while you are waiting and are working on the fourth of the quartet. Suppose that you are still waiting.

Further suppose that you joined a writing server that was randomly suggested on Reddit. Suppose that you met your best writing friend (who has the shockingly poor taste to live across an ocean from you, stunning siren that she is), and with her support, started a writing Instagram. Suppose that you are autistic, and never developed an organic understanding of social media, and yearn for the old school days of posting blocks of text into the void instead.

That was a lot of work, supposing all that. I’m proud of you.

Anyway, here we are, with an honest to goodness blog, here in the big year of [current year]. Welcome.

I am the sort of chaotic millennial who has tried literally every form of scheduling ever developed (do not @ me, bujo people. I’ve tried. Yes I’ve tried the Ryder Carroll method), so I cannot promise you a consistent posting schedule. Nor can I promise you consistent content. The presence or absence of any aesthetic on my part will be up for debate. Not by me, but please, feel free.

I can promise you connection. I can promise you honesty. And I can promise you updates. I hope that’s enough.

You wanna end with something I wrote recently? Too bad, my blog, my rules.

“You will not apologize to anyone for not knowing something you haven’t been taught.”

Next time I’ll tell you about my new piano.

Do good, friends.