JulyAugust books: 4/6 (Your Perfect Year, which I got for free from Amazon at some point and started reading, like, two years ago. Translated from German.)
Ah, squiders. I opened this to write this post days ago. Alas.
The two jobs continue. And shall for another three weeks. Yesterday I had to do both in person, which was a lot, but it was nice to see my old coworkers and check in with them face to face.
(The commute for the old job was quite long, which was one of the reasons I switched. I can–and have been–walking to my new job. Walking takes less than a third of the time it took to drove to the old job.)
The first two weeks of doing both jobs, I went to my new job, and then came home and immediately jumped onto the old job. But it’s an awkward time period, because while, in theory, I have about an hour and half between the end of the new job and when I need to pick up my oldest from school, sometimes I have to stay later at the new job. Trying to stuff the old job in that time period wasn’t working great, so this week I’m trying something new, which is new job -> errands and chores and stuff -> child retrieval -> old job. That break between the two seems to be helping with my mental health a bit.
But I suspect a lot of the stress boils down to the complete upheaval of my routine, and things just need time to adjust.
Writing hasn’t really been happening, as we talked about, though I have been continuing to send out queries for Book 1. That is horribly depressing, but I did go into it knowing the genre was going to be a hard sell in the current market. I think I’m up to 30ish rejections?
It’s been about a decade since I last queried, and I’ve noticed different trends this time around. Seems like a lot of agents go through fairly quickly and reject whatever they can, and in general I’m surviving those cuts. And they’ll do rounds of rejections, and I’m staying afloat through a lot of them. So I suspect my submission package is fine, and my writing is fine, but they can’t see what to do with epic fantasy right now.
A rejection is still a rejection though.
Even the morning pages have taken a hit through the double job/school starting/everything else madness.
Here are the stats:
June: 28 of 29 days (Started the whole project on the 2nd)
July: 24 of 31 days (worse than I was remembering)
August: 17 of 28 days (also I found an entry I labeled as “April,” so doing well)
Obviously there are 3 more days in August and perhaps I shall do morning pages on all of them! But 20/31 is still less than 24/31.
Admittedly, like we talked about…last week? that email I read threw me a little bit off my groove re: morning pages, but the fact of the matter is that I am still enjoying them, and it’s good to be getting some writing done, no matter how small. I’m switching in some writing exercises as opposed to just prompts, so in theory we’re learning and not stagnating or whatever the scaremongering was on about.
Also pondering my next steps once I finish with the old job and have my afternoons back. Part of me wants to leave the World’s Edge revision on pause. If you remember, the reason we moved onto World’s Edge was because it’s same world, same genre, as Book 1, and hence we would look attractive to a potential agent who could say, ah, here is a consistent writer who we can count on to write more in the same genre. (A lie, but I can pretend.) But now I find myself wondering, if epic/high fantasy really is not selling right now, if I shouldn’t switch to an adjacent genre and see if that works better.
Low fantasy and magical realism seems to be on every agent’s wishlist. And one of the projects I’ve been poking very lightly for the past month, which is the sequel to my story “Drifting” in the Under Her Protection anthology, would fit those genres. It’s modern day, modern world, except the MC’s grandmother lives in an old family home that’s been there long enough that the land–and the magic–have gotten into it.
I’ve written part of the sequel before, but I think making the character younger (right now she’s 23ish, graduated from college and failing at adulting, but like, 16, 17, so I can move it into young adult) might work better. And I had a magic system epiphany while walking to the first job, and it’s always good when you know how magic works in your world.
And it’s been a while since I’ve drafted a new story. Hallowed Hill came out in 2022, and that’s the last full-length work I’ve done that wasn’t a revision of some sort.
Pondering, pondering. Making potential plans for when we’re out of survival mode.
Hope you’re doing all right in your neck of the woods. See you next week!
