In which I look back

It's December.  It's the sort of time when things get reviewed.  Arbitrary as it may be, there are things to review and it's as good a time as any.

So NaNoWriMo happened.  My final wordcount for the month (and the first draft) came in at just over 104,000 words.  Slightly fewer than last year, but the story ends when it ends.  And first drafts are where we find things, no matter how much we think we planned the story in advance.  I found a Khevelese engineer living in the refugee camp with fire in her heart and a refusal to take any crap despite her situation.  I found the story wants to be more of a mosaic, picking up perspectives from all over the city.  And I found the poisoner wasn't who I thought it was, and now the whole story needs reworking with that in mind.

This is why no one ever gets to see the draft I knock out during NaNo.  I reach the end of the month with so many ideas about how I should have been writing the story that there's no point in sending it to beta readers.  They'll get a later version, when I've fixed all the really obvious stuff.

The other thing I did this year was that big ol' rash declaration about sending a novel out to agents.  I managed that, of course.  The queries went out, and whilst I'm still mostly waiting to hear back (it's a busy time of year) I have now had two (two!) requests for the full manuscript.  And that's set against only one flat rejection, which seems like a damn good hit rate to me.  Even if both of those requests ultimately turn into rejections, it's a positive sign that those opening chapters have something good in them.  I'm feeling quite optimistic about the whole affair at the moment.  We'll see how long that lasts.

It's nice to have something to feel optimistic about at the moment.  I never did get a proper response to the email I sent to my MP.  And the world is probably going to end in nuclear apocalypse before I get a book published.  But, you know, if racing the end of the world is what it takes then I'm lacing up my running shoes.

Oh yeah, running.  Really ought to get back to that...

In which I have nothing much to report

It's been a month since I sent out my first queries for the novel.  And of the original six queries I sent, I've so far had one rejection (yay, first agent rejection!) and a whole lot of silence.

This is not a complaint, I hasten to add.  For one thing, the agents I queried were pretty much unanimous in claiming a 6 - 8 week response time on queries, and we haven't even reached that milestone yet.  For another thing, last week was Frankfurt Book Fair which will not only have impacted the reading of the slush pile while it was on, but the weeks before it will have been filled with prep work and now they'll be filled with follow-up.  My query won't be getting read and rejected until the dust from all of that has settled.  So we wait, and we have a little freakout every time the email notification appears on our phone, and we find other things to do in the meantime.

I responded to that one rejection by sending out another query to another agent somewhere else.  I also sent another one out today, just because I'd had a microscopic chat with the guy on Twitter the other day and I wanted to query him before I lost the tweets and couldn't remember who he was any more.  I've also finally gone back to sending out my short stories and acquiring more rejections for those too.  The Rejection Collection is coming along beautifully these days.

And it's only a week until NaNoWriMo!  I have pages upon pages of worldbuilding, and character notes, and story beats, and with luck by the end of November I'll have another first draft that's worth polishing up into something more.  That's assuming we haven't all perished in a nuclear war by then, of course...

In which I review the rash declaration made earlier

So at the start of the year I rashly declared that before another January came around I would be in a position to query agents with an actual, bona fide novel of my own.  And then I went quiet, because getting to that position meant focusing on novel drafts rather than blog posts.

The good news is that all of that work has paid off.  Iron and Gold has been through multiple drafts this year, and I finally reached the point where I'm, well, not happy with it because you can never be entirely happy with a story, but as content as I can be that it's as good as I can make it.  And so I've formatted it properly, and written a synopsis, and written a query letter, and sent it out to a few agents.  Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for the rejections to come rolling in...

Obviously, I hope somebody likes it.  I hope it gets picked up, because I really like these characters and I want to write the other two books that I have in mind with them.  But just in case, I'm going to crack on with other things instead.

Helpfully, I've got NaNoWriMo looming to help with that.  I have a plot in mind, but there's still a certain amount of worldbuilding to be done.  I've got lizard people, and a matrilinear human society, and two different calendar systems, and a not-quite-murder mystery, and a host of characters, but I still need a few more names and things.  And a title.  I've no idea what this one is going to be called yet, but it'll come.

And if NaNo this year gets derailed by a deluge of responses from agents?  Well, that won't be such a bad thing now, will it?