![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2025 Writing Update
Feb. 23rd, 2025 01:34 pmI feel like I'm in this weird limbo where I have to wait for certain things to happen before I can take other steps regarding my writing career.
I've hit pretty much all of the agents I wanted to query; I currently still have 2 full manuscripts out and 3 queries that still need a response. Of the 2 agents who have my full, one of them I'm pinning my hopes on because she tweeted that she wants Chinese fantasy and wuxia/xianxia stories. I've decided that if that agent rejects, I'll immediately move forward with my plan to submit to publishers that have open submissions (Bindery and Penguin Random House Canada), rather than wait until god-knows-when for all the other agents to respond.
I'm not super confident about receiving a response from those publishers (I don't know if PRH Canada has ever published a book they received from their slush pile), so my plan is to use the 6-month period while waiting to see if PRH Canada ever responds to research and prepare for self publishing.
I feel good about my plans, but I just hate how I have to wait until undetermined periods before I can take action.
I've been slowly editing Novel #4, but I just really feel that I've spent too long on this book and I've hit editing fatigue. (It's hard to edit when you have memories of every previous version of the story still lingering in your head.) Also, I think I'm just not good at plotting a murder mystery, and even worse at revising a murder mystery.
It's been over a year now since I finished drafting Novel #5, but I haven't really felt inspired to write anything new. Part of that is probably because I'm not feeling inspired as a reader, either. Traditional publishing has really pivoted HARD to romantasy and low fantasy (as opposed to high or epic secondary-world fantasy, though with lower stakes than the grimdark fantasy that used to be considered low fantasy). I'm sure part of the issue is that I see far fewer book deal announcements now that Twitter sucks, but when I do see book deal announcements for fantasy novels, they just sound...boring. Every romantasy is about fae (or elves). Non-Western fantasy acquisitions seem to have scaled back significantly.
Sigh.
I've hit pretty much all of the agents I wanted to query; I currently still have 2 full manuscripts out and 3 queries that still need a response. Of the 2 agents who have my full, one of them I'm pinning my hopes on because she tweeted that she wants Chinese fantasy and wuxia/xianxia stories. I've decided that if that agent rejects, I'll immediately move forward with my plan to submit to publishers that have open submissions (Bindery and Penguin Random House Canada), rather than wait until god-knows-when for all the other agents to respond.
I'm not super confident about receiving a response from those publishers (I don't know if PRH Canada has ever published a book they received from their slush pile), so my plan is to use the 6-month period while waiting to see if PRH Canada ever responds to research and prepare for self publishing.
I feel good about my plans, but I just hate how I have to wait until undetermined periods before I can take action.
I've been slowly editing Novel #4, but I just really feel that I've spent too long on this book and I've hit editing fatigue. (It's hard to edit when you have memories of every previous version of the story still lingering in your head.) Also, I think I'm just not good at plotting a murder mystery, and even worse at revising a murder mystery.
It's been over a year now since I finished drafting Novel #5, but I haven't really felt inspired to write anything new. Part of that is probably because I'm not feeling inspired as a reader, either. Traditional publishing has really pivoted HARD to romantasy and low fantasy (as opposed to high or epic secondary-world fantasy, though with lower stakes than the grimdark fantasy that used to be considered low fantasy). I'm sure part of the issue is that I see far fewer book deal announcements now that Twitter sucks, but when I do see book deal announcements for fantasy novels, they just sound...boring. Every romantasy is about fae (or elves). Non-Western fantasy acquisitions seem to have scaled back significantly.
Sigh.
