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Guess who's back
Sep. 25th, 2025 11:33 amI've taken a long hiatus from Novel #4, but I'm finally back to editing it.
I took a long break in part because I could tell, due to a combination of depression about traditional publishing and having edited the story too much, I had hit editing fatigue and wasn't able to edit it effectively. But the other part was that 2025 has actually been a crazy busy year for me, due to the fact that I moved, I've had a lot of exhausting family drama, and I became a lot busier at work because of my promotion (which I haven't been happy about).
There's a clear night-and-day difference between editing the story now and trying to edit it while I was in the grip of publishing/story fatigue. I've had so many ideas for improving the execution of the story and I've been able to identify a bunch of plot holes. I think the investigation aspect of the mystery has definitely been streamlined and the pacing improved.
So far, I've reread 70% of the story, editing as I go along (mostly for consistency, improving dialogue, things like that). My goal is to finish rereading the book by the end of this weekend. However, there's still more work to be done after that; I have a few plot holes that I need to figure out how to fix, and I also want to add some scenes/chapters to the book to flesh out character backstory and the world and give the book a stronger theme.
My (relaxed) goal is to finish editing this book by the end of 2025, but given how energized/motivated for this project I've felt lately, maybe I'll finish before then. Who knows.
I'm still not sure if this has a shot in the query trenches, since books that have been on submission before are generally tough sells for agents unless they've been substantially rewritten. And I honestly don't know what counts as "substantially rewritten." I have never rewritten any of my novels from scratch, and while Novel #4 definitely has the most changes out of any book I've edited, the key scenes are still the same; it's the connective tissue that's been reworked. And *on top of all that*, traditional publishing is still romantasy-heavy in the fantasy space. So who knows.
In terms of Novel #5, I've accepted that it's dead in the query trenches. I submitted it to Penguin Random House Canada, and I plan to submit it to Bindery during their open submission period in October. But the annoying part is, only one of Bindery's fantasy imprints is open this October, so if I get rejected by them, I'll have to wait for the next submission period some time next year to try other ones. It all just makes it hard to know when I can throw myself into self-publishing the novel.
I took a long break in part because I could tell, due to a combination of depression about traditional publishing and having edited the story too much, I had hit editing fatigue and wasn't able to edit it effectively. But the other part was that 2025 has actually been a crazy busy year for me, due to the fact that I moved, I've had a lot of exhausting family drama, and I became a lot busier at work because of my promotion (which I haven't been happy about).
There's a clear night-and-day difference between editing the story now and trying to edit it while I was in the grip of publishing/story fatigue. I've had so many ideas for improving the execution of the story and I've been able to identify a bunch of plot holes. I think the investigation aspect of the mystery has definitely been streamlined and the pacing improved.
So far, I've reread 70% of the story, editing as I go along (mostly for consistency, improving dialogue, things like that). My goal is to finish rereading the book by the end of this weekend. However, there's still more work to be done after that; I have a few plot holes that I need to figure out how to fix, and I also want to add some scenes/chapters to the book to flesh out character backstory and the world and give the book a stronger theme.
My (relaxed) goal is to finish editing this book by the end of 2025, but given how energized/motivated for this project I've felt lately, maybe I'll finish before then. Who knows.
I'm still not sure if this has a shot in the query trenches, since books that have been on submission before are generally tough sells for agents unless they've been substantially rewritten. And I honestly don't know what counts as "substantially rewritten." I have never rewritten any of my novels from scratch, and while Novel #4 definitely has the most changes out of any book I've edited, the key scenes are still the same; it's the connective tissue that's been reworked. And *on top of all that*, traditional publishing is still romantasy-heavy in the fantasy space. So who knows.
In terms of Novel #5, I've accepted that it's dead in the query trenches. I submitted it to Penguin Random House Canada, and I plan to submit it to Bindery during their open submission period in October. But the annoying part is, only one of Bindery's fantasy imprints is open this October, so if I get rejected by them, I'll have to wait for the next submission period some time next year to try other ones. It all just makes it hard to know when I can throw myself into self-publishing the novel.
