I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t wait to get my hands on the free version of Sims 4. Anything to keep my mind off all the writing projects I’m working on!
Polishing my DREAMING querY
Show of hands, who here really likes writing query letters?
See, inna da bennningning, I thought I did. Because I love writing emails and presenting my story professionally. Little did I know that the pitch would break me. Is this the villain origin story? Ah the pitch… What can one say? How can one to put this frustration to words? Ever since I started Uni, I realized I am an over-writer. 2000 word essay? Oops, my fingers slipped over the keyboard and I accidentally wrote 4000 words instead. 80% of my University time was spent not writing essays, but trying to trim them down. So you can imagine the frustration when I was faced with cutting down my 78,000 word novel, aka, a 312 book-page novel, into 200 words, aka less than half a page! Call an ambulance! (and yes, for me!). And don’t get me started on the fact that it has to flow well, make sense and entice the reader. Help, I do not know what I am doing. - I sent out my first batch of queries at the end of August. That’s more than a month ago. I have sent two other emails since but not a full 5-agent-batch. Why? Because I want to re-examine my query after having been rejected three times at this point. That doesn’t mean anything of course, since three rejections is very little. Too little, in fact, to know if the problem is: 1. I just wasn’t a right fit for them, 2. They didn’t like the first three chapters or 3. They didn’t like the query. It’s frustrating not knowing which of these three elements swayed these agents to reject. But I believe that anything can be perfected, so I set myself the goal of rewriting my query before the second batch, and reviewing my first three chapters before the third batch. In related news, nobody warned me just how cringe it would be to reread the first chapters after having sent them in. I don’t know if it’s just because of my crippling self-doubt, but from one moment to the next, my first chapters just read so badly! But I’ll take a deeper dive into those chapters later – now I’m focused on the query. In order to rewrite it, I assembled different query drafts, polished them, and then gave them to my family, who then had to rank how likely they were to read the novel based on each query. I got feedback from two people. Yay! Contradicting feedback. … … Yay? Though both readers ranked the queries quite differently and so the feedback was somewhat contradictory, one of them stood out a little bit, so I worked from there, deleting sentences I didn’t like and molding together a solid paragraph from bits and pieces. Then I refined everything down to every minute word choice. Yes, I am a perfectionist!!!
Though I am quite content with this new version (until probably like tomorrow, when I will rewrite it all, again), I still have an issue with my comparable titles. One of them is pretty old. It’s The Neverending Story. But for goodness sake I can’t for the life of me find a novel that's less than three years old where the character falls into a book’s world. I’m starting to even doubt that I should go in the plot-related-comp direction at all. So if anyone knows of a recent YA portal-fantasy or even high fantasy, let me know! In any case, I will be doing research in that direction this week.
If you want to have a look at the query (in progress), here it is:
Getting trapped in a world of her own imagination and battling her demons is not what 17-year-old Evelyn Asherwood has in mind going into senior year. When Evelyn discovers the Alter, a world where she can create anything she could ever want by simply using her imagination, it’s no wonder she prefers it to mundane high school drama. After all, being trained by the mystical people of the dreamlike dimension is no match for real life. Never having felt more alive, Evelyn spends more and more time in the utopian world while boring reality fades to the background. But everything changes when Evelyn’s demonic alter ego, Solyce, appears. Consumed by inexplicable rage, Solyce starts to burn the Alter down and distorts Evelyn’s reality with psychological games and hallucinations, all until Evelyn is unable to tell reality from fantasy. To stop Solyce and save her new friends, Evelyn must gather the strength to stand and fight her own darkness, or give in to the pain and sacrifice herself, killing Solyce with her. I am currently looking for new critique partners for it, so send me a message in the contact form if you would like to exchange queries! End of year progress plaN
As these next few months may be the last where I am completely free to work independently on my novels, I plan to make the most of it.
I will be sorting out all of my novels and really go through them. Since I have technically always been a panster, now comes the difficult time of facing my demons: organizing novels into sequences, beats, and scenes. That means I will be basically reading through all of my projects and organizing them. And I suspect that will take a while. Stay tuned to see what progress I (don’t) make! What about NaNoWriMo?
I still haven’t quite figured out my NaNo plans yet. As a perfectionist, I can hardly not participate, and yet, I already have so many projects in the works. 13 projects, to be more precise, according to my master document. 13 projects of over 15,000 words.
An idea I had was, instead of writing a novel in November, to instead plan, script-write, and film a 0-budget movie for youtube. But for now that’s just an idea. Otherwise, I do have my fair share of ideas for new novels. Sometimes, the issue remains that the ideas are there, the spark is there, but as soon as I'm sitting in front of that screen, my mind just goes blank, and I can’t expand the idea through words on the page. I don’t know, I’ll have to see. Other times, I have project ideas but mentally can not work with them, especially when they deal with heavy stuff. This April for example, I set out to write a novel where the main character looses her mind. The story is very gory and has very dark themes and I found myself unable to write more than a few pages before realizing that writing more of it would really be pretty detrimental for my mental health, which at the time was already almost at an all time low. So I stopped and worked on something else – which I’m glad I did! So yeah, we’ll have to see what I come up with in the next 15 days! No stress at all! TL;DR
As always, here’s my tiktok recap of this week. I’ll see you all next week!
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