Holiday blogging schedule

After this gets cleaned up, or when I feel like it, whichever comes last. Merry Freaking Christmas!

Status reports: Faerie Noir story–The holiday twilight zone crept up on me, so I have to wait a week to send out the R&R to the other agents who requested fulls but never got back to me on them. Well, I don’t have to, but it seems polite to wait at least until the 27th. Still waiting to hear back from the agent who asked for it, but evidently the agency is having email issues. That agent more or less said nothing was happening until January anyway, as I recall, in his Twitter stream.

After that I’m in a bit of a bind. I have a list of agents who turned the original sub down, but the R&R is substantial enough structurally that it might qualify as new to them. On the other hand, there were still a few queries I had yet to make when I did the R&R, and I almost feel as if I should finish out that list. They weren’t low-priority agents either, quite the opposite–they were the ones I wanted to save for when I had everything just so. In fact, the last three full requests were from the beginning of that section of the list on Query Tracker. The R&R stopped the process, for obvious reasons. Now to pick it up again.

The Ghost story–not sure where to go with it. I’ve heard trying to sell two different novels at the same time is bad. That was a while ago, and I don’t recall the reasons. I need to generate a full QT list for it.

The SFF Epic–not quite to 20,000 words. I’d like to pick up the pace on it, to at least 3,000 and preferably 4,000 words a week. I continue to debate whether to push something like a formal outline or synopsis out, or simply to continue on with my “I know where I want this to go, and I know some key milestones along the way” approach. I’ve had good luck with the latter in the past. It’s not full-out “pantsing” but it doesn’t feel as constraining as an outline either. More than once I’ve introduced a character and realized who they needed to be and what they needed to do after the fact, as the scenes required. Could I do that in outline form? Maybe. Would I enjoy it as much? I doubt it.

Short stories–two in circulation, one up on blocks. The latter I’m going to have to wait on–I have two fundamentally opposed notions of what to do with it, and they need to fight it out on their own time in my subconscious. The other two (one flash, one 4500 words) sell or they don’t. Sometimes, with short stories in particular, what you like about them isn’t what others want to see. I could change them, but in my mind, not improve them. Novels are more malleable. There are almost always choices you can make with novels that improve their viability without altering what they are. I don’t believe that’s as true with shorts.

Anyway–all the best for whatever festive bits you have or will celebrate. I have to go see if my order at Left Bank Books is ready. Cheers!