Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
Open mike again already! Talk about whatever you like.
I finally got the climax finished, in spite of all the life chaos! Now I need the wrap-up, and then I can send it off to my editor, and start The Next Thing while I wait for revisions requests. (Ugh.)
Congratulation on the climax! May I ask whether it’s for a sequel to The Dark Lord’s Daughter, or something else?
Hooray that the climax is done. Hopefully the wrap/up won’t take too long.
Now I’m wondering. What sort of difficulties do you run into during the wrap-up? I would expect it to be smooth sailing since you tend to know when to stop.
Is the Next Thing the next book in this series?
Yup.
How do you deal with the waiting period after you submit to agents? I just finished my first book and sent it out to a handful of agents, and I can’t help thinking about it and waiting and wondering all the time, but there’s nothing I can do (and I know the odds are terribly low anyway!). It feels like applying to jobs, except no job has ever felt this personal, and I was never any good at coping with applying to jobs either.
I’ve been trying to distract myself by reading but unfortunately you cannot go through life constantly reading…
I’m almost hoping for a Snoopy-style “your manuscript is terrible. Never submit to us again” response so I can write this off as a mistake and not think about it again. (But I keep thinking about it.)
Write more books.
Write something else.
Research other agents for the next round of querying, and find somebody even cooler than the ones you already tried.
Write something else.
Brush up your author website, or write a long screed about your writing process on social media, or pull quotes from your novel that would make good t-shirts.
Write something else.
Find a group of other querying writers and whine together about how horrible the process is. (It is horrible.)
Write something else.
Plugging away with writing. Two isekai wrestling with metaphysics.
Sorry. I love Cimorene.
No need for apologies. Hardly anyone checks copyright dates, so I get a LOT of questions about “Dealing” and the way the series developed that just aren’t relevant, because they weren’t originally written in the order people think they were.
Congrats on being close to done! (For sufficiently flexible definitions of “done”.)
Narrativity was excellent this year! We had a really terrific bunch of attendees, both old hands & new. Great response on the various live-feedback and group brainstorming activities. And the best consuite we’ve had since the early days!
Also, my author website is finally live! https://lizavogel.com/ if you want to check out the marvelous art my friend did for me.
My villains seem set on a course to blow up the space station. But I keep writing (or thinking of) scenes set on the space station. I’m very unclear how the timing works here. Also it’s the most people I’ve ever killed in a story and I’m squeamish about it.
I also recently discovered that there was one poisoner, not two, and he was found dead of poison himself, not captured for interrogation. Sure glad I’m not serializing this as I go along. This leaves a lot more space for him to have had collaborators on the doomed station, which is probably essential.
Secret Agent Man resolutely refuses to tell anyone which side he’s working for. Including me. I suspect it’s more complicated than any of the obvious answers.
Another question, if you’re still taking them – I’ve been reading through some of your old posts on dialog and I know what I need to achieve now (distinct voices, in grammar/word choice/etc) but I’m still terrible at it! I can do my own voice, or a child’s voice. That’s it. I have no idea how to figure out how another character would speak, especially someone who has a big speaking part. How do you improve at this? Is there a way to research how e.g. crochety old ladies or charming young men speak? (Or charming old ladies, or crochety young men, for that matter!)