Welcome to my first writing update of 2022! Yes, you read that right. The fact it comes a whopping 6 months into the year is telling of how unrealistic my expectations were for my writing.
I severely underestimated how long it was going to take to edit my first novel, Pyres of Äpis. It's been such a long time since I've done an update, here's what my plan was for the the start of the year:
To redraft Pyres of Äpis by the end of February.
To finish a draft of Shards of Lisgrimir by the end of May.
Here's what I achieved - a redraft of Pyres of Äpis by the end of June. I've long since stopped kicking myself for missing my targets, primarily because I'm happy with how PoÄ has turned out. Additionally, I've skimmed chunks of SoL and I think it isn't bad. Unfortunately, rather than cut down on words, I have added around 12,000 more in my redraft, which gives PoÄ a word count of around 176,000, nearing on an unpublishable length for a first time author.
My writing has to stand up for itself, but having a book of such a length as a debut makes the difficult task of becoming published a tad harder. Still, I don't think I can cut it without sacrificing POV characters, all of which I need/want for the sequel.
Popular authors like Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch published debut books longer than that, but that was over 15 years ago, and the world has changed. One can dream, regardless.
In the last few days I've made a version of a query letter and a synopsis. For the uninitiated, the former is like a cover letter for a job application and the latter is a rundown of the major plot points in your novel, to give the agent/publisher an idea of what your story is about without reading the whole thing.
The next step is finding a list of agents who may want to represent my book and submitting to them. An idea equal parts exciting and daunting.
Byzantine Dreams
When I haven't been stressing over my edits, I've started a new project that I see as a kind of adjacent future sci-fi story featuring a world in which the Eastern Roman Empire (known to historians as the Byzantine Empire) didn't fall, and instead persisted into an advanced human age with robots.
This is going to be single perspective, stand-alone and no more than 100,000 words. I want it to be a much closer story. It's early days yet, and I've only really sorted out the main character's premise, and because the above fantasy trilogy is a priority, it likely won't see a finished draft for some time.
But I see this as a main project that I noodle away at when SoL, and its sequel, inevitably annoy me.
Near future
I hope to post on here a bit more regularly, and maybe rekindle my Instagram account that I've ignored since March. I feel with the latest draft of PoÄ done, I'll be under less self-induced pressure. There's also a couple of book reviews I've posted on goodreads that I'll probably put on here soon, including one of Dark Age by Pierce Brown. His Red Rising series has quickly become one of my favourites.
Stay tuned.
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