_

Forest War is stalled in the outline, because I realized there's a huge structual flaw in the middle (basically, an extended sequence in which the POV character is inactive, an observer rather than an actor), and I haven't figured out how to fix it yet.

I'm also debating whether it's worth it to fix, which is irritating, because I really enjoy this world.  It's just--the more I write the outline, the clearer this story becomes to me, the more obvious it is to me that it's YA.  But I can't actually imagine how one would sell a YA book where the characters are fairies--not the fae/sidhe/underhilll fairies of legend, but Fern Gully/Tinker Bell-esque hand-sized forest spirits with butterfly wings and nature magic and pretty colors.  If it were a movie, we could rate it PG and move on.  Since it's a novel, I'm becoming dubious about its saleability, because its target audience is 10-14, maybe even 12-16, for the character and writing and plot stuff, but--I'm not sure we could get a 14 year old to overlook the fact that the main characters are fairies.

So I'm still thinking about it.  I would hate to abandon this project, but like Moxie, it might  be something that'll have to wait until I have a few books with decent sales under my belt.  It just might not be a good project for me right now, while I'm still unsold.

I've also been tinkering with other projects in their early stages, especially since working on The Novel's submission package for Strange Chemistry got me thinking about writing YA again.  The Novel is still in a place where I'm happy with it, so no editing there, but I do have an urban fantasy YA trilogy I've been poking at.  I haven't mentioned it much because it's been troublesome--I've rewritten the plot concept half a dozen times--but I think I finally got a solid concept for the first two books.

A bit ago I essentially tossed all the plotting I'd done for months out the window and rewrote the concept for book one, but couldn't get into book two.  Today, after basically everything else went wrong, I sat down and hammered out a concept for book two, which is the only thing saving this day from total miserable uselessness.

Also tried to edit the mermaid pirates picture book, but it turns out exacting word choice is not something I'm capable of when miserable, but plotting urban fantasy YA is.  Things you learn about yourself!

Remember when I said I'd tell you about my new project in my next post . . ?  Well, after eating my words, I am NOW going to tell you about my new project.  A month and a half later.  Oops?

After many moons of research, worldbuilding, more research, more worldbuilding, character profiling, and oh yeah, even more worldbuilding, I'm about to embark upon outlining a new middle grade fantasy.  About fairies.

Spoilers:

Right now, my target age range for this is upper middle grade, 10-14.  Of my middle grade novels, I seem to have run the gamut: Skywatch is either true middle grade, 8-12, or edges into upper, 9-13.  Trial is young middle grade, I'd call it ages 7-10.  And this is 10-14.  That's mostly because of the subject matter--this is about war and death and disability and prejudice and racism and systematic oppression and anger, a lot of anger.  Aster is my angriest protagonist yet, and that's a contributing factor as to why this story has taken me so long to get a hold of.  Aster is angry and reckless and self-involved.

The working title, which I came up with literally as I was writing this post, is The Forest War.  (Previous working titles include the terrible and too-obvious Night and Day, and then Epic in homage to its inspiration.)  Interestingly, unlike Skywatch and Trial, The Forest War is a standalone.  I think it's also going to be longer than both of them--pushing the advisable length for middle grade long.  We'll see.

Now I need to get down to outlining.  Here goes nothing.

Chapters of Trial to edit, that is.

Applying the hard copy edits is actually going slower than the hard copy edit itself, which I didn't think was possible.  Partly it's that I have to actually write something for those spots where I jotted down "insert description of a field and Eva's emotions here", and partly it's because I keep getting caught in research spirals.

A research spiral looks like this: I'll run across a sentence that needs more detail and then spend an hour trying to figure out whether chalkboards existed in medieval Italy (as far as I can tell, no), and if not, what if anything was used intead (. . . nothing, as far as I can tell?  Apparently teachers just lectured and their students copied it on tablets.  None of the art from the era has the teacher referring to anything the whole class can see.  It's annoying because the technology was there--chalk and a black wall!--but nobody put it together).  Then I have to make decisions about the results of my research (like, do I use chalkboards anyway?  No?  Then what?), and then I have to get it into my worldbuilding document (often with comments about why I arrived at that conclusion, because if I don't remember I'll just end up in another research spiral trying to figure it out).

More than one of these in a session makes getting through a chapter and a half an accomplishment.

Current wordcount on the full document is 33,767, which is actually less than I anticipated since I'm a third of the way through the manuscript.  What I'm beginning to suspect this means is that my next few drafts will also add words.

In bill-paying-job news, camp went really well!  I had fabulous students and we had a grand old time, plus their parents were happy, which is always important.

Now that that particular extra work is out of the way, I'm hoping to wrap the draft II edit for Trial in the next two weeks so I can buckle down to worldbuilding and outlining my next project.

Finished the first read-through/hard copy edit of Trial last week, took a bit of time for distance and to work at the bill-paying job, and intend to commence applying said edits to the .doc this week.  That might sound easy, but really it's basically an entire second edit of the draft, because I have to read everything again and I'll catch new things to change and also edit my edits.  I also need to decide whether I'm going to do a serious line edit for that final 1/3 of the draft that didn't get line edited the way the first 2/3s did.  Likely I'll make that decision when I get there.

Also, sent a follow up e-mail to an agent who requested the full for Skywatch. We're past the "follow up if you haven't heard by" date, so I'm following up.  I have about a million worst-case scenarios going through my head, and you don't want to know how long (and how much research) it took me to write an e-mail that was literally two sentences.  Now, of course, I have to wait again.  Deep breaths and continuing to send out the query.

Conclusion: The pace sped up some, but not much.  As of midnight and eightish hours of work (I ate twice), I've finished through page 34.  That's just over four pages an hour.  With 93 pages more to go, I'm thinking this is going to take significantly longer than I budgeted.

Weirdly, I'm not displeased with this.  I'm a little irritated that it's thrown my revision schedule out of whack, but this book hasn't yet run to schedule, so I don't know why I thought it would now.

I'm doing good work, and shall be content with that.

(PS: no tea-spilling, though I did use up a tea bag down to the dregs.  Kind of proud of that, actually.  Because I'm weird.)

Sent another bunch of queries off en masse in the last few days.  It's still nerve-wracking!  This lot has a longer response time on average than the last bunch, but that doesn't make me any less twitchy, somehow.  It's a logic-versus-emotion thing: I have done the scary thing, now I expect a response . . . or possibly desire a response . . . as fast as possible.  All those NRMN rejections can be hard to take for someone used to always getting a reply, even if it's just a form letter.  "We'll get back to you if we want you" is so ambiguous . . . mind you, I understand why--agents are crazy-swamped--but it's still, well, nerve-wracking from the other end!

I simultaneously feel like it's been a month since Nova Albion and like barely any time has passed.  I've been working a lot, both at the paying job and the business end of writing.  I've about come to the end of my latest list of agents for Skywatch and will need to do more research there, plus I'd like to start querying The Novel but the materials aren't as ready as I'd like.

So: lots of work down, lots more to go.  For all that I know my workload will increase (possibly exponentially) when I get a novel picked up, I can't wait, because at least then it'll be work with a visible effect.  Right now it's all front loading, working and working and working in the hopes of paying off down the line.

I think I can I think I can I think I can . . .

I am thiiiiiiiis close to finishing the rough of Trial.  Pushed through on two of the hardest chapters today, the first one I've been dreading since I outlined it because it involves a plot device I'm not good at, and the second because I realized in reading my outline that I'd stuffed way too much into it and half of it belongs in the next chapter.

But they're done, and I managed 2900 words today, which is pretty decent considering the dearth of writing lately.  I'm just so ready to be finished with this rough, because it's the editing process that's going to make the book worth anything, and I'm not going to get there till I finish the rough.  Writing this thing has been like the death of a thousand cuts--the chapters are short, the book is short, there's nothing complicated, but because it keeps getting backburnered, I've been writing it for months!

*breathes*

The end is in sight, however, and I know I'm going to get there.  This'll be the first novel ms I finish since Skywatch, which was--geez, three years ago almost exactly.  That's depressing.  On the other hand, in between I've been published twice, moved two thousand miles, and changed jobs.  Plus started two other books that I had the foresight to realize weren't going anywhere as they were, and thus stopped.  Failure matters--it's what a good writer calls a learning experience, and it's worth a lot.

Editing Trial is, I think, going to be very different from editing Skywatch.  Skywatch only took me a few months to write, I never took any long breaks, and it was 20k longer than Trial is going to be.  Skywatch was always all of a piece.  Trial, I suspect, is going to be very disjointed, both because of the story structure itself and way I ended up writing it.  But I have a lot more editing experience now than I did the first few times I went through Skywatch--I have Skywatch, obviously, but I also seriously revised The Novel.  Every little bit helps, or so I hope.

22 chapters down, 4 chapters to go!

Three rejections and one full MS request for Skywatch, plus two more NRMN (no response means no) rejections.  I need to spend an afternoon sending out new queries, but I've been focused on some editing for others that I promised and on polishing the outline for Flying Machines (finished through Act Two, just need to get Act Three done).

I also read two awesome books, one YA and one grownup urban fantasy.

The YA is White Cat, by Holly Black.  This book is a few years old, but I avoided it because I barely got through Tithe.  It wasn't bad, just . . . meh.  But I really enjoyed White Cat and the questions about rights and agency and safety that are raised throughout the book, and also of identity--we find out as the book goes on that Cassel, the POV character, is beyond the definition of an unreliable narrator--he's unreliable even unto himself.  How that effects who he is and how he reacts to things is fascinating.  I started the sequel today, and I'm interested in seeing where the series goes.

The urban fantasy is, of course, Seanan McGuire's latest, Midnight Blue-Light Special!  McGuire is pretty much my favorite author for adults, and MBLS lives up to her standard.  It has all the cryptids we know and love from Discount Armageddon and a plot that moves like anything.  Plus the Aeslin Mice, perennial fan favorites, play a big role--I think they were sort of fun background in Discount Armageddon, but they have plot purposes and are integrated into Verity's life in MBLS, which I really appreciated.  HAIL THE SEQUEL!

Y'all, it's been so long since I did any nitty-gritty worldbuilding stuff that I forgot how much I LOVE it.

Flying Machines (which I suspect will need a new name sooner rather than later; hopefully the outline will reveal one to me) takes place in the bowels of the City in the Sky.  Because the City is held up by gas bags underneath it (yes, I know this is not the way lighter-than-air flight really works.  Please keep in mind that I did research, seriously considered all my options, and then threw the laws of physics out the window for what would work better culturally and look the way I wanted), this meant googling airships and lighter-than-air craft till my googler was sore.  Much of the City's infrastructure is going to be involved in this story, which means I need to know more than the vague outlines of infrastructure that I put together when I was initially worldbuilding for Skywatch.

Thus, instead of working on the story outline, I bent pencil to paper and sketched out schematics of the City's Envelope, the very structures that keep it aloft.  It took three and a half hours, three sheets of paper, almost an entire lead for my mechanical pencil, and a lot of erasing and re-drawing, but I think I have the basic structures, their names, and their origins worked out.  Since this is all going to figure into the plot, I am excited!  It was a ton of fun articulating what I'd sort of known in the back of my head into specifics that I could put on a page.  Though I did wish for a 3-D modeler a couple of times.  I suspect that some of my sketches will only ever make sense to me.

Now I need to figure out what's directly under the City, between the building foundations and the Envelope.  Obviously maintenance tunnels, but what else?  So much of worldbuilding is cultural, historical and biographical that I forgot how much I love building buildings.

This feels very much like a tiny glimpse of what it's going to be like to put Moxie's city together when I get around to her books, and I think I'm going to spend way too much time on it and have a marvelous time.

Worldbuilding FTW!

One rejection letter so far for Skywatch!  Whoo!

I actually have it out at eight agents right now, because I ran across an agent who got me really excited, so when I sent out my query to bring it back up to seven queries out, I sent another.  Because why not!  But I do intend to generally keep it to seven queries out at a time, give or take those who have a no-response-means-no policy (but I will wait till their reply-by date).

I've also been doing research for agents for The Novel.  I found a lot more potential Skywatch agents that way, but fewer for The Novel.  Steampunk and middle grade are in right now.  YA is not less in, but when agents say they want "YA fantasy" I have learned that they mostly mean urban fantasy.  And the sheer number of agents who straight-up don't want high fantasy or anything with unicorns, even if they take basically all other spec-fic, is higher than I thought (though if they don't take unicorns, they also tend not to take vampires, werewolves, angels or dystopias, either).  I get it, being a person who generally doesn't enjoy high fantasy or unicorns, but it's discouraging when I have a book that plays with those things (or at least, talks back to the stereotypical presentation thereof) and I'm barred from submitting.

Strictly speaking, I could submit anyway, but that's on every agent's pet peeves list I've ever seen--submissions that don't pay attention to the guidelines and agent preferences!  So, I will likely have a smaller pool for The Novel, especially since I can't re-submit to agents I submitted to before, unless their guidelines specifically state that resubmissions with significant revision are allowed (which is generally a no-no).

So, yeah.  More research to do, but I'm feeling pretty okay.