Almost halfway through 2025.
That…just really hit me as I sat to write this. The year’s almost half over. And…well, progress has been mixed.
First, the bad. Procurers 2 has stalled. Like, really stalled. The main difficulty has been getting everything to fit together. Making sure Konrad has a satisfying character arc that’s still consistent with what happened in the last book; making sure all the supporting characters contribute something tangible to the story; trying to get the plot from point A to the ending I have in mind; finding the right balance throughout the book between the thrilling and the believable. All of this—and many more things I’ve likely forgotten—have ground my work on Bezok’s Wrath almost to a halt.
It doesn’t help, of course, that I’ve been super busy over the last month. I have two big project proposals due for school, and that’s eaten up a lot of my time. I’ve had personal stuff eat up time, too; I just had my MA grad, for one thing, and that took up some time.
But in the end, all that’s just noise. The real difficulty has been getting all the pieces to fit; once they do, I find it much easier to stay motivated and keep writing. I’ve barely written any fresh copy over the last two weeks; at this point, my goal to write four books in a year will once again go unfulfilled.
In the end, though, I guess it’s not the end of the world. I did have some ideas recently with regards to how I can fix some of the issues I’ve had with Bezok’s Wrath. With these ideas in my pocket, I’m going to give it one more try. If this attempt doesn’t work, then I’ll shelve Bezok’s Wrath for a while and focus on something else. I did have a new book idea recently, one that revolves in some ways around our cultural worship of celebrities. If that one doesn’t work out, I’ve always got Blueblood to go back to. Or Keepers. Or heck, even Usi.
Anyway, enough with the doom and gloom. I do have some good news: editing on The Ravage is going alright. This edit, I’ve focused mainly on cleaning up language, though I have done a few plot edits here and there. I hadn’t really noticed until this edit how many unnecessary words I tend to use when I write. I guess that’s why we edit, though: going through and weeding those out has me feeling much better about the state of that book. I’m hopeful I can have the editing done by early July. Once that’s done, I’ll have to write some synopses; agents will usually ask either for a short synopsis—basically a page-long plot summary—or a long synopsis, which is a chapter-by-chapter summary. That’ll be interesting for The Ravage, since that book doesn’t have chapters, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
And then after that…ugh. The query letter. I’ve talked elsewhere about how much I hate writing query letters, how the skills required to write a good one don’t come naturally to me. So I’ll just say I hope what I learned at CanCon 2023 helps me.
Alright…I think that’s it for today! Watch for another Cork story this Wednesday. And then after that…maybe something different. I did just finish re-reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Might be I’ll give some thoughts on that, talk a little about how The Dark Tower has influenced my writing, and so on. For now, though, I’ll leave you with this: if you haven’t read The Dark Tower yet, you need to. It’s so good.
OK, that’s really it from me. Until next time…
Have fun, stay safe, keep reading.
