I have officially started querying Surrealist! We’re off to the races, which are extraordinarily slow. While I wait to hear back, I am drafting Project D and trying to keep up with my grad school work. All in all, I am keeping very busy and feeling less accomplished than I probably should, so it’s par for the course.
Progress
I have queried 17 agents so far and have 2 rejections as of writing this. I also submitted the whole manuscript to an editor who rejected my last one and requested my next one (this one). I am finding that rejections don’t mean anything to me anymore because I expect them.
I also received two rejections today, within 42 minutes of each other, for two of my short stories I’d sent to literary magazines. At least one of them was a tiered rejection saying that they liked my writing but that it wasn’t quite a fit. I know it’s at least tired because of the verbiage, and that another response I got from them years ago was a form rejection, and this one was different. There is a good chance that both of them are higher-tier rejections, but the rejection wiki seems to be down or defunct, which is annoying.
I also began working on drafting Project D and got up to 7.5K words written this month, the majority of which was written the last couple of days as I started to draft. I am excited that this project is starting off with some speed, but momentum might be difficult to keep as the bulk of my creative writing comes in the beginning of the week and then gets replaced by homework as due dates loom later in the week. This will continue through the end of July.
Liesure
I just started reading A Wrinkle in Time. I remember bits and pieces of it from listening to it in the car as a kid, but it is all so jumbled in my mind, mixed with the movie and my own dreams. This same sort of surrealization of media happened to the Felix the Cat film until I got to the point where I couldn’t remember what was a part of the original media, and what I made up. Such is the way of a very overactive imagination.
I also watched Backrooms, as my brother watched it right after it came out, and he said that it reminded him significantly of some of the things that I did in Surrealist. It wouldn’t normally be the sort of film I would go watch, but I liked it a lot. I think going in without expectations of all of the lore made me appreciate it a bit more, and I was, of course, looking for what connections my brother saw. I have to say, in some ways it was too similar and in others it was totally different, a perfect market position for the book if you ask me.
What I’m learning
I am tired. That’s it. I probably need a nap, but I can’t nap, and therein lies the rub.
Looking Forward
This month is all about getting as much of Project D done as possible. My official goal is between 2-5k words a week, but I’d really like to get closer to 7-12k a week, so somewhere in that ballpark. All I know is that 6k a week is utterly unacceptable.
Whatever I don’t finish in the next 5-6 weeks of my class on Project D, I plan to do in the three weeks between my classes. As long as it’s not above 35k words, I should be pretty alright, and I’m already 5k+ words into the project, so I’m on pretty solid footing at the moment. I do have a couple of other things brewing, but those will have to wait a little while to see if they pan out.
That’s all for now,
Naomi
Leave a Reply