Today, I find myself reflecting on the query trenches and how I miss them. I know how that might sound: crazy writer seeks rejection. However, within the mud and mire of the trenches is where hope and the future lie. It has been over a year since I sent my last query, and that is strange for me at this point. The querying trenches and the rejections that come with them mean movement, and the worst feeling I can experience is that of being stagnant. So, how do I plan to get from here to June, which is when I will likely start querying Surrealist? The answer is simple: movement.
Progress
This month has been a bit of a return to normalcy for me. Yes, I am not as productive because I have homework and graduate school classes; however, I hit my stride anyway. My average for the month, 900+ words a day, does not show this quite as much as it ought to because I finished the draft of Project C on the 23rd. It does not show that I hit 4k words one day and blazed through the end of that project, and I did not put the 5.5k words of my final research paper for one of my classes in my writing tracker either.
Thanks to my wonderful Alpha reader, who finished reading Project C mere hours after I finished writing it, I am already more than halfway through the next revision on that project. The ending is going to need the most work, but I am confident that I will finish this draft and get it to beta readers by the end of next week.
Liesure
There has scarcely been time for leisure. I started reading a book on higher dimensions, and I’ve watched an episode and a half of the live-action One Piece, but mostly in the evenings when I’m not working on homework, I’ve been watching Big Bang Theory in the background and working on some art. My hope is that with warmer weather and fewer commitments with no school in April, I will have time to go on more walks and relax a little bit more.
The one big leisure thing I did this month was going to see Project Hail Mary. I do not differ from the critics or audience rating of the film; my only issues with my viewing experience were the fact that the kid next to me kept chewing on his straw and that I would have loved to watch it on a larger screen. The movie itself was wonderful, and I hadn’t expected to laugh as much as I did.
What I’m Learning
Stress from writing and stress from school are vastly different. I know that the goals I set for myself in writing are contributing meaningfully to my career. With school, each assignment feels pointless. I find it difficult to care about assignments, especially when they make up such a small amount of my grade. This is compounded by the fact that doing an assignment has a distinct opportunity cost with writing because I could be writing rather than doing the assignment. This is a very difficult thing to balance. I already push myself a lot, and adding a master’s degree on top of a full-time job and writing at least part-time hours has made me more exhausted than I care to admit. I know in the long run there are benefits to getting this degree, but in the moment, it can be difficult to justify.
Looking Forward
As I already said, the plan is to finish up Project C’s revision and send it to beta readers. Then, while beta readers have that project, I will dive headfirst into the revision of Surrealist. I have no idea how I’m going to tackle this line-edit, but the more I think about it, the less daunting it becomes because I already have a solid draft and helpful feedback. I am dying to get the book to my beta readers to see how it might be received and start working on my querying list. Hope has begun taking root within me, and that is exhilarating as it is terrifying.
Over the next couple of days, I will finish my research paper and my final bit of a group project for a different class, and then I will be out of school for about two months. During those two months, my aim is to blaze through revisions on Surrealist, another round on Project C, and start brainstorming and drafting Project D. If I can get a little bit ahead on projects this summer, that will help me to slow down during the five months of classes from June until mid-November.
June will also likely be when I will start querying Surrealist, provided my beta readers don’t hate it. I doubt at this point that that will happen, but it is always possible and would require another heavy revision. I am excited, looking forward to sending my work out again. It is high time that I do so, and my hope is that I will not have such a large gap between querying projects again as I move forward. Surrealist will be the third project that I am querying, and I do believe that I have seriously leveled up between the last one I queried, Mushroom Dragon, and this one. As I turn my attention back to Surrealist this month, I feel hope for what it can be and how it might be received by agents and editors. It is strange, throughout the whole process of working on Surrealist, I have felt like I have something special in a way that I haven’t with other projects. Pompeii and Alexandria were just for me to find my footing. Night World was self-discovery and coming back to myself, and Mushroom Dragon was exploring themes on a large scale that ended up being unwieldy when all was said and done. Surrealist is built on the shoulders of those projects. It has elements of everything I’ve done baked into it. It has my grief and my longing, my love and my doubt. If someone were to go inside my brain who had read Surrealist, they would be comforted by the familiarity. I don’t think I can overstate how much I love this book and what it has done for me, and I hope that I can share it with you someday soon.
Before I get too moon-eyed, that’s all for now.
Naomi
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