Day 313: Progress Update

Thought I'd do a progress update today, but sadly there's not much to report. I'm still chugging along editing Oneiromancer. I haven't made as much progress on the finding-an-agent front as I'd hoped. Turns out there are thousands of agents, but not very many looking for my kind of story. Weirdly enough, I just keep finding UK agencies and publishing firms that want more speculative fiction. I'm not sure if it's some bias created by the search algorithm thinking I want to publish in the UK or if there are actually just more publishers interested in speculative fiction across the pond. Lots of them are happy to receive international queries though. I have a list of about eight people I'd like to try that I collected the same day after my last progress update. I drafted letters to two of them. It's a lot harder than it seems putting your book into a few phrases. Also, it's really hard when you don't really feel confident in the material. This whole experience is really strange honestly. I think I understand why people say writing your book is the easy part now.

I think after starting down the path to querying I've realized that I don't actually believe in putting the book out there even though I'm only sending the parts I've edited. It's just not up to my taste. Everybody says you're your own harshest critic, but why bother if you don't actually enjoy the story you've written? I think for now I'm going to focus on making the book as best it can be rather than get distracted with querying too early. I still have some time on the clock before I have to go get a regular old job, so I'm trying to use it as wisely as possible. I'm hoping that by the time I finish up editing that I'll feel better about the book as a whole and be ready to draft some much improved query letters. Until then I'll just have to keep working.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley