Good evening, squiders! How are you doing?
I’m a little overwhelmed around normal everyday things and this leadership course I’m staffing at the end of the month, and the consignment sale. (I think I’ve talked about both of those before. Let me know if not.)
Last week I noted that now that I’m submitting Book 1 to agents (I got my first rejection this morning) I could go back to my revision, but that my brain was thinking about other stories instead. And through talking through that with you guys, I realized that maybe that particular revision (the scifi horror novella) is not the right revision to be working on at the moment.
I have spent some time looking at all my projects (mostly revision, some new stories vaguely outlined) and pondering things, and I have come to the following conclusions:
1) If I am querying a YA fantasy, it makes sense to work on another YA fantasy. If an agent calls to make an offer, or to see if we’re a good fit long term, and they ask what I’m working on, and I have changed both age range and genre, that could be a turnoff for them. I noticed that many of the agents I put on my querying list were asking for YA fantasy but not necessarily science fiction or horror, and if they wanted YA fantasy, they didn’t necessarily want adult fantasy either. (Not everyone, obviously, but enough.)
2) I write a lot of first drafts, and then I put the story away to eventually get to in my revision cycle. This has perhaps hurt me in the long run because I have a lot of stories that need revision and I will probably never get to all of them. (And maybe some of those older ones should be forgotten anyway.)
3) A lot of my existing stories could be rewritten (or if not yet written, modified) to be YA, so that’s good. Probably.
So what have I decided?
Of my existing revision projects, only two are YA fantasy: Broken Mirrors, which we talked about last week (the one that is straddling the line between MG and YA and doing neither successfully), and World’s Edge, which you can find here on the blog, since I wrote it for Nano in 2019. World’s Edge takes place in the same world as the trilogy (just 700 years before) as well. World’s Edge is borderline YA, as it was also an experiment. I wanted to write a story where the viewpoint character is not the protagonist. So the main character is 16, but the character driving the story is an adult. A little fiddly, for sure.
Of those two options, World’s Edge seems like the right choice, as it’s the right genre(-ish) and the same world as the book I’m querying, and Broken Mirrors is a disaster.
That said, I have no idea what state World’s Edge is in. I finished the draft in 2020, I think, and haven’t looked at it since. (A common issue, unfortunately. I have gotten better about going all the way through the process, but not all the time.) It could be a mess, or need a lot of work.
So the general plan is to read over World’s Edge and see what state it’s in, and then make a determination about whether it’s a good project to start now. And perhaps we look at writing a new project if it’s a mess. Something age and genre appropriate.
On we blindly stumble! See you next week!
