Good morning, squiders, hope your week is going well! My birthday was quite nice, and now I have new books, yaaaaay.
On we blindly stumble with our random number generator. Progress continues to be made. My SkillShare class is ready for me to make the slides, I’ve written 1.5K on a horror short story (possibly terrible, but we shall see when we’re done), I’ve done 5 pages in my trip book and drawn two character drawings. Progress!
The Book 1 submission materials continue to be a sticking point, but at least we are looking at them. I went through the potential comps my Discord person sent me to see if they seemed like they would work and identified one of them as a possibility (of course, now I must read said book). Still, ideally I would have two comps (assuming this one will work), so the search is ongoing. I cannot seem to find any YA fantasy books published in the last three years that involve prophecies at all, so that’s not great.
All I’m looking for is dual viewpoint, involves a prophecy, and may or may not involve a sentient forest. Nothing much, I know.
Still, I cannot get hung up on comps forever, so I did hunt down my synopsis (four years old, apparently). It’s actually in pretty good shape. The wording is a little awkward and a couple plot points need updating, but it should be pretty easy to fix up. Of course, in theory I should have shorter and longer versions of said synopsis (I do have a chapter list, with summaries of each chapter. I don’t know if that will work for a longer synopsis or if it needs to be more stylized) but that may be a problem for future!Kit.
You’ll note that actually writing the query letter has yet to come up.
I’m thinking I need to rework the steps in the spreadsheet for the Book 1 submission materials, to cover the extra steps I’m finding I’m needing. But I also need to not dwell on the comps so much. It’s an avoidance technique as much as anything else, but with the added insidiousness of seeming like productivity.
Also, I need to get on it, or I’m not going to be able to move on to my next edit in time for my December critique meeting.
Squiders, if you’ve queried recently, how did you pick your comps?
