Because it needs to be said: I am not okay with anything happening in the U.S. right now. I support minorities and women and trans people. I am scared.
But this blog is about me trying to get my silly little book published, so that’s what I will continue to write about in this space.
And—I know it’s not silly. To me, it is crushingly important. But. I don’t know. Call your heartsong your “silly little book” if that’s the thing that lets you keep working on it in the midst of uncertain and impossible times. And call your senators!!! But keep making your silly little art, in any way you can.
At a recent gathering, my friend said they were procrastinating on an important task. Another friend cut in and said firmly, almost defiantly: “You mean gathering your energy.”
Isn’t that beautiful?
I’ve been gathering my energy to query again. I’ve also been healing from a difficult critique session. I think it’s very frustrating and unfair that someone who was rude to me about my work and my identity was also correct about some things! Mostly, I feel let down by my own brain. How DARE I feel discouraged when I knew most of the advice was wrong, and kind of mean, even as I was hearing it?
But the correct thing is this: your chances of finding representation for a debut novel are higher if your wordcount is lower. I’ve spoken to an actual agent who said that needing to be below 100k for a debut is a myth, and it all depends. And (according to my research) up to 120k is fine for sci-fi/fantasy anyway. All of which is true! But so is the first thing. And I thought I’d been through my novel more times than I could count, I thought I’d done everything I possibly could—but I hadn’t gone through specifically focused on lowering my wordcount. I was wrong. And my novel is getting better for it.
It’s tedious. To spice it up, I’ve made a beautiful new spreadsheet—it’s got columns and metrics and a sexy toggle that goes green when I delete the correct amount of words per chapter as pro-rated to the chapter’s starting length. So I can tell you with devastating accuracy that I am 83.92% percent of the way down from 112k words to my goal of 100k. It’s going well, in fits and bursts and long weeks of procrastinating gathering my energy. I have deleted very few scenes, but every sentence is getting tighter and better. And I started listening to The Shit About Writing podcast again the other day, which is the first time I’ve been able to stomach even a second-hand query critique in about half a year. I’m not quite back in the game yet, but I’m making progress, and moving in the right direction.
Hang in there, y’all.
gracemakley.com 
Hang in there too!!!