Queries for Assassin's have been sent off to all of my first round choices for agents. So far, 7 have returned with rejections. Only one of those disappointed me because I'm pretty much expecting A.C. to end up at a small press. Not because it's not good—I definitely think it is worthy of an agent and a traditional publisher. But it's epic fantasy, and honestly, that's not a genre high on anyone's acquisitions list. I love epic fantasy and hate that it's not being given more attention right now, but being aware of that reality helps keep me from being too upset about the rejections.
Once all my first round agents get back to me, I have another 25 or 26 on my second round list. I'll probably also start hunting around to see if I can add any others. After that, I have half a dozen publishers followed by a list of maybe a dozen or so small presses. Hopefully the book will find a home in all that. Not just any old home either, but a home that's "right". My job is to not give up on it.
In other news, just finished the Blood Charms rough draft. I need to revise the last 3 chapters and get them posted to the workshop, then I'll be re-outlining the novel to figure out what's missing and how and where to add or cut things. This is a different process for me—usually I'm content with my first outline and just building from there. But this is also a bit of a different genre for me, and I'm still figuring things out. The outline will also help keep my hands in the book without me actually working on revisions. I know I need to break for about a month, it's just hard to do—I want to dive in there and get those revisions going. What I need to do is let it rest and percolate a bit between the rough/first draft and my next round of revisions. Working on world building helps, but it can get...tedious. I'm hoping the outline will help keep me away from actual revisions for at least a few weeks. It should help me work on some notes to apply to the next round.
I already know one of my biggest problems is the "blended" setting I'm aiming for. It definitely fades towards the end of the novel. Hell, it fades towards the middle of the novel. So that's something I'm really going to have to think about and work on while I'm letting the actual draft rest.
In the meantime, the question now becomes, do I move Quest of Ehlarayn to a primary project or do I find something unrelated to either the Alden books (or maybe even another Alden book that's in a completely different series, like my 5 book Phoenix series) or the Kayde books? I have ideas for totally unrelated projects, but I'm not as excited about them as I should be, but neither Assassin's or Charms are sure things, so am equally not sure working on additional related books is a good idea. Probably shouldn't worry about it too much—Charms has a few rounds of revisions to go before it's no longer the main writing project. Something will sort itself out by the time I get there.
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