So. Authorial life after submitting…theoretically I was planning to submit to 5-6 agents, then as the blogs advised move on and go and immerse myself in a new project (I figured having a baby would do it) to avoid nail biting and constant email checking.
The reality: well I haven’t had the baby yet, not due for over a month anyway…and I miss writing! And I inevitably wonder whether my submission package, and book, can be improved, and I’m not great at waiting 1-6 months to find out if the submissions package garnered any full MS requests and then think about how I could improve.
So, I got in touch with an old acquaintance and he’s willing to endorse my book bless him. He’s not published in the same genre (I’m fantasy, he’s historical fiction), but I figure it shows I’ve made an effort to engage with the whole marketing thing in my cover letter. Plus one of the agent sites suggested it.
And I’ve discovered a new world of finding beta readers – hello Facebook! My previous betas were friends or friends of friends (or yes, I confess, family), so in retrospect I could have tried Facebook earlier. It just felt too overwhelming/unknown at the time.
I now have 4-6 people apparently up for reading my book and telling me what they think of it, which is so nice of them, and also I’ve remembered how nice it is to be read! I guess I’d lost sight of that a bit in the throes of trying to produce a submissions package to lure agents into reading the book; and it’s so lovely to return to the thrill of being read and finding out how the novel’s events strike people. Which is the whole point, I loved writing the book, I love being read (by kind people who actually like fantasy lol) and I want to write more already!
But what to write 🤷♀️
If I start on book 2 and book 1 never gets off the ground, or needs so much editing that it turns book 2 into a dinosaur that needs to be rewritten anyway, that may be self-defeating. If I write something completely new, like a fairytale retelling, or a memoir, or a children’s book, that feels like I might be biting off more than I can chew this close to New Baby. I tried plotting out Book 2 as a compromise, but I already have a skeleton plot and my best ideas come when actually writing, and seeing how the characters interact and following how things develop.
🫠
So here I am, writing about not knowing what to write 🤣 Turns out no matter how busy Mum Self is, or how knackered Pregnant Self is, or however occupied Country Self is with our 14 new chicks who have been successfully adopted by Sunbeam Chicken 🙏, Writerly Self remains unfulfilled by anything other than writing. And now I’ve let her out of the bag, I’m not sure she’ll fit back in. I need to write. Something. Right.
Country Mum Writes 