Where I'm At.

It's 7am as I write this; I've been awake since 4am and have A LOT of writing to do today. In these hours, I've been reading through and updating my blog. I read back on the post of Imperial Infiltration's progress and thought I'd take the opportunity to properly state where I'm at with that.

First off, I finished an incredible read of Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven yesterday. I've had the book on my to-be-read for months after loving (and being a little broken by) All the Bright Places and finally crawled through my reading pile enough to read it. Completely. Adored. I took notes as soon as I finished for a review I'll be writing on it! I want to get that down before starting A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas sometime today.

But Imperial Infiltration's progress. For those who follow me on social media, you'll have noticed that I've been posting about querying agents again. (Again, as in, remember three years ago when a too-young me took this path with The Huntress's Curse?) I'm querying because I've scrapped the idea of self publishing. In turn, I've scrapped the post "officially" announcing the decision to self-publish, which was hard because I read over it and saw how happy and excited I was to give out that news. But I believe that I'll one day deliver better news about my books, announcements backed up by a lot more than just myself. After making that post, I went on a week's holiday to Corfu without my laptop, which was needed and beautiful and gave me a lot of time to research and think over my decision. I found a new article that suggested self-publishing wasn't the path for the sort of writer that I want to be. To achieve that, I need to go back to querying, as I did three years ago, and bite back the negativity associated with rejections. Self-publishing wasn't as cost-effective as I'd originally thought. However, I did get to see an amazing book cover and the start of a map for Imperial Infiltration.

As soon as I got home from Corfu, I began writing my query letter. I, of course, forgot how tedious it was. I got everything prepared, edited, polished and I sent off the requested sample pages and a query letter to three agents. That was another change from last time I queried. I needed much smaller batches of agents at a time to save rejection confusion and to improve my content each time and make it better with each submission batch. Three rejections later, I'm moving onto researching my next three. Now, these next three that I'm querying have asked for a little more content. They want longer samples, a cover letter, a query letter and a synopsis.

If you've ever had to write a synopsis, you'll understand the despair I'm in when I say that I'm working on it and wondering what the hell my book is about. Honestly, I'm torn between how can I neatly and passionately (enough) condense my 300-odd page/120,000 word novel into a one-page synopsis and keep things interesting, and what even is the purpose of this story down to one sentence? Through this panic, I realised I was looking at the question the wrong way. I was comparing my story to other, very different stories and wondering why my hook didn't sound like theirs. That's because Imperial Infiltration is more of a mental journey of finding oneself and making peace with a past and a present and lives that seem to fly beyond control. It's not a massive action story until the second book comes into play. So to explain that this is a story twisted around grief and questions and mental struggles is okay because that's what I've chosen to write about. But still, how do I make it interesting enough?

At the moment, I have a very, very awful rough draft of a synopsis, plus a better one half-done. Which rounds me back nicely to my writing list today:

• I have two reviews to write, one for HUTU and one for a very insightful and surprisingly inspiring musical that I saw last night, which I'll be uploading onto here.
• I have three more query letters to tailor to three more agents.
• A synopsis to finish and polish because I'll never get an agent if I don't finish it and send it off.
• I'll be writing more on my magician story (which has taken a really good albeit crazy turn).
• I need to write a cover letter, different to my query letter, which needs to feature an author bio of which I have one thing for, which won't be stressful to write AT ALL.
• On top of that, I'll be looking over my sample chapters again for anything missed last time.

But it's only 7:25am and I have many, many hours ahead of me to get this done, or at least make a caffeine-drenched, impressionable progress with this list.