CWB Writing Newsletter - May 2023
Going to hammer out a quick newsletter for y'all because somehow it's May 30th, when it feels like yesterday was late April!
Working With Diana
As mentioned in the last newsletter, in February I signed with Diana Fox of Fox Literary to represent Piety the Knife, its sequel, and my future work to publishers. Since then we've gone over not just Piety the Knife, but also its sequel, and talked about plans. One plan we've talked about: possibly converting the sequel to the third book in the trilogy, and converting the plan for the third book into the second, which is kind of crazy but might be the right move! She's very excited about the plot outline for what is currently the third book, much of which is a flashback, and thinks it might hit the reader harder if we kind of smash-cut right from Piety to that. I need to ponder it a bit more and decide if it makes sense with my overall plan for the story.
In the meantime, I have lots of great feedback on the sequel I did write, including a whole bunch of thoughts on what to cut, what to expand, and what to tweak. I'm holding off on a second draft right now for two reasons. First, the whole "this might actually end up being the third book in the trilogy" thing. Second, we want to get Piety all finished up before focusing on anything else. So, let's talk about that!
Piety the Knife - Final Tweaks
Diana provided me a lot of good feedback on Piety as well. She's really happy with the latest draft, and only wants a few relatively minor changes before it's time to shop it to publishers. She's still in the process of getting her line edits together, but in the interim, we had a Zoom call to talk about overall thoughts, which has allowed me to get started with some edits in advance of getting her final redline document. I'm working on those edits now, and we're hoping to have the book stable and ready to go out on submission by mid-to-late-June. Pretty cool!
If it does get picked up by a publisher, there will no doubt be further revisions. Any book you've ever read, at least any traditionally-published book, is the product of numerous people's hard work. The author gets the majority of the credit, and of course it is their story, but in nearly all cases there is an editor or set of editors who contribute substantially to the final manuscript. I'm looking forward to experiencing that part of the process, so … fingers crossed we get there!
Possessed - Indie Release?
I also talked with Diana about the possibility of indie-publishing Possessed. She doesn't have an issue with the idea, as contemporary fantasy is a very popular indie genre but a very hard sell to traditional publishers. SO … this means I might be able to get it out to you folks.
That does come with some complications: I'm not willing to put the book out without running it through professional editing services. I'm looking at over a thousand bucks for that, plus likely a similar number to pay a cover artist (I don't really want to do the cover myself like I did with Elixir, and I already talked about why I don't support AI art over on my blog). That's some serious scratch, especially for a book that may or may not sell. I don't necessarily care about recouping the cost, but I need to be able to actually pay it, which means I need to do some saving!
Book Recommendation
Speaking of indie releases, my friend Zach Argyle wrapped up an incredibly successful kickstarter for gorgeous new editions of his fantasy series, Threadlight. If you just want to read the books, though (and I recommend you do), you can get them on Amazon individually or as an ebook box set for a ridiculously low $4.99. They're cool books! Definitely worth a look if you're into swords and sorcery with a lot of fun world building and solid characters.
That's it for now. See you in July. Hopefully sometime before the last two days of the month!
-Chris
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