Book Update

I'll update you on both of my current novel-works-in-progress.

Charred, my first completed manuscript, is in the submission stage. I've queried one agent about a week and a half ago or so, and I've just recently finished fine-tuning my query letter for a third. Every agent is different, so I'm tailoring each letter to each agent's needs. I'm including a synopsis with my next query, which I hope to send out this week. (Yeah, I need to buy more stamps. Who has ten bucks to drop on a pack of 20?)

I'm hopeful for Charred. I've got some little changes I want to make, some themes I'd like to emphasize a little more. It's how I want it for th most part, though. It's a decent book. Probably not hardback quality, but definitely good enough to be published.

Below the Surface is my real work in progress. I started it just recently, and haven't had a lot of time to do a ton of writing on it. I have managed to get about 14000 words so far though, including a prologue and four complete chapters. I started the fifth chapter yesterday, managing only aobut 200 words.

I'm doing a little research right now. One of my characters is a fortune-tellign woman, who sometimes uses Tarot cards, so I'm reading The Tarot Revealed, which I found at the Goodwill for 69 cents. For the record, I don't believe Tarot cards can tell the future. There are references to the occult thoughout the book, and it creeps me out a little to be reading it, but it's not somethign I believe or approve of. But my character uses them and I want to be authentic. (There is a lot of cool stuff in the book. All the symbology on the cards and all that. But in the instructions the author even advises the Tarot reader that if they try to do a reading and it doesn't make sense, do it again, and if it still doesn't work, wait and do it another day. Kind of sounds like you're just hoping the cards fall in the right order.)

So anyway.

I finished Charred in exactly three months. Below the Surface will take me much longer, I'm sure, but I think it will be better. There's a lot of different layers to it, although I didn't inted for that originally. My goal on Charred was always 1000 words a day. My goal now is to write every day, or edit, one or the other. I haven't written yet today, but that's partially because I've gotten to a spot n the book that I'm not excited about writing about. I might need to do a little more planning of my orderof events to make sure my pacing stays strong. The first three chapters (and the prologue) really move, but now they've slowed up a bit.