[irenewendywode]

I should be describing the setting of The Grafting Mark as "like Little House on the Prairie but with aliens and tablet computers" because I keep getting people put off by the fact that it's sci-fi. And I kinda feel like I should be pushing back more in the direction of "no but I think you might like it anyway."

At least one of those people was specifically put off by all the computing metaphors in the table of contents. I wanted to put a TOC in so people would know there's a glossary at the end. I've seen glossaries put at the beginning and it can work, but I think in this case it would a) give the game away on some plot points and b) be more intimidating than the TOC.

And at that point I think I might be bending too much for the sake of marketability. I should just accept that it's sci-fi and some people are going to be put off by that.

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Finished my last once-over of the second draft! Ordered the prints of the prepub edition for friends and family, and sent my first query! My first choice agent has a "let us know if you're also querying elsewhere" policy so I was just like "hmm no I will wait for this response first" I just like the simpler flow of that. They should get back to me before the end of the year, so I can send more queries if necessary in January, when I have more free time.

So that's it! I can relax and catch up on other stuff for the next while.

I can't help but wonder when I would have finished this if I hadn't been at home with the covid all this week. I can't say this isn't nice to get done, and I'm confident my job will still be there when I finally kick this annoying virus. So all in all, worse things have happened.

My editor is going to give the second half another pass, which is good, because it is much more whole and satisfying, but it's got some rough edges because of all the shuffling around of old material and addition of new material. The characters are now set in a much more rich and realistic interpersonal world, which I have trouble juggling. Only the first ten pages go with the query so I made sure those are in tip-top shape.

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Art for my upcoming novel, The Grafting Mark, querying soon

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Took a break from editing today to do a little art for the pre-publication limited edition cover. Pencil and conte crayon on paper.

[irenewendywode]

You know that advice you hear about starting the story in the middle of the action? How it usually comes with the assumption that your first draft is going to begin with setting the scene and establishing background which you'll probably have to cut?

The Grafting Mark was a really abrupt project, I'd been toying with a vague idea but not developed it much by the time I was considering doing nanowrimo late last October. I pretty much just sat down on November first and started at an early spot and wrote like a being possessed. Background was a thing that happened along the way.

Anyway the point is it's really surreal to be told by my editor "No wait, go back, you overshot the action. You know that vehicular accident just before? Go back and tell me more about that."

I mean she's right obviously, but I'm laughing my pants off.

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I don't think I daydream as much as other writers.

I hear a lot of people talk about going over scenarios in their heads and imagining them really vividly and then not being able to find the words. I can almost always find some words that get close enough to the idea in my head that I'm happy to write them down. A lot of the time I refine the words and work the scenario until it becomes vivid but it's not vivid for me until I have the words for it.

I get stuck all the time! However I don't think I've ever had the classic writer's block experience of knowing what I want to write about and not being able to get it onto the page. I get stuck because my imagination hits a fuzzy bit and the idea of the scene dissolves into mist.

Words are really friendly and safe for me and it's stories that challenge me. I hear a lot of people say they have stories inside them and the struggle is to get those stories out. But I'm not full of stories in the same way.

I'm full of ideas! But ideas are seeds and they have to be tended and watered and be in the right soil to grow into anything substantial.

For me, choosing words is almost an afterthought in writing. I'm sitting here growing my garden and when a tomato is ready I can just pluck it. I don't ever remember having a problem with that part. I don't remember seeing a big red juicy tomato of a story that looks ready to pick and be trying to pick it but not be certain how.

Just reading the blog entries of other writers and thinking about how different we all are and how the stories we write are so different as a result. I don't know what it means but it's just cool to think about.

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Could Not get through that other book I had my eye on, it was just too juvenile. Which really outlines the distinction between YA as in "books for young folks growing into adult tastes but with some content concessions for their age" and YA as in "books written for a Very Specific Age Bracket." I think I've always preferred the former, even when I was a specific age, because I was never typical for my age, and I just think those age better, too. The youth experience is different every generation.

Anyway having that distinction made so clear to me really helps me make peace with the idea of using two YA books I enjoy as comps for an adult novel. Genres are really squishy sometimes and I have to focus more on what kind of story it is rather than what categories it falls into.

[irenewendywode]

Finished reading another possible comp today. Editor mentioned Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, which I tried to read as a kid and never got through, but which I enjoyed a lot this time.

Points against it as a comp: it's many decades old, incredibly heteronormative among other artifacts of its time, and in combination with Loveless, might give the idea I'm going for a younger audience than I am.

Points for it as a comp: well known author, thematic similarities to The Grafting Mark on the sci fi and survival sides, and the perspective character reads as potentially aroace through a modern lens.

There's at least two more books I want to read before I finalize my choices but I think there's a good chance it's going to end up as one of three. I think I'll feel comfortable with two out of three comps being YA books, given one of them is so old YA wasn't really a genre the way it is now, and as long as the third book is a recent adult novel, and I have a good candidate in mind, but want to save reading it for after I do my first round of editing, for Reasons.

I started reading another book last week that checks both the queer box and the survival box, but it didn't pull me in immediately and it seemed to skew younger than the other two YA books I'm considering as comps. It probably won't make the list but I still feel like I ought to give it another chance to see if it fits better once the story gets going.

I suspect I'm going to end up with Oseman, Heinlein and Weir, and with all three authors I'll be able to say that although I didn't read the comp before I wrote my book, I already appreciated the author's other work. So that's sort of like keeping apprised of my genres? I don't have time to read a lot of the hot new books but there are authors I like and vaguely follow.

Anyway I'm keeping up with the genres now, and the book is going to change a lot between first draft and query! So I'm doing my homework the morning of, maybe, but still getting it in under the wire!

[irenewendywode]

Finished reading another possible comp today and I'm going to have to keep looking, I think. Of the Wild by E. Wambheim was great, and on the face of it, this one should be a better comp for my book than a YA school story. Of the Wild and The Grafting Mark are both genre love stories with aspec relationships. But Of the Wild is a fairy tale fantasy ace romance, and my gut is telling me that my book has more in common with my first read, Loveless, the YA school story, despite being a totally separate genre the way people tend to split genres.

You can push fantasy and sci-fi together, because they can frame similar ways of diverging from our reality, but the soul and feel of a book has so much more fluidity than the way we tend to split genres.

Fairy tale fantasy has this stylized feel to it, it can be very environmental, it builds a kind of mood it's hard to achieve in the real world. And that lends itself to epic romance.

My book is the kind of grounded near-future sci-fi that feels more concrete and everyday, and combine that with the aro main relationship and the way the book focuses on the importance and power of friendship, and it's really much more similar to the YA book, Loveless, despite the mature themes, nonhuman characters and non-earth worlds in The Grafting Mark.

The next book I intend to read seems like it might be a closer match, but I won't know until I read it! Genuinely, I'm just really enjoying having an excuse to buy new books and spend time reading them. I haven't read enough new books recently because I'm always busy either writing or keeping myself alive.

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I've been doing comp research for The Grafting Mark, and I'm on the fence about using Alice Oseman's Loveless, even after reading it. Emotionally it's a comp, but it's deeply YA and The Grafting Mark is not YA, despite all the commonalities.

The Grafting Mark is survival sci-fi with a dark edge and I'm fairly certain I'm going to mention Andy Weir in my comp section when I query. My editor mentioned that it was very reminiscent of Project Hail Mary, which I haven't read, but plan to after I finish my second draft. I've read The Martian, though, and there's definitely some similarities there. The Martian is a little old to use as a comp, but I feel like it's well known enough that it couldn't hurt to mention as long as I have a couple of more recent comps.

I'd like my comps to express not only the type of sci-fi plot but also the focus on friendship and the queerness of the characters. It's hard to find popular books that feature aro and/or ace mains that aren't YA, which is one reason I'm really not sure if I'll be able to find a better match in that vein than Loveless.

I don't think that's so bad - Loveless is a beautiful book to read as an adult, with college age main characters dealing with heavy issues and a fairly hefty page count, so it's not at the youngest end of young adult, but it's still fundamentally a book about being in school and coming of age.

The Grafting Mark is not that, but there aren't any comps that really hit the bullseye here, and I kind of like the dissonance of saying, "okay, think a cross between The Martian and Loveless!" It must be a little difficult to imagine the convergence if you haven't actually read the book but I think that's pretty accurate.

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Woo! My domain is up and running on the new website!

It took a few days because I wanted to wait 72 hours before contacting tumblr support because they said it might take that long, but then when I did contact tumblr, they were like "everything's good on our end, try again with your domain listing people" so then I had to contact support over there and get them to force add a new A listing (and now my account shows two A listings, one of which still can't be deleted! Weird. Anyway!) so it took a hot minute but everything's set up!

Also remembered that Tabitha won an honorable mention from a queer book awards blog when it came out and I need to mention that in my query! I put it up on the book page as well. Then I had some fun using little book-specific icons as bullet points in some of the descriptions.

I'm so glad all this is getting done. I've been meaning to rebuild my site for a long time now, but didn't really have the impetus for it until I had a new book to feature. Now I'm really excited to get it edited and send out queries! Hopefully that excitement will help smooth the editing process.

[irenewendywode]

Spent the morning writing a first draft of a query letter for The Grafting Mark and then I was like "ohh I am in the marketing copy ZONE, gonna rewrite ALL my summaries now" so I did.

I'll post them all around the smedias when I do my actual marketing push once TGM comes out, but I was very excited and wanted to tell people so you can read them on my site!

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I took my domain off my novelist Tumblr blog, and near as I can figure it could take up to 72 hours for the domain to be fully freed up so I can attach it to my neocities site. So in the meantime my domain gives a Tumblr error page but both my sites are available! Just at irenewendywode.neocities.org and right here @irenewendywode !

Spent tonight researching agents and queries, and heard the advice to take down self published works unless they have 50 or more reviews on Amazon. I can't imagine doing that. Maybe it's a good idea but I can't get my head around it. I won't mention self publishing in my queries because of this advice, but I will mention my former contracts which have lapsed and left me to self publish, and if having "failed" books out there is a deal breaker for an agent I guess I will have to find a different agent. Look, I realize I am absolutely crap at marketing! That's why I want an agent!

Anyway this querying thing is a lot more fraught than the actual writing and editing in a lot of ways and I'm not going to dismantle my little online world where all my books I'm proud of and want to share are available. If I have to self-publish again because I've done so before, I'll do it, but I really believe in this new book and I have hope that I can put together a query letter that will convince someone to take a chance on it despite the fact that all my early work is out there on the streets.

I'm going to mull this over a little more but I just can't stand the idea of pulling them. It doesn't make any sense to me on a gut level, even if I see the logic of it conceptually.

Anyway I read a lot of advice that did make sense to me, and probably tomorrow I'll try to synthesize it down into a first draft query. I'm going to need to do some more research on the comps front but I've got time. The first draft of the book is still with my editor and will be for a couple weeks, and I want the second draft done before I send out any queries. But I just really wanted to get a head start on the whole process.

Thankfully my work schedule will be a little lighter in July and August and things will be a little less hectic on that front and (hopefully) leave me with more focus for writing, editing, querying and all my varied side projects.

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Okay, so when I logged into Lulu to update my prices in preparation for launching the new site, I MAY have mucked up paperback distribution of the Half-Dragon series SLIGHTLY. But the ebooks should be fine, and you can still get paperbacks direct from Lulu. Just, there might be an interruption in the ability to order them from Amazon and B&N.

It should all be taken care of well before The Grafting Mark comes out, which is when I'm going to do my big marketing blitz!

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I know I said I was going to be updating y'all on the progress of my novel when I started it, but updating this blog didn't end up making the top of the priorities list, what with writing a novel, working full time, and everything else! But if you follow my main/fandom blog you've been getting a lot of updates, and if you don't and you want to read those updates, you can find them here!

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Planning on starting nanowrimo tomorrow. I was thinking of writing some Loki fic today but I ended up mostly cleaning my apartment and listening to podcasts and doing jigsaw puzzles. I think that was probably for the best.

It's simply in my nature to approach nanowrimo as a vehicle for creating an original novel, especially since the last time I did the event, I came out of it with most of the first draft of my first contract-published novel. So I'm going to try to stick to the concept I have in mind. But if I do need a break from it or end up with fanfiction plot bunnies that refuse to be ignored, I will count the words towards my nano count.

My working title for the main project is Bonny and the Bird Girl. I'm sure you will all hear a lot more about it in the next few weeks!

[irenewendywode]

Join Khislon, Ezri and Isis in their quest for peace, love and aceptance, which the world has in somewhat short supply as it teeters on the brink of war. BUY THE EBOOK:

BUY THE PRINT BOOK:

For centuries, dragons and half-dragons have hidden themselves away, bound by a treaty that forbids them to reveal their existence to the human public. But now, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, that ancient peace is coming unraveled. And the world will never be the same. Isis Va is more than a millennium old, powerful, and founder of the Red Glade. Some people believe her to be a goddess. She’d really rather they didn’t. Isis’s daughter Ezri has been trained to heal, but she still knows violence better than anything else. When the two Red Glade women meet the Darkhan army, their cultures collide. They butt heads on questions small and fundamental alike. Whether it’s succeeding in helping the Darkhnit prepare for war, or merely hurting all involved, Isis doesn’t know. That question won’t be answered until they must join forces to face the threat of Nash, his army of Movrekt half-dragons, and all of the machinations he has set in place to keep the world in chaos, and himself at the head.

You can read a short excerpt of the novel here, or the prologue and first chapter here. Some content warnings are listed here.