Backing Off

Whew! Last week was quite a week. If you guessed my production pace was unsustainable, you guessed right. This week I switched gears from anthology submissions and buckled down to finish writing to my 50,000 word mark on Soiled Undies. Mission accomplished. Cannot say for certain that it made the story better, but it did make it longer. Long enough to be accepted by one agent’s query engine.

Querying is a process in itself. There is no easy system. Finding agents open for queries in a niche genre is a lot of time and effort even with the help of my AI assistants. Several who advertise themselves as open to queries turn out not to be when you take the time to track down whatever obscure platform the agent uses to accept queries. So far there seems to be no industry standard. Yes, there are a few websites such as Query Engine or Query Manager that are used by some agents, but these appear to be of Byzantine web architecture designed to confound more than assist.

So, one query submitted. Chat suggested I should expect 60 rejections before getting one acceptance. That might take me 60 weeks. If there are even 60 author agents worldwide accepting speculative fiction in the absurdist scifi tone of Soiled Undies. This is why Amazon Kindle is such a godsend and why the independent publishing industry is taking off. The time wasted trying and failing to query agents could be better and more enjoyably used writing more stories. Grateful to have options.

Speaking of writing, it has gone uncommonly well. There’s a dearth of anthology opportunities in the speculative fiction genre this month so I’ve returned to writing from inspiration and am happy with some stories that sprung up whole cloth out of nowhere to fill my pages leading to me exceeding my daily writing quota. One thousand words per day has proven to be too few. No problem, there is no penalty for overwriting my daily targets. There are a few anthology opportunities next month so I will switch back to writing to prompts after a taking a week or two off.

My Substack subscribers finally broke the 50 mark now hovering at 51. I’m also discovering some really great work on Substack from other authors. I’ve been entertained recently by Jake Bible’s adventures of Larry the Skunk Ape and by the A.M. Blackmere podcast, which is riveting (I was impressed enough to order his book).

Today I posted another story from my Snapshots Across the Multiverse collection Regnum Somnium, The Taxonomy of Dreams: https://brainsoupfic.substack.com/p/regnum-somnium