UPDATE: It’s Been a While…
I’m not going to squint my eyes and fudge the date of my last blog—it’s been a minute, to say the least. Pregnancy will do that! But with the due date of our baby coming closer, along with five months (bless!) of maternity leave, I hope we will be able to devote some time to our WIPs and other projects.
querying update: a birth of flames (project— flameheart 1)
People love query stats. While we have sent less than 100 queries, we’ve had about a 20% request rate for partials/fulls from both agents and small pubs. We are SO blessed for such a response to this story!
Overall, the feedback has been generally positive:
strong development arc of the FMC
interesting, integrative worldbuilding
captivating first pages
All things a querying writer loves to hear. But of course, it takes one phrase for the Imposter Syndrome Monster to rear its ugly head (even when everything, good and bad, is personal taste in this field):
slower start than they preferred
too close to something else on their list
“I like it, but I just didn’t fall in love with it”
That last one? That’s the biggest punch. Don’t get us wrong, we obviously want someone who is going to love our work. But the idea of falling in love with a project from the agent/publisher perspective can come across as gatekeeping. Just because they didn’t love it that much doesn’t mean readers won’t. This is a whole hot-button issue on BookTwitter, so we won’t digress much on it. We just pray for the perfect home for this story that’s been placed on our hearts.
So, what now?
We have fulls sitting with several prospective industry folks, both agents and small pubs. It’s a waiting game, like much of this process. Come April, we will have been querying this book for a year. Dalton and I have tossed around the idea of self-publishing, as we feel strongly there is a reader this book was intended for beyond ourselves. But more prayer is needed for that decision as we wait to hear back on submissions.
WRITING UPDATE: OTHER PROJECTS
FLAMEHEART 2 has been outlined completely and has roughly 20,000 words written. WOO! Again, I’m hoping we will be able to work more on this in the coming months, but that may be wishful thinking.
KAYCE WEATHERSTONE & THE FLOATING KINGDOM, our MG Fantasy spin-off of Project Flameheart, is still in the brainstorming stages. I want to research current popular MG fantasy, especially those appealing more to boys (of which, there is a severe lack of). Several agents on BookTwitter seem eager for this demographic/audience to have more representation. Our 8yo son loves to read, and we want to give him a MG hero to look up to.
LIFE UPDATE
Obviously, we are having a baby! He is happy, healthy, and ready to greet the world. I’m due in April, so we could be greeting him any day now.
I’ve been thinking about sharing our story, as this was a long road and we are so blessed that God has answered our prayers. We are storytellers first…but that’s a blog for another time.
