Nothing Doing

Nothing Doing

Okay that’s a lame blog title.

Not much to report. We’ve been busy getting ready to vacate our storage unit. On Monday we rent a truck and bring it all home, rip through as much as we can, and then take a huge load to the dump. So far we’ve gone through about 15 boxes of books and recycled a bunch. It’s amazing how little used books are worth these days. We sold them to a used book store for maybe pennies per book. It probably cost me more to store the damn things in the storage unit than what I got for them. We also got rid of a ton of old clothes we had in storage. What’s left is a ton of Xmas decorations, old bookshelves, sporting goods, and Tonya’s collection of craft magazines and Hercules dolls.

On the writing front, I put a new version of the query letter for Dawn’s Rise up for review. I think people like it better, but it still needs work before I’m ready to send it to an agent. One person wrote this comment:

Every sci-fi novel is a race against time to save humanity. You should consider something that separates yours from others written.

My takeaway from that comment is that A) I’ve successfully captured the essence of the SF novel and B) I do need to say what’s special about my novel.

So, what the F is special about Dawn’s Rise? My main goal in writing the novel was to A) include as many mega disasters in one book as I could—and I mean an over-the-top amount of disasters, and B) throw in the whole Space Elevator thing. So naturally that brought me to a Space Elevator Disaster. How do I fit that into 150 words without saying what I just said? This is the challenge I face.

Maybe I just need to focus on one aspect of the story, instead of trying to summarize the whole damn thing. Like a 150 word vignette? Just a taste of the story. A teaser if you will. I'll have to consider it. Something like "this is your standard 'World's coming to an End' but with this twist" kind of thing. Besides which, the Query Letter is not supposed to be a summary of the story, it's supposed to be a sales pitch, so I can say whatever I need to to get an agent's attention (although it's not supposed to "sound" pitchy).

I won’t have much time to work on it the new few days because of our mini-move but I’m determined to get something out soon to agents. Keep tuned.