Querying has been a struggle, but not exactly the struggle I expected. My CP suggested I share some of my thoughts and experiences, and since she’s always right, I agreed.

First things first: no one makes it through the trenches unscathed. We all deal with the fear, the vulnerability, the hope, and the rejection. In fact, we expect it (if we’ve been paying attention). I’ve certainly gotten my share of all of those things, having queried several stories, a novella, and now the novel I wrote for the express purposes of traditional publication. But there is more to querying than sending out letters and sample pages and waiting for the inevitable bad news. We’re still people during that time. More to the point, we’re still writers.

So, what do writers do while they’re querying? Usually the #writingcommunity on Twitter will urge you to “write something else” during that time, either to distract yourself from the aforementioned uncomfortable feelings associated with querying, or just because that’s what we do. We write. But I think the question is more challenging than it seems, or at least, it is for me.

What am I supposed to write? The sequel to the book I’m querying? If the first book goes nowhere or faces huge revisions, a sequel could become meaningless or require its own significant rewrites. I don’t like writing with an unknown foundation, so I am reluctant to choose that route. What about the sequel to a previous, unqueried book I wrote years ago? Same problem. A sequel to my novella? No. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

Something new is always an option. But that option kind of hurts, too, doesn’t it? To say nothing of my previous works, I just spent two years writing this book and another year stewing over it, beta-reading it, and editing it. Three years devoted to a single work makes moving on feel like I’ve written it off (apologies for the pun) as a loss somehow.

I love the world that I have created. I love the stories and the major arcs I am building toward. But I can’t stand how fragile it all feels. It’s like I’m building a tower made of shadow, one that might become real someday, but isn’t yet. How do you add another level when the first one is just an idea? Everything new I write has to be written as if nothing came before it, because each new thing might be the first thing I publish. It makes it feel like I haven’t done anything at all, an idea that stands in devastating contrast with the thousands of hours I have spent thinking and writing and rewriting and editing and working through things with my CP.

I know this idea is toxic. It flows directly from the idea that only traditional publishing validates a written work. Unfortunately, it’s one I’ve held for a long time. It’s not one I want to have, and one I would argue against for anyone but myself, but it’s there. It is probably this underlying idea that infects every negative feeling I have about querying and writing-while-querying. It is probably the cause.

Recently, I have managed to throw myself into a post-Roe body horror short story, and that has been a nice reprieve, but it has also felt like a total abandonment of my dark fantasy world that I have put so much into. It’s a dalliance, an aberration. An excuse to work through something else on my mind, but not really the kind of writing that I want to characterize my career.

And I do want a career. I want dozens of books and novellas and short stories, fleshing out a fantasy world and layered, complex stories that people want to read. It’s always been what I’ve wanted. It feels shaky now. I’m trying to get through this uncertainty, but it’s hard.  

I hope your writing is going better than mine.

Until we meet again,

Paul R Monarch