Well after an even longer hiatus than planned, Damien and I are officially settled in Athens, Ohio and I’m ready to get back in the game. It’s been a fun trip but I’m glad it’s over because a month and a half is a looooooooong time to go without writing. I was working on a scholarly essay for the first half of the month of July, so you could argue that I was writing, but it felt like I wasn’t because I wasn’t able to do any creative writing on the road and as much as I enjoyed working on this scholarly essay is absolutely no substitute for working on a story or novel. The only thing really that kept me feeling like “a writer” (whatever that means) was that I did receive two acceptances while on the road – one from an Australian journal (yay! I’m soon to be international!) and one from an online journal that pays professional rates and is on Duotrope’s list of the 25 Most Challenging Fiction Markets.
This month I have one last non-creative project to work on – a book review that I’ve agreed to write for a magazine about Australian literature. It’s a fun and (I expect) easy project so my goal is to have at least a solid working draft of it done by the end of the month of August, which would open me up in September to start getting my momentum going again with my creative writing. I’ve already started doing a little creative writing since we’ve gotten here, and I’m sure I’ll continue (I had a few revision ideas for some of my stories while we were in transit and I’m anxious to get cracking on them). But since the month is already half over and I’m under deadline for the book review (and we’re still unpacking and I’m still looking for a job . . .), I’m not going to set a writing goal for this month.
What I will do, though, is set an agent hunting goal. That’s right, I’ve decided that it’s time to start looking for an agent for my thesis. I think the best option for me is to divide my hunt up into small chunks of about five queries at a time. If I send out 5 queries a month, it’ll be a slow enough moving process that if I come to see some major flaw in the novel that needs to be revised, there will still be plenty more agents I haven’t sent to yet. Five is also a small enough number that it won’t get to feel overwhelming and shouldn’t prevent me from setting and sticking to regular writing and journal submission goals. So I’m setting a goal for myself of sending out five queries by the end of the month. I plan to keep setting that same goal for future months and starting next month I’ll add to it regular writing and submission goals.
So, for August, it’s just:
- Send out 5 queries to agents
