Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 35
Rejections: 11
Scenes Mapped: 8
Total Scenes: 329
I got some work done last night which was great. I realized there was a set of scenes I had forgotten about that start to propel Uma’s arc so I’m working that in. After that, Arc 1 is ready for the 3rd Plot Point and I can pivot to Arc 2. It’s coming together. 😀
Filling the Well
Bloodwitch: 39%
The Raven Boys: 90%
Guide to Literary Agents 2019: 85/332
I keep digging through Guide and I’m on the last chapter before the agent listings. This week I should be able to finish building out the expansion to my agent list and get back to querying. Win and win.
Polishing the Well
Our kids are home from camp! They’ve been in Kentucky all week serving and connecting with the Lord and I couldn’t be happier that they got the opportunity…or that they’re home. My heart is so full that nothing else can get in the way.
Well Chat
What’s Left?
We’ve talked about a lot this week hitting all the high points from sci-fi to romance. By now you’re probably wondering what else I could talk about in the realm of genre fiction. Well, there’s a few things left.
First off is Westerns. You know the type. Old John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies set in the “Old West” period of the U.S. Movies where there’s a small town out on the frontier with some kind of criminal with his grip on the town like an overgrown bully and a new guy in town who’s mad as hell and ain’t gonna take it anymore. Watch Back to the Future Part III and you’ll get a riff on Westerns that still hits all the high points. You’ve got trains and horses and six-shooters and no dang medicine. The best westerns are their own cliches.
Then there’s dystopian fiction. These are your end-of-the-world or post-apocalyptic visions of the future, but they’re not JUST that. Any futurescape that appears worse in some way from what we hope the future will or could be is dystopia. My favorite right now is 1984 and even that in and of itself has become a bit cliche. It envisions a future where the state governs and watches everything and adjusts the news and history as they see fit. Big brother is always watching. Now, some people might argue that this is the present to some degree, but to the degree depicted in Orwell’s classic, this is definitely a future we want no part of. That’s dystopia for you. The world may not have ended, but if we end up there, you might wish it had. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories are just a subgenre within dystopia, not their defining stories.
Then there’s literary fiction which, frankly, I’ve never been able to define. I don’t know how you could have a story that is ACTUALLY a story that can’t be defined. That said, I’m big into categorization. I feel like everything has a box and there is a box for everything. If there isn’t a box for something, you just make a new box, you don’t toss it.
Just to get an idea of what is considered literary fiction, I just googled it and ended up here on Goodreads. I started reading through the examples of literary fiction and immediately started categorizing them. The Handmaid’s Tale reads like dystopian to me. Lord of the Flies: Fantasy. Of Mice and Men: Suspense. Pride and Prejudice: Romance. The one thing these all have in common is that they transcend any genre you try to put them in. They’re ALL seen as classics because they dive into the heart of the human condition. Maybe THAT is what makes literary fiction…
Then there’s your lyrical forms that tell a story but through verse instead of prose. These are your poetry. Epic, haiku, sonnet, the list goes on as long as your arm. This is where the form serves as much purpose as the words themselves and there is beauty in the construction beyond what it said. I’ve written some myself, but I could never get swept up in the beauty of it as I was writing. Prose works better for me.
There’s one more topic I want to cover, but we’ll save that one for tomorrow. I hope you all had a good weekend. Check in with you tomorrow to cap off my Genre Exploration Series. Good night.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG