Writing Updates

1/15/2024

Hi, all.

Just as an aside, I’m going to be stepping away from audiobook recording for the foreseeable future. I’ll likely pick it back up again someday, when health and time permit, but for now, I’m putting the mic away.

Thank you to everyone who trusted me with their book. I genuinely hope I did your work proud.

12/10/2024

To put it bluntly: querying didn’t go well.

I started back in May, thinking I was ready to rock. After the first 15 or so, quibbles with my manuscript began to rear their ugly heads. When I sent out those first queries, I had a complete book, but no beta reader feedback. I jumped the gun, not just jumped it, but polevaulted over it.

Was it a complete story? Yes.
Was it well-edited and formatted? Also yes.
Was it ready for querying? No.

I was emboldened when I got a positive reply in June, my first manuscript request. I felt everything was in a good place, and my query was working. But the opening, as all openings always do, forever and always, amen, needed work. I got some reader feedback and ended up adding another 5000+ words, which meant it needed more editing.

Again, at this point, I’m still (and still am!) very confident in this novel. But after the initial request, I got only received one other request, which was immediately shot down. Rejections started piling up, but I kept plugging away. I personalized most of my query letters, tried to make them funny and memorable without detracting from the business side of things. I tweaked my query, but still nothing.

The one full request came back with some helpful feedback, but sadly, that was a rejection, too.

What went wrong, you ask?

1. I kept labeling it comedic fantasy instead of just fantasy. Regardless of the love Discworld gets, out-and-out comedic or tongue-in-cheek fantasy doesn’t move publisher meters. Most of the more successful ones, like The Dark Profit Saga and Kings of the Wyld, are self-published or independent.

2. I queried a month or so too early. I genuinely thought everything was set, but I didn’t give myself time for reflection. I was in a far better place than my first queried novel, a far, far better place, but it needed a bit more time to cook.

3. Trying to lean too hard into the comedic fantasy bit in the personalized greetings. The one yes I got was from a simple little intro:
   
   Dear -Agent-,
   I saw your call for fantasy novels on the -blank- site, and as it turns out, I have one of those!

   Now, I know what you're thinking: gosh, Aaron, that sounds amazing, but I'd need a voice-riddled query letter with a story premise and its main points of marketability!

   Huh, what a coincidence, I have one of those, too!

   It was quick, fun, and to the point. I tried a bit too hard with some of the other ones, including one agent that I was pretty dang sure was my best shot. Next time, I’m just going to have a set opening, then just release it all into the wild.

4. Not self-publishing from the beginning. My particular niche of the fantasy genre works much better in the indie-publishing scene, and despite my research, I didn’t see that going in. I just wanted to break in and have someone say “hey, yes, this is good enough for people to pay for” rather than, y’know, assume it was.

So where does this leave Pilfer! ? I’m currently plotting out a crowdfunding campaign so I can get a good cover artist, cover design, and some inline illustrations, and then hopefully, publish it through KDP. Until I hit the Kickstarter button, though, I have a few more queries that I’m just gonna leave there. I have one publisher request out, too, but I’m not holding my breath. This book is going to come to life one way or another. Stories are stubborn like that.

Will I ever query again? I think so. Maybe. I have a couple more projects in the planning stages (indeed, some well into the manuscript stage) that might be more commercial, but I love the world of Pilfer! and love writing in it. I just had a vacation last week, and wrote close to 10k words, both doing discovery writing and working on the sequel. After a year of personal and creative travail, it felt amazing to fall into a groove and watch a world unfold in front of me.

Lord willing and the creek don’t right, I think it’s just a matter of time, patience, and perseverance.

9/18/2024

One of the biggest growing pains I’ve had as a newer audiobook narrator is scheduling while also figuring out how much I could actually handle. The past few months have had me forlornly looking at Scrivener before sighing and starting to record.

Thankfully, through churn and burn, trial and error, late nights and lots of tea, I think I’ve found the balance. I genuinely love bringing these books to life, but learning what I’m responsibly capable of has cut into my recent writing time.

I’m still on track to match last month’s 8K word count —and if I find a couple quiet mornings or evenings, somewhere closer to 12K— but the single-minded focus side of me is telling me this book should be around 75%.

SMF Aaron is super helpful in keeping me in gear, but he’s not very forgiving. He’s actually kind of a butthat, but he’s also the reason I’ll be finishing three books in two years.

9/3/2024

Now that a hectic stretch of life is over, Honor Resources is starting to take center creative energy again. I’m aiming for finishing the first draft before November. I know, I know, Stephen King would have a heyday over a draft taking more than three months, but I’m trying to allow myself a bit of grace.

When I wrote Splinters, I’d given myself a goal of 4,000 words a week. For Pilfer, I tried to write more often, even if it was fewer words per day. For Honor Resources, I’m trying to hold to what I call the Pratchett Constant, 400 words per day. It’s my minimum per session, unless I’m actively falling asleep or something more important than writing crops up (which includes mysterious activities called deeshes and lawn-dray, according to my dear wife).

I’m not gonna lie. There’s a part of me that fumes at my lack of efficiency, the part desperate to make amends for years of wasted youth. It’s the part refusing to believe Joel 2:25, of God’s ability to restore lost years. It’s the part of me resonating with the great Relient K line “who I am hates who I’ve been.” If I’m not restrained, I give the throne of my life over to Productivity, who seeks to cover the many-year reign of Apathy at the cost of a frantic, joy-stealing need to create.

I do my level best to not waste a single day, but I also struggle with accepting days not up to the standards I’ve set for myself. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, I have trouble dreaming, but not letting dreams be my master. I’m a mental Molotov cocktail of ADHD, depression, and OCD, and if I start putting the weight of my identity on what I create, it collapses like a toothpick cathedral French-kissing a bulldozer. Having the basis of who I am not be on what I do, but on who God has said I am while also not giving myself an inch to circumnavigate the globe is a difficult, but important balance.

I mean, I haven’t found it. But I am trying.

8/12/2024

I’ve been polishing Pilfer! a bit lately thanks to some beta reader feedback, so Honor Resources has only gotten about 1500 or so words on it over the past week. Really happy with the way Pilfer! is turning out. Honor Resources is taking longer because life has been happening (and y’know, this little audiobook gig I’ve made to support my writing habit), but I have an inkling it’s gonna be fun.

7/30/24

While I hack away with Pilfer! in the query mines, I've been starting up my next novel. It's continuing in the the grand tradition (read: one whole book) of tongue-in-cheek, slightly slapstick humor with those little scatterings of heart emerging up like bubbles on a pizza crust. I keep insisting it'll be shorter, but I know better than to tell myself it'll be less than 80K words. I'd told myself Pilfer! was going to be 65K, then felt slightly embarrassed when I finished the first draft at 85K+. Oops.

It's better to have a large chunk of marble to make a smaller statue than to get a smaller rock and try to make it bigger, I suppose.

5/5/2024

Second-Pass revisions are humming along. The ice sculpture looks like a swan, now it's a matter of adding definition.

Maybe not a swan. Probably closer to a warthog. And it's not made out of ice, but some kind of cheese. The definition thing still stands, though.

5/1/2024

If there was ever a time to break out a dad-joke about it "being drafty in here", now would be the time to...

Oh. Welp. There it is.

Thanks to a birthday present of time to write, the second draft of Pilfer is complete! I know I've said this before, but I think this phase will go by quickly. Mostly, it's B-plots getting neatened up, then a good old fashioned line edit, and it'll be good to go!

I told a friend I'd been hoping to finish this up by the end of February. I know it's May, but I'm genuinely happy with what's been done with that time. Lord willing and writer's block being kind, I don't think this revision slog happens next book.

4/7/2024

I feel comfortable writing 80% there, because that's technically the amount done for where I'm at. The struggle is coming from the amount that has to come together in order for it to make sense and be polished. I'll be honest, I get a little daunted at this point in writing. I see all the threads from the first draft coming together to make a tapestry, but then I see where I didn't match the patterns correctly or where there's a bunch of other small adjustments to be made and I get overwhelmed and write run-on sentences in other media as a rebellion against the rigor I hold myself to and I'm doing it right now aren't I?

I feel like I'm letting someone, somewhere down by not finishing sooner. I feel guilty when I'm not writing, because I'm not "productive". I feel like a schmuck because I had grand ideas for three books a year (somehow, while working full-time and not ignoring my family) and those ideals aren't being met. I feel like a failure who is not only a failure but in the process of failing in a whole new way.

Internal Aaron's dialogue isn't kind right now. Say a prayer for me that I might be able to finish this thing well.

3/10/2024

Second draft continues apace, past the 40% mark now. There's been a few out-and-out rewrites, which take time to button up when you're not writing full-time. The end product is stuff I'm really, really happy with, so it's been well worth it. There's also a few stylistic changes I had to make (tense change during certain scenes/flashbacks, when and where they show up, how it ties back in, etc.) that have eaten up time.

I mean, no, I don't actually have a time limit outside of the timepiece of Providence, really, but I also want to move this along. I'd like to have four books under my belt before 2025.

2/14/2024

Apparently, when I schedule out second drafts, I need to add the Scotty factor to cover the "this is all garbage and needs to be completely rewritten" plaguing the early chapters of a draft. I think I'm almost out of that initial slog (although, I do know at least one later chapter is going to be completely rewritten from the group up). Beta reading has most definitely been pushed back to the beginning of March at the absolute earliest, though.

The slice of web for Aaron Waite - author, biannual blogger, in love with and bad at FromSoft games

A quick display of my vocal range

My audition for The Shattered Sons, which just finished recording. Click the picture to check out the book on Amazon!

My audition for Jared Woodcox’s Journey to Torcia: Shadow Casters. While I didn’t get the job this time, I’m proud of the work and it was highly complimented by the author. Jared was kind enough to allow me to use it in my sizzle reel here on the site. Click the picture to check out the book on Amazon!