Got back into the regular (summer) swing of things with work and the kids’ last week of holidays, just in time for our routine to change again come next week. On one hand, I can’t believe it will be September already; on the other hand, May feels like a hazy memory. We had a relatively decent summer, weather-wise, and I think that’s made it feel long even as it seemed to breeze by. I am definitely excited about switching to my fall closet – hello, sweaters and layers! – but less excited about the prospect of the cold, dark days of winter beyond.

I am already starting to mentally prepare for ‘hibernation’ mode, which this year will (hopefully) involve writing my next book. For the last few weeks, I’ve struggled with writer’s block – not in writing, but in brainstorming my next story idea – and I was starting to worry about, what else, never being able to write anything again. It’s a rite of passage, right? Well, it sucks. Thankfully, it’s over … for now … I think. I have an idea and … I’m really excited about it? Honestly, it feels like a magic trick because less than a week ago I was convinced my brain was broken. Creativity is a weird, wonderful thing.

This week, I did something I haven’t done in a long time: took a bunch of things to get tailored. It started with a NWT J. Crew dress I thrifted. I LOVED it, but it was slightly big in the bust and gaping under the arms. In the past, I might have tried to make it work* but this time, I decided it was worth the time and money to get it to fit just right. It turned out to be a relatively inexpensive fix ($20), so I took the plunge and took in a couple of other dresses that had a similar issue, including my beloved rainbow dress. I mean, I’ve had that dress for years and adore it, so it’s worth the effort, right? Especially since I’ve found a seamstress in my neighbourhood whose work I trust.

* My reason was that, for many years, my style/closet was constantly evolving, and I couldn’t always be sure that any particular item would be a ‘forever’ piece worth the extra investment of tailoring. I would either not buy something that didn’t fit perfectly, or else buy it and just make it work as-is. Now that my style and closet have ‘settled’, I feel differently about spending money on fixing up core pieces.

My current shopping obsession is still jewelry. I’ve been browsing a lot on Poshmark, because thrift stores have been a bust lately, but haven’t bought anything yet. I’m trying to be very intentional and approach it more like “collecting” than “buying”. Mainly, I want to get pieces that I can pass down to my daughter. Lately, I’ve found myself going back again and again through the jewelry that I got from my mom and grandmothers, and (re)discovering pieces that perfectly suit my current tastes. Every time that happens, it feels like a gift from the women who shaped my life; a way to feel close to them again. I love the idea of making that possible, some day, for my own kids (and, maybe, grandkids).

Last weekend, I did a big edit of my jewelry collection – putting aside stuff that doesn’t suit me anymore, reorganizing the rest, and generally making more space (literally and figuratively) for the pieces I love. I need to be able to easily see and access my jewelry and clothes in order to wear them regularly. Out of sight, out of mind. (I recently read that object impermanence is an issue in ADHD and I was, like, ‘yeah, that tracks’. LOL!) I’m now gearing up to do the same thing with my clothes, which will be harder – I have way more emotional attachment to clothes – but I’m excited to start the new season with a ‘fresh’ slate.

Have a great weekend!

Yesterday marked 4 months since I embarked on the adventure known as Trying to Get a Traditional Publishing Deal. In the context of the industry, that’s barely a blip. To me, it seemed like one, very long fever dream. As a writer, I’ve aged, like, a decade. I made mistakes, learned stuff, got rejected, bounced back. Over and over. I wrote a LOT. [Since January, nearly 400,000 words. That’s 4 books’ worth.] I still do not have an agent, and I am about to start querying my second manuscript (which is actually my 4^th book). Let’s recap!

Back in July, I decided that it was time to shelve A Party to Murder for the time being. It’s not that I think it’s a bad book; in fact, after the last round of revisions in July, I think it’s better than ever. The mistakes I made early on during the query journey came home to roost, though. The biggest one was querying too soon, and too widely. It meant that, with many agents, I didn’t end up putting my best foot forward vis-à-vis this book – and, in querying, you typically only get one shot. It sucks, but it is what it is, and I learned some valuable lessons from it. I am not sending A Party to Murder to the dustbin, though. I’m still hopeful that, down the line, I’ll get another chance to bring it out to the world – especially since I wrote 2 other books in that series (as interconnected standalone mysteries). It remains to be seen how and when.

My final (for now) stats for A Party to Murder are 70 queries sent, 2 full requests, one partial request, and 39 rejections. I think it’s safe to say the remaining outstanding queries are also rejections; it’s increasingly common, it seems, for agents not to respond (even with form rejections). In light of the effort and time I put into this book, the lessons I learned from querying it were not cheap ones … but that’s how it usually goes with writing. I feel much better prepared for my second attempt at querying, at least. In addition to being excited to try again, I also feel a kind of detached curiosity about how the process will go this time around, given that I’m much more savvy about the industry and its expectations, and that I’ll be working with a very different book.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I wrote this last book as a cynical exercise in pandering to the market … but I definitely approached it more strategically than my first. Since I didn’t get much agent feedback on A Party to Murder, I wasn’t able to get a clear sense of its marketability as a historical mystery, so when I decided it was time to pivot, I decided the safest bet would be to write something different. Mystery is the genre in which I feel most at home (when it comes to structure and plot beats), but I figured I would need to switch things up. So, instead of historical, I went with contemporary, and instead of a romance-forward plot, I went with a fantasy-forward one. The Mysterious Affair at Gaunt Hall is an adult, contemporary fantasy mystery set in a small English village hiding a big secret. My main inspirations were Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. When I say ‘inspiration’, I’m using that term very loosely. Each one gave me a little nugget of an idea for what ended up being key parts of the premise of my book, but you’d be hard-pressed to find obvious similarities between these works and mine. I also took a much more considerable chunk of inspiration (slash actual plot) from a novella I wrote about ten years ago. I didn’t actually go back to re-read that earlier work, but it might be interesting to do so at some point and compare to see my evolution as a writer.

Here, for fun, is a short blurb for The Mysterious Affair at Gaunt Hall:

Thea Paget has a problem. She’s standing in a strange room with a dead body at her feet and the last 48 hours are a complete blank. The last thing she remembers is driving into the small village of Spalding Crow, following a mysterious summons from a man whose name may or may not be Mr. Noddy. With her academic and personal life in tatters thanks to a heartbreaking betrayal, Thea hasn’t got much to lose. Even so, a murder charge is something she’d rather avoid. Two people are dead – and one of them might not even be a garden variety human. Wolfram Breakspear, lately of Gaunt Hall, was the immortal creature responsible for Spalding Crow’s ancient curse. Allegedly.

Every 27 years, at the summer solstice, Spalding Crow must send a bride to Gaunt Hall or else face the wrath of its owner. Floods, earthquakes, and the threat of a motorway running straight through the village (among other terrible things) have kept the inhabitants of Spalding Crow in line for centuries. Now, one of them seems to have taken matters into his – or her – own hands. With the solstice just around the corner, and a new bride due to fulfill the covenant, the traditional engagement party at Gaunt Hall has become the scene of a double murder. But why would anyone want to kill the local antiques dealer? Is Breakspear really dead? And what’s going to happen once the clock strikes midnight on solstice day if the covenant isn’t fulfilled? To get herself out of Spalding Crow, Thea must first return to the crime scene and try to find the answers to these questions, along with her missing memories. She soon discovers that Gaunt Hall will not yield up its mysteries easily – especially not if Theo Devlin, Breakspear’s former personal secretary, has anything to do with it. Luckily, a magical talking mirror proves slightly more willing to help than the devilishly handsome Mr. Devlin. Offered an unorthodox means of investigation, Thea embarks on a race against time to unravel the truth and, very possibly, save Spalding Crow from utter destruction. But nothing at Gaunt Hall is as it seems, and Thea is about to find out that its secrets can change everything … including her life.

Let’s hope it’s a story that will catch an agent’s eye!

I’m doing a few things differently this time to increase my chances. First and most importantly, I stuck firmly to genre conventions on word count. The Mysterious Affair at Gaunt Hall is 80,000 words, which seems to be the sweet spot for debut novels. Hopefully, that means that agents won’t reject it outright based on length. Second, I plan to query in very small batches, spread out over a much longer period, starting with agents who have fast response rates. The goal is to test the strength of both my query package and my MS, and make adjustments as necessary. I don’t expect to get personalized responses, but form rejections can still be helpful in pinpointing what is and isn’t working. I am also going to get a professional editorial assessment (in addition to beta reader feedback) to help me with that. Ultimately, of course, the whole thing may come down to marketability, which is hard to predict these days. So, on one level, this whole thing is just a big roll of the dice.

Meanwhile, to keep moving forward, I really should be starting to think about my next book. Should … but haven’t. Or, rather, I have been thinking about it and not getting very far. I think there’s a bit of ‘quiet burnout’ happening (not weird, considering how hard I pushed myself for the last 6 months) along with the usual cocktail of impostor syndrome and “what’s the point when all I get is rejection” blues. I’ve been trying to go easy on myself this month, as summer is winding down, but I’m starting to feel the clock ticking. Come fall, I need to find the motivation to get myself back in the saddle. I keep thinking about the axiom that gets bandied about a lot in writer spaces, which is that most published authors sell their 4^th or 6^th or 9^th book, rarely their first. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try and try again.

We were in Clearwater, BC, last week for our family summer vacation, and it was wonderful. It felt like stepping outside the mad whirlwind of daily life for a little while and just being. I read five books in six days, which wasn’t a new record for me but was utterly delightful. We all went swimming in the lake every day. My husband and I took a kayak ride to see the waterlilies up close. My daughter and I sat on the dock, dangling our feet in the water, and enjoying our “girl time”. Truly, it was bliss.

And then, it was back to real life. I had this week off from work as well, which gave me a chance to acclimatize to the pace of our usual routines again. As always, I had lofty goals for using the extra free time to get stuff done and, as always, most of them came to nought. This year, I am determined not to beat myself up over it. Especially since we are now nearing the end of August, which is a difficult time of year for me. End-of-summer melancholy still hits me hard every year. I recently read a quote that August was the true of the year end (as opposed to December) and I really feel that. I’m sure that August being my birth month has something to do with that, but it’s also the start of the season change (at least here, in Edmonton) and the realignment of daily life with the kids heading back to school in September. The end of August feels like turning over a page to a new chapter.

These are older outfits, by the way. In Clearwater, I wore the same Lululemon shorts for a week. [Along with a couple of T-shirts and an old sweatshirt, 2 swimsuits, and a couple of basic, loose cotton dresses I keep specifically for these trips. Oh, and my black, plastic Birks.] As someone who gets “dressed up” every day of my life, it was a big change of pace for me but, honestly, I loved it. It really helped to underscore that feeling of pause.

But now I’m back in the saddle and trying to mentally prepare for going back to work next week. I had a peek at my work inbox because I couldn’t help myself. It was less horrific than I was fearing, and I did a little bit of cleaning up with an eye to making life easier for myself come Monday. Does anyone else do that? I’m very lucky to work with folks who really understand and respect the importance of disconnecting from work, so there’s usually no external pressure to “check in” while I’m on holiday (except in rare cases of major emergencies), but I am still battling my own internal mindset inculcated during my years in private practice.

There are some updates to share on the book front, but I will save those for a separate post. I also have a ton of book reviews to share, but I’m not sure if I should do a separate post for those as well. Lately, I’ve been posting them on Reels – yes, Reels! Me, on video, imagine that – over on my new writing account on IG. Would you want to see something here as well?

Have a great weekend!