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| Sunday, September 26, 2021 12:41 PM |
| (Last updated on Sunday, September 26, 2021 12:42 PM) | | Let's Talk Some More About Books! |
 by Fëanor |
Hey! I remembered I had a blog, and some things are going on, so I thought I'd post!
- My next book, RING AND IRON: A STRANGER WORLD ADVENTURE, the third entry in my Middle Grade fantasy series, will be out in hardcover on December 6th! Mark your calendars! I'm not sure when I'll put it on pre-sale on Barnes & Noble...probably some time in November? Anyway, I will definitely shout about it when it happens.
- Kirkus Reviews just reviewed the book! You can read it here, and I added a quote from the review to my Published Works page. TL/DR: they liked it! Although apparently they think the kids these days don't know about LORD OF THE RINGS, and might not get my references to it. Well, they should! That's all I have to say about that.
- As I mentioned in my last post, I asked some folks to read the early draft of my next, non-Stranger-World novel, the title of which I haven't decided on yet (currently I like IN THE CITY OF A HUNGRY GOD - what do you think?), and they gave me a lot of useful feedback. One thing I kept thinking about was the complaint that it didn't feel like it had a solid conclusion. I had indeed purposefully left things at a cliffhanger, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought the first book in a series shouldn't end that way. It did need some more satisfying ending, in which our heroes accomplished something more tangible. As I said to my brother, "this one should be A New Hope, not Empire Strikes Back." I thought maybe I could slap together a better ending in maybe 5 or 10 thousand words. Well, 27,000 words later, I was done! Yeah, it's quite a bit longer now, but I'm also much happier with it.
- Still on the topic of the new book: I'd assumed as I was writing it that it would be for the Young Adult audience. But the new word count puts it outside the established range for YA - even for the traditionally longer fantasy genre. I talked to a literary agent friend of mine, describing my problem, and he pointed out that since two of my main characters were adults, what I had wasn't really YA anyway. So yeah, turns out I wrote an adult fantasy book. I guess it's also technically urban fantasy, since most of it takes place in a present day city. Who knew?? Anyway, that's actually good news really, since for adult fantasy, my word count is just right.
- The next step for my new book is for me to do yet another editing pass, making sure it all hangs together and sounds good. Then I'll send it back out to my test readers again for them to do another pass. I'd also like to get a sensitivity reader or two to take a look at it, as I'm dealing with some minority groups here and I don't want to be saying anything stupid by mistake. Then I start searching for a literary agent who's interested in this kind of book. Then I write query letters, send them out, and cross my fingers. I hope you'll cross your fingers for me, too!
- As for stuff I'm reading, I'm currently on the final book in Maggie Stiefvater's Wolves of Mercy Falls series, SINNER. Each book in this series has been better than the last, and this one features a particularly complex relationship between two particularly broken individuals. Interestingly, it's focusing a lot more on real world emotional issues than it is on the werewolf stuff. It's good!
- Other books I've read recently are STORMSONG and SOULSTAR, the last two entries in C.L. Polk's Kingston Cycle (thanks to my friend Cynthia for turning me on to this series; I stalk her Goodreads and add everything she rates highly to my "to read" shelf!). These are also fantasy romance books, like The Wolves of Mercy Falls, but they also each feature a murder mystery, and are set not on a subtly altered present day Earth, but in a completely different reality full of magic, ghosts, and angels. Also, the romances featured are LGBTQ+. The final book has the most complex romance, as there's no meet-cute or passionate first kiss; instead, we follow along as two people who were separated 20 years ago re-learn how to be a couple. It's well done.
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
