So Close…

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

I’m not a big fan of cliches, and the phrase “so close, and yet so far away” has always seemed silly to me. And yet, it describes my most recent experience in querying pretty well.

I’ve been trying to sell my most recent finished manuscript, THE OBSIDIAN PYRAMIDS, for almost a year and a half now. I’ve queried about 35 agents, and I did 2 verbal pitch sessions at a writer’s convention in Chicago last summer. If you haven’t read my earlier posts on this book and others, THE OBSIDIAN PYRAMIDS is the seventh full MS I’ve completed, and the fourth book I’ve queries agents on.

At the end of January this year, I received my first ever request as a reply to a query. I sent in the current version of the MS, and a little over 3 months later, the agent responded with a revise and resubmit request. She said she loved the concept, and that the MS had a ton of potential, but gave me two general criticisms on the writing (too much internal dialogue, and not enough description to go along with the external dialogue). I spent almost two months revising based on those comments, then sent in the new draft at the end of June.

This morning, I received a reply to the submission. Sadly, a rejection. The agent did say she thought I did a good job of revising based on her feedback, so at least I have that to provide some level of comfort.

I went from a 100% rejection rate in the slush pile to an R&R and (I think) almost an offer with a single agent. So close. And yet, now I’m essentially back to square one. I have about 15 agents remaining on my list for THE OBSIDIAN PYRAMIDS, and none of them have ever heard from me before. Starting over from scratch, so far away from getting an offer.

Plotting vs. Pantsing

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago in an apartment far, far away…

I was a pantser. Full on discovery writer, gardener, whatever you wish to call it. With my first two books, I started writing them. That’s it. I started with word one and just kept going.

Many years later, I consider myself a pretty heavy plotter/outliner. I HAVE MANY SPREADSHEETS.

Someday, I should talk about my evolution in this aspect as a writer, but that’s a much longer, more involved blog post. For this, I simply want to put down in words as it happens, in case this goes horribly wrong, or horribly right, what I’m experimenting with on my new WIP.

Back in 2007, when I was still (sort of) young, when I started writing my first book, for a few days, I tried writing two books. At the same time. When I’d never written (finished) a book before. Seriously.

It was dumb. I gave the unfinished book a working title of Hell’s Gate. I think I wrote about 10,000 words in it, but unlike every other MS, I tried writing it out of order. It’s a strange concept to me now, and I found with that it was much easier to stick with my other project, The Doorway, by writing linearly. Like normal. Strange, but…

I’m doing it again. Kind of.

I’ve been working on my newest creation, Plague of Cataclysms, for some time now. Way too long, given that I haven’t started writing the first draft yet. But I have written a few scenes. I’ve decided to try playing around with each POV character at once, in her/his opening scene. And heavily revising before moving on, which is something I never really do.

I’m doing it because I want to work on character voices before I really dive in, and also because I want to practice with some fundamental aspects of writing I think I’m weak on. I’m not sure how this will impact the finished product, but I hope it makes me a better writer in the long run.

The outline is far from finished, and I still have worldbuilding details to work on. I count what I have as the zeroth draft. I feel like I’m pretty deep in this thing, but I still don’t count this as a start of the WIP.

So I guess the question is: Am I pantsing or plotting? In between? Or some freaky, mutant combination of the two?

Finding Motivation to Move On

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

I’ve spent more time working on my most recent MS, The Obsidian Pyramids, than any other book in my past. It even feels like I’ve spent more time on this one than the others combined. Unfortunately, the querying process hasn’t gone much better than before (though I did at least receive a couple personalized rejections for the first time ever, so maybe I should count that as a win).

But the world moves on, and the time approaches when I need to focus on the next project. I’ve worked on my next book a fair amount (mostly pre-writing), but I haven’t been able to get myself to stick with it consistently like I have in the past. Part of that is my career – I started a big, new project a month ago and I’ve been devoting most of my evenings working on it. But the hardest part is convincing myself I’ll find more success with book 8 than numbers 1-7. Creating a novel takes a lot of time and effort, and it can be hard to ignore distractions and put words to page (screen? hard disk?) when I expect only a handful of people will ever read it.

Still, I must push forward. I am excited about the premise, and I think the characters should be pretty awesome, but even though I’ve spent a good deal of time “designing” them, and I know about them, I don’t know them, know them yet. Not like my already-written characters. These new people seem so distant right now.

Anyway, I just sent out round 3 of queries for TOP, so now I hope I can get myself to fully focus on my new WIP, The Plague of Cataclysms. At the very least, I think I’m winning with the title…

Pitching

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

As in pitching a book to a lit agent in a pitch session, not baseball. Though the Brewers pitching staff has been quite good this year, especially the bullpen.

I’m headed down to Chitown tomorrow to my first writers conference, and I signed up for two pitch sessions with agents. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but as it’s now here, I wonder what I was thinking when I decided I would try to sell my work by talking to people. In person. Oops.

Anyway, I’ve seen some conflicting advice regarding how to go about the pitch, so I probably won’t do it right. My pitch is about 45 seconds in length, provided I don’t break down in tears in the middle and need time to recover. When I was in college and needed to give presentations, even including a couple at academic conferences in foreign countries, I always thought I did a pretty decent job, and never really felt that uncomfortable. But with those, I had visual aids to help guide my thoughts, and the stakes weren’t quite as high if I did a poor job. It mattered, but it didn’t mean crippling rejection over a book I slaved away for 17 months on.

Oh, and I wasn’t sitting directly in front of a single person who will probably want nothing more than for me to leave so she can get the damn day over with.

But we’ll see how it goes. I’m stuffing a portable box of wine in my laptop bag so I can start drinking the instant I’m done shaming myself.

Deep in the Query Trenches

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

After 17 months of hard work on my most recent MS, The Obsidian Pyramids, I sent out my first round of queries seven weeks ago; four rejections so far, but I’m still waiting to hear on four others. I also decided to enter #QueryKombat last minute. We’re supposed to hear who made the cut (64 out of 428 entries will make the tourney) next Friday.

I’ll try to keep track of my query adventures here, starting by posting the current version of my query and the first page of my MS (this is essentially the submission to #QueryKombat).

Query:

Dear [Agent],

Twelve obsidian pyramids have stood since before memory, conferring arcane powers upon those who seek them out. Most who pursue them become Endowed, acquiring one of twelve special abilities. But a few unlucky initiates are instead marked – physically and spiritually – as Accursed, and are treated as little more than animals, thought to possess stained souls.

Alaeric Helskor is one of those unlucky few. After years traveling lost and alone, he’s visited by a mysterious shadow-woman who grants him the unique ability to temporarily siphon Endoweds’ powers – but only after he’s slain an Endowed of matching ability. Promising him redemption, she convinces him to travel to Lake Celes, where a self-proclaimed prophet named Ben Tobagho has taken control of ancient ruins that contain the secrets of the pyramids and their creation.

After an Endowed poisoned his daughter years ago, revenge sparked in Tobagho’s heart; he now plots the destruction of the pyramids and the end of the Endowed, playing on the fears and jealousy of normals – men and women who’ve never visited the pyramids. When the shadow-woman prompts Alaeric to steal a mystical artifact from within the ruins, he quickly makes himself Tobagho’s enemy.

As Tobagho’s vitriolic message spreads and his power grows, Alaeric becomes caught in the middle of the ensuing war between Endowed and normals. To save the pyramids, and the shadow-woman who granted him his powers, he must expose Tobagho as a fraud. But the prophet holds all the cards, and Alaeric must decide if redemption is worth his life.

THE OBSIDIAN PYRAMIDS is a 110,000 word adult high fantasy that melds the western-style setting and innovative magic of Brandon Sanderson’s THE ALLOY OF LAW and the morally flawed yet likeable characters of Scott Lynch’s THE REPUBLIC OF THIEVES.

I work as a portfolio manager for Crabel Capital Management, and I earned my B.S, M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Marquette University. My greatest writing influences include Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, and Jim Butcher.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best Regards,
Kevin Indrebo

First page:

Alaeric pressed his body against the rock outcropping that concealed him, fingers wrapped around the hilt of his sword. He controlled his breathing, keeping it slow and calm. The eerie silence of the late afternoon was loud in his ears.

Below, the woman who’d been tracking him picked her way along the gully. Her blood-red hair stirred as a slight breeze picked up, and she glanced around, eyes wide and alert for anything – not the look of someone who assumed she was alone. Days since he discovered her, this was the first time he’d managed to gain the advantage and get a good look at her.

She was quite striking. Beautiful, even. She wore tight, black leather pants and a matching jacket, with a small bedroll strapped to her back. She walked with an otherworldly grace, one that made her appear out of place among the stunted plants and rocky, dry terrain. Like a thorny, vibrant flower in a dying, unkempt garden.

A Dancer. No doubt about it. She floated over the uneven ground Alaeric had stumbled and struggled his way through a few hundred heartbeats earlier. A high-level Dancer, at that. Too high for Alaeric to sense how many pyramids she’d seen.

This complicated things. For a time, when he first noticed the signs, he’d wondered if he was imagining the woman’s presence in his wake. The djinn knew he was having a fuck of a time distinguishing real threats from fake these days. But even when he’d convinced himself someone was tracking him, he’d still held out hope it was a simple brigand. Simple, but persistent. Alaeric may not have looked like much of a target, but out here, in the lonely and vicious Miraji Desert, some folks were desperate.

The Epic in Epic Fantasy

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I had the flu. I had it bad. I get sick somewhat frequently, partly because I fly a lot, partly because I drink too much and that probably weakens my immune system I can only assume. But I haven’t had the flu much since I was a kid. This was definitely the worst I’ve had it since I turned 18.

I couldn’t get out of bed for 3 days except to go to the bathroom. Could almost eat nothing.

It was also hard for me to sleep during the day, feverish and sweaty that I was. Fortunately, I had one little piece of luck on my side. Something that made it easy to get through. OK, not easy, but possible. I was reading Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer (Stormlight Archives 3) at the time.

Now, I read a lot of big books (I love big books and I cannot lie). Epic fantasy has always been my thing. I used to go to the bookstore and randomly choose books from the fantasy section based on which one was the thickest.

But I’m pretty certain this is the longest book I’ve ever read. Over 450,000 words. More than 1200 pages in hardcover with basically no margins. That’s about four Kevin books in one.

The final sequence, which involved about a thousand threads converging on each other in an epic confrontation, was the equivalent of a normal-sized novel. And holy shit was it emotionally exhausting.

It was incredible, and the only bad part about it was: I was sad it finally came to an end. 450,00 words and I wanted more immediately.

I want to be able to write like that. To create something so epic, so gripping, so dramatic, an epic fantasy reader can read the longest book she’s ever read and think it was too short.

But I can’t. Or at least, I can’t imagine ever getting to that level. I’ve learned more from Brandon than any other author, and I think a lot my strengths as a writer are similar (though not as good by any means) to his. To do what he did in this book, though? I just can’t imagine ever having that ability.

But it doesn’t mean I won’t try. I just finished the fifth draft of my seventh novel, The Obsidian Pyramids. Shortly after publishing this post, I will be embarking on one of the scariest, most painful, frustrating experiences a young(ish-in-a-way) writer can have. I will be sending out the first round of queries.

Pray for me. If you do that sort of thing. I’d say have a drink for me if not (or if so!), but I will be having plenty for myself this weekend, so I think I have that covered.

Writing Other

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

After a holiday break (with a bit too much drinking, if there is such a thing), I’m back at editing my WIP, The Obsidian Pyramids. With some helpful feedback, I’m pushing toward the fourth draft.

One of the comments I received was a request to add a POV for one of the secondary characters. I was hesitant at first, but I’m giving it the old college try, and I think if it works, it can solve multiple problems with the MS.

As a quick aside, one of the things I’ve discovered about myself as a writer over my last two novels is this: I enjoy writing women characters much more than men. Am I good at it? Ha, lol, probably not. Though I do personally feel like my ladies are better than the boys, I’m very much a dude, and I probably don’t get it.

In my previous book, Daughters of Darkness, most of the characters were women. I was scared, figuring I would fuck it up, write ridiculous, unbelievable, or offensive characters. But I was pleased with how it turned out (even if lit agents seem to disagree with me). Now, as I look to add this new POV, I’m faced an even scarier proposition: writing the character I understand the least, and probably will get horribly wrong, forever shaming myself…

A popular, charismatic dude.

Seriously, I have no idea how these people work. I’m an enginerd, and I’ve recently learned that I’m probably mildly autistic. I have a PhD, I write algorithms to trade hundreds of millions of dollars in institutional money, but ask me to initiate a friendly conversation at a bar/party/whatever, I’m like, uh… I don’t… what?

So getting inside the head of this magically (in a literal sense) charismatic guy  is daunting. Fuck, even writing him from other character’s perspectives was scary and hard (and I’m not sure I succeeded).

I figure I’ll do what I always do in these situations: focus on the magic. Royne is a Charmer, which means his magical ability is to instinctually understand what other people want to hear, how to stroke their egos, how to connect with and impress them.

We’ll see how it goes.

No NaNoWriMo For Me

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year, for the first time in several Novembers. Personally, I always looked at NaNoWriMo as a cute little thing, something to talk about on social media a bit. I’ve never been a fast writer or a binge writer, so I never came close to winning.

But I’ve also never (at least from a certain age) had a problem sticking with my writing and getting to the end of the draft, even if it took a little time. When I’m writing a first draft, I write six days a week, skipping very few schedule days during the drafting process. It usually takes me 5-6 months to produce a first draft in the range of 100k-120k words.

Last year, I made a mistake by forcing myself to start writing on Nov 1st. I clearly wasn’t ready, and should’ve spent another month or so on pre-writing. A mistake that’s led to more needed revision on the book – I’m currently finishing up the third draft. I’m trying to take my time and make sure I don’t rush things. Quality over speed for me these days, even if I feel a little impatient now and then.

For everyone that is participating, good luck this year and have fun.

 

A Million Words

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

I’m currently finishing up the second draft of my current WIP, The Obsidian Pyramids, still working to get better, still struggling to work through rejections and stay positive. I recently remembered the old adage, the first million words is practice, and I figured, once I hit a million words, I’ll magically become a great writer, yes?

Seems like I should be getting close, so I decided to run the numbers and see where I am.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a short story, but I used to do so more often, before I got into writing novels regularly. I don’t think I have copies of them all, so I just have to guess at how many words these count for. I’m going to say 50,000 total, though that might be a little conservative. But we’ll start there.

Current total: 50,000

My first attempt at writing a novel came when I was a senior in college. It didn’t go well. I stopped after 20,000 words and didn’t attempt another novel for almost 6 years.

I have three other unfinished novels, none of which I’ll ever return to. In more than one case, leaving the project was me acting strategically rather than simply quitting, so I think I should be able to count these in my total. My estimate is that those four incomplete projects account for about 75k words.

Current total: 125,000

Then we have my completed novels:

  • The Doorway: 105k
  • Starcatcher: 160k
  • The Book of Terrors: 180k
  • Wizard’s Curse (YA): 50k
  • Blood Price: 115k
  • Daughters of Darkness: 115k
  • The Obsidian Pyramids: 105k

 

Final total: 955,000 words. So close!!!

Next Round

~ Kevin Indrebo ~ Leave a comment

Finally, at long last, the wait is over. It’s time for…

The next round of rejection. I mean querying.

I’ve spent the last couple months working on more edits for Daughters of Darkness (after several months of writing the book I’m now calling The Obsidian Pyramids), and I’m finally ready to send out the next round of submissions. My changes to the query were minimal, but I think it’s clearly stronger than the previous versions.

For anyone who’s curious, here’s the body of the query:

 

High Lady Iris LaRose always knew she would become one of the most influential women of the Dianic Empire – until her sister brought shame upon the entire family by harboring a failed assassin. After years of struggle to prove their love and commitment to the empire, Iris and her mother have nearly erased the family’s tainted past. Then Iris’s mother murders her daughter’s groom on the couple’s wedding day.

When Iris flees the scene, she’s accused of conspiracy by Empress Elena Flora, a woman with little sympathy left for the LaRose family. But Iris won’t believe that her mother is truly guilty – an imposter must be responsible. Faced with execution, Iris’s only option is to lie, claiming she can bring the imperial guard to her mother.

Her lie buys her just enough freedom to seek the hidden killer, but when answers prove difficult to find, she turns to the most unwelcome of allies: Violet Zino, a brash and charming pirate who can access the criminal underground.

As new assassinations threaten the stability of the empire, Iris and Violet uncover clues that lead them to a shadowy group called the Daughters of Darkness, women who plan to destroy the empire by replacing the empress with a saboteur. Now Iris must choose to risk her life and her freedom to save Elena Flora, or watch as the empire she loves crumbles.

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, complete at 112,600 words, is high fantasy that will appeal to fans of The Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks and The City Stained Red by Sam Sykes, as it shares their adventurous tone and touch of irreverent humor.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

 

It’s a bit longer than I wanted – and quite a bit longer than the first draft – but I think this is the best possible version.

So I’m off to put together and send out those submissions. Then on to the initial reading of the first draft of The Obsidian Pyramids. No summer vacation for his writer.