April 28th, 2010

It's Like Kill Bill Meets Good Omens, but Completely Different

Yesterday I did it, months before I thought I would: I actually wrote a query letter pitch for Hubris.

Charlie just wanted to reconnect with his adopted sister, Adriana. Adriana just wanted to avenge her birth mother by killing the six Gods and ending their tyrannical reign over the universe. But then things got complicated. Charlie has met the Gods, and though they’re rattled and threatened, they don’t seem much like tyrants. What’s more, they claim that if Adriana succeeds in killing all of them, she’ll wipe out the universe in the process. Adriana thinks they’re bluffing; the godishes, impish immortal beings that are not quite gods but not quite anything else, are in her corner. But even Adriana is starting to suspect that she’s being manipulated.

As Charlie races from New York to the Tian Shan mountains to [...]

April 20th, 2010

The First Waiting Game

Ah, now it’s coming back to me: the feeling of restlessness, the guilty sense that I should have gotten back to work by now instead of pouring hours into blowing stuff up in Just Cause 2.  I had forgotten about this part of the novel-writing process.  But Hubris is still in the hands of a number of my beta readers, and I don’t feel that I’ve gotten enough feedback yet to mount a proper revision.  I think I only need one significant rewrite, primarily to punch up the lackluster first chapter, before I’m ready to start the second big waiting game that is the query process.  But for now I’m stuck on the first waiting game.  You play this game by trying your hardest to respect the fact that your friends and family actually have other things to do [...]