Hello, friends!
First, a bit of a technical note; I’ve moved my subscribers from ConvertKit over to Substack. I’ve been abjectly terrible with keeping up with ConvertKit, but I thought you may be interested in getting updates. If not, and you’d prefer to unsubscribe, no hard feelings! I know it’s been quite a while since you’ve heard from me.
Not, I must admit, that I’ve been doing much better here on Substack. The last few months have been fairly slow. I thought about doing a 2022 retrospective, but kept putting it off and putting it off.
The truth is, things haven’t been all too exciting. I’ve been doing yet another revision pass on The Unbreaking of Hannah Cole, my contemporary YA novel that I’ve been working on for forever now.
There aren’t many agents who haven’t seen this book yet, but hope springs eternal. My goal is to shave it down to 70,000 words, and send it off a few presses that don’t require agented submissions.
I’ve had a few people suggest self-publishing it, which, to me, feels like a sad way to end this book’s story. I can design the book, maybe even design the cover, but I think it’d break my heart after spending years writing and working on this story to put it up on Amazon and maybe sell a handful of copies.
I know there are some self-published authors that do exceptionally well — but Murphy’s Law and the Law of Averages tells me that I’m not one of them.
Speaking of Hannah, I recently re-discovered one of the earliest, earliest, earliest versions of the book—long before Hannah was a pastor’s daughter (or named Hannah, for that matter). It’s been quite a while since I’ve even seen this, and it’s quite amazing how much my writing’s grown since 2010-ish.
That much gives me hope. There’s someone out there who wants this story. Something for my fellow writers to keep in mind. It’s true for you, too.
I wish I had more exciting stuff for you! It’s been a long while of nose to the grindstone, writing poems, editing poems, doing my work, getting feedback, and doing the business of being a writer.
I will try to be back here more often with snippets, talking about what I’m reading, and other adventures. I have a couple poems I need to record, as well as a few cover ideas for my next collection of poetry, the collected works from the “pandemic years” so to speak. Those will come soon.
Thank you, as always, for bearing with me.
With love,
Zach