November 2024 Update 🍂

+meet all the witchy women I've written about 🔮

Hi everyone,

This newsletter is going to be sparse on publishing updates…because there really aren’t any 🙃 but I will have some shiny new writing content for you to catch up on! (now that I can almost function the week after discovering the US is dangerously close to becoming a fascist state with the most hateful and idiotic politicians in charge of this country and I’m still trying to figure out how to cope with that 💥) Anyway, this is why writing and reading is a great escape when the real world feels too difficult to engage in, and pouring yourself into a creative task can help give you hope and strength…and I actually did get a lot of writing done this past week that helped me feel better 💖

So let’s get the statistics for The Blood of a Divine’s querying journey out of the way first:

Queries sent: 81

Rejections/No-response: 68

Full & Partial Requests: 2

Withdrawn query + Agent left industry: 2

Pending queries: 11

Most of my pending queries were sent in May and June, and one as far back as March—so now I’m in the awkward position of having to nudge agents since 6 months have already passed for most of my pending queries, which is a reasonable amount of time to check in with an agent (IMO). And the reason that it’s awkward is because some agents get very touchy about ‘nudging’. I love when agents specifically tell you how many months should pass before you send a message to follow up and check if they are still considering your query, if they somehow overlooked it, or if you can resubmit—but many agents will have different timelines and some will only allow you to nudge them if you have an agent offer of representation, i.e. “don’t bother me unless someone else already offered to give you representation”.

But.

Some agents are okay with you nudging. Some are even okay with you nudging that you have a full request from other agents (I’ve only seen this more recently). Some are okay with you nudging after 4 months. Some 6 months. Some of them will reply with a touchy email if you nudge them too soon, though.

So when there aren’t any specific guidelines about how to nudge agents on literary agency websites, it becomes a whole dilemma for the writer to basically ask themselves “after waiting months for a response, do I want to risk annoying an agent because I nudged them too soon about looking at my query?” but also “if I never nudge them, will they forget about my query entirely?”

and in my case, with some of these agents who take longer to reply, I’ve updated my query letter and first three chapters since March—it’s what helped me get two requests in August—so do I want to nudge that agent or resubmit? but if I resubmit does that mean I have to wait a whole other 8 months to hear back from that agent? (which I still haven’t yet)

side note: this is why any time someone says they were in the ‘trenches’ for one month before getting an agent representation and only a few months before they got a book deal, those of us who are literally halfway through our second year of querying the same book…we might side-eye those extra lucky authors a bit for acting like spending only a few weeks waiting to get what everyone wants out of querying was a big ordeal…when that is nothing compared to waiting months or an entire year to hear back from agents—and it would still be form rejections—and some writers have had to query for years with several books. So yeah, getting that on your first try in one month? That is SUPER fast.

Anyway, I don’t know if I want to go through the anxiety of deciding who to nudge today and I still have such high hopes for the agent who currently has my full MS and is excited about 🕷💋 WIP. I’m really hoping that the ‘all you need is one yes’ is true and that my one yes will be from that agent 🥺

Here’s what you missed on my social media platforms this month 🧙‍♀️🔮

Last-last Monday, I put together a fun post to exhibit all the witchy women in my writing projects—since I’m still in a very witchy mood after Halloween. Even though I haven’t exactly written a Witch Book yet, witches have shown up in several of my works! Take a look below:

Feel free to let me know which witch in this series you found the most intriguing! Or if you have a favorite witch book you’d like to recommend 😊

What am I working on now?

I still intend to finish up a polished & readable draft of 🕷💋 WIP this month, but that’s not the project I put 10K words into this past week and a half… 👀

You may recall that in my last newsletter, I shared snippets of what will for sure be the next book universe I delve into after 🕷💋 WIP, a sapphic fantasy pirate book that is all about my FMC finding the strength to fight for and rescue the women she loves, a sea goddess ruthless in her pursuit for revenge, charming pirates, swashbuckling action, and anti-colonization. And what ties that project to this newsletter is the fact that this book will actually feature a cameo of Carmen, the Sea Witch.

Yes, that Little Mermaid Remix short story is actually set in the same world as my sapphic pirate book! And I wrote my short story with that in mind because it was easier for me to worldbuild—mermaids, sea goddesses, and pirates really all belong in the same world imo—and that fantasy setting is based on the Mexican Caribbean/Yucatan/Cancun, which I also thought would be a cool way to bring my culture into a twist on the originally Danish tale. Under the Sea Witch’s Spell is the title of that short story, and although I powered through COVID to submit it to a contest and even paid a fee, I got a form rejection just a few days after. I was devastated. All those weeks of work just to get rejected without even being given a reason, and now I had to figure out what to do with this special themed story to get it published.

It’s usually hard for me to boast about my writing, but Under the Sea Witch’s Spell was edited several times, beta-ed by multiple readers, and I got it under 5K words—and I truly thought it was good enough to win a contest. I still think it’s the best short story I’ve written eight months later—but I can’t find any other paying literary magazines that would take a 5K word fairytale retelling, or any stories involving romance (unless it’s horror or weird science fiction), and I know the writing quality in this story was good enough to be paid for and to be published in a lit mag—but I haven’t yet found an anthology or magazine that would even accept the premise.

This is why I originally thought I might draw illustrations for the story (since I want to do that anyway because I love this story, characters, and setting so much) and then I’d post it on itch.io for people to pay a small price to read it. But after testing the waters with my cozy high fantasy romcom short story…I got a grand total of 3 downloads (and the donations were so appreciated! but hardly anyone even wanted to read it for free). What the Rain Dragged in at The Cat’s Claw was a gift to everyone supporting me and I knew I might never find a place that would accept a 8K word short story—but when I considered doing the same for Under the Sea Witch’s Spell, I hesitated. Because I know that story deserves better than to be released into obscurity. I know it’s worthy of being recognized on a bigger scale. I know it’s good enough to be published and for me to be paid for it—so after I went back to write a bit of my sapphic pirate book on election day (my way of coping with anxiety), I thought…what if I really DID turn Under the Sea Witch’s Spell into a book or novella as a spinoff for the pirate book since we get to see Carmen and Prince Theo again in that story?

Fairytale twists and retellings do very well as novels and it’s a genre I love to read—which is why I was so surprised that most literary magazines don’t want that kind of story! And when I thought about the premise of this Little Mermaid twist being fleshed out into a full novel—knowing all the background lore for all the characters I created but never got to include in my own short story, knowing I had to skip some of the buildup of the romance between Carmen and the Prince to get the story under 5K words, knowing that there was so much more that would happen even after the ‘happy ending’ I wrote for that story—I truly believe Under the Sea Witch’s Spell was so special because it was so unique of a twist and rich with potential, beauty, magic, comedy, drama, and romance—and if I can expand the tale into enough words, I know it could be a good book 💜

So…I started writing more of that story as if it were a novel, and I ended up writing about 10K in one weekend and what I was writing…was really good! I feel like with both TBOAD and 🕷💋 WIP I didn’t have the ease of spinning beautiful sentences out of my brain instantly onto a keyboard for my first drafts…but with this expanded version of my Sea Witch tale…I was writing lines like this right away on my first try???

Long story short, I was so captivated by the way this story was developing that I couldn’t stop writing for hours last-last weekend 🥰 It was that thrill of first-drafting when you know something special is about to take shape that you become so consumed by it because you don’t want to lose the magic of this spontaneous energy when the words are flowing so quickly and easily. And well…now that the story is nearly 20K words, I think I really do have to turn it into a novella or full novel now 💜

So let me know what you think—would you read a book based on this premise?

What if the sea witch in the Little Mermaid wasn’t a villain, but a professional business witch trying to protect her foolish teenage client from being endangered? What if the prince ended up falling in love with the sea witch instead of the mermaid princess? And what if this tale ended up being just as dark as the original Hans Christian Andersen story AND as magical and romantic as the Disney version, all set in a fantasy world based on the Mexican Caribbean coast? 🧜‍♀️🖤💜

Anyway, I’m writing it…and time will tell whether I simply turn it into a novella or try to get it traditionally published as a full length novel 💖

Also I’m sorry I had to tell a very long story about the only thing I’ve been writing for the past week 😂 but yes, indeed… I took another tiny break from 🕷💋 WIP to be consumed by something else entirely for a book (series?) on the horizon…but this one won’t be very far away! And I think this world of witches who aren’t villains, mermaids who aren’t pure and innocent, pirates who have better hearts than the colonist nobles who exploit the labor of island natives to increase their own wealth and power, and women—women who get to wield swords, be intelligent, fight for their freedom, be soft and compassionate, love who they love, and get to be seen as beautiful in so many different ways—a world based on a place in Mexico that I loved getting to visit, getting to write about my culture and my people and all the beautiful, amazing things that make it such a magical place—this is the world I want to be in right now.

But before I can fully dive in to this new universe… I have to finish 🕷💋 WIP and get ready to query it if TBOAD, the book of my heart, does not get me an agent first 😢

Well, I hope this was enough of a monthly update for anyone curious to hear from me! As mentioned last month, I am easing up on the amount of newsletters I send each month now so that people don’t get exhausted with me 😅

But also now that Blue Sky is flourishing and people are actually enjoying my historical fiction research threads, I’m itching to write another Just HistFic Things article soon! So let me know if there’s anything you would like to know re: my historical fiction writing process for any of my histfic projects :D

Take care, everyone 🖤

Jazmin