Hey everyone,

I'm still here and I'm still writing. After the above post, I sent UTILITY around to some beta readers, and their feedback led to a bunch of edits, which I only just recently finished. It's not a full-blown, whole new draft, but I rewrote much of the middle 100 pages of the novel, and what with getting married and honeymooning and all, that took a while.

My opening 4 pages have been getting a lot of positive feedback lately, and after the above experience with the agent pitch session, I'm feeling much better about this next round of submissions. I have two versions of a query letter, one more high-concept sounding, and the other hopefully better suited for literary-bent agents. I'd love to get some feedback on which is better, so I'll put those two in a new post.

"The Was" hasn't been picked up by anyone yet, though some publications have thoroughly considered it. It's still out to a good amount of literary journals, and my luck could change. There are a few more journals still in the chamber, but a recent read-through made me feel like it could probably use some minor re-writes before I exhaust my last options.

I still revisit Wake here and there, but it still needs some work before I can submit it. I wish I could get some critical eyes on it (especially since it's only 1,500 words), but no one I've contacted seems that interested.

I've applied to an adult workshop to help with this. If I were to get in (*crosses fingers* ), then I feel they could help me with Predisposed as well. I've gotten pretty far into the outlining process of a "safer," fringe-YA, anti-coming-of-age story that I'm calling Eventually ..., and the workshop could maybe help with that as-yet nascent work, too.

So have new fear, I'm still putting in the time and effort to not only try and get UTILITY published, but also to pump out new material.

Dish towels and casserole dishes to all of you,
ViV