The agent search continues and it’s quite tiring. I keep telling myself that these things take time and that there are no guarantees , but still there’s this nagging feeling that people around are starting to question why you don’t have the book published yet. Were you lying about how good you thought you were? Surely you should have heard something by now?
I have to keep telling myself that it’s only been 6 weeks and that’s no time in publishing; no time at all.
But then thoughts turn to the next book. Should I get on with book 2? If book 1 turns out to be a trunk novel, what good would starting on book 2 do? Or should I instead work on another idea? It’s not like I don’t have loads of them.

As a result, I feel like my life is on hold, that I’m at a crossroads unsure of which road to take. I find myself checking email with an unhealthy regularity, as if waiting for something to happen.
Most days you see it for what it is, insecurity from being in a position you’ve never been in before. Some days, it just gets to you and you start think that you simply must be the worst writer out there.
Today was one of those days, one where I felt that I needed to make a decision on which book to seriously work on. You know, actually sit down and write rather than try out scenes, play around with ideas. And it was my friend Sam Sykes who reinforced a stupid idea I’ve been having: why not write both?
Could I seriously write 2 novels simultaneously without one bleeding into another? The Four Realms’ sequel is pretty much planned out and mentally I feel ready to write that book. The other book, Gods of the Wild Frontier, is very different. It doesn’t play with trope, it’s got cowboys and helicopters and vulture gods and ghost animals and only the basics of a plot at the moment. I normally know the end to a novel, but with this one I have no idea, and that’s a little scary. I’ve never started a novel where I don’t know the end, so this will be a bit of a new experience for me.
I’m hoping that both projects are separate individual enough that writing them will feel distinctly different. After all, I don’t need to write them perfectly on the first draft. Tone and style can be played with in later revisions.
So I’m both scared and a little excited at this experiment. It may be doomed to failure, but that’s better than just sitting around waiting for emails to arrive, right?