End-of-Year Wrap Up

Wait a moment, where did 2024 go!? I can’t believe December’s already almost over. Wasn’t it May last month?

This year had a lot of ups and downs, but for the sake of my own sanity, I’m going to focus on the ups, and less on the downs. It’s the holidays, there’s a lot of bad going on in this world right now, so let’s spread some cheer!

One of my biggest writer “red flags” is that I rarely read. This year, I acknowledged that, and I aimed to fix it, and hey! I picked up 12 books this year and I finished 8 of them. A few of them I simply won’t finish before the new year, and two were DNFs—one a historical fiction, and one that I THOUGHT was historical fiction but was actually nonfiction, lol. I’ve never been a huge fan of historical fiction (or nonfiction), but I’d picked both those books because I wanted to read how other authors handled seafaring settings.

It’s kinda a shame I couldn’t get through them, but that’s entirely because when I read something, I don’t really want to exist in the world I already live in, y’know? I’d rather go somewhere else—which was why Tress of the Emerald Sea won out over The Wager. Personal taste. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad work of literature!

Here they all are:

I think I read about four books in 2023, so that’s a significant bump up! I bolded my 5-star ratings in the list, because those I typically save for books that really blow me out of the water. Regardless of rating, I highly recommend all of these books on the list.

Now, the real reason most folks are subscribed to this newsletter is for updates about The Divine Archive, my seafaring fantasy duology, so let’s get into that!

One of these days I’ll release a newsletter with a full, formal “pitch” for this duology, as I’ve been rather noninformative about it, but that’ll be for another day. Maybe January’s newsletter. For now, I want to focus solely on end-of-year stats.

Blood of the Gods is probably about as submission-ready as I can stomach, at the moment. I’d told myself I’d do one more edit pass to tune up prose and pacing, but I lost steam halfway through. Those are edits I can make if a publisher ever picks me up (or, alternatively, if I get to a point where self-publishing is my way forward). I don’t want to burn myself out!

I’d like to tradpub, if possible. I feel like that’s my #1 shot at getting the widest possible audience. But sometimes I wonder, as a queer author with a shamelessly queer story: what are my chances, especially in this political climate?

So, self publishing remains my backup.

Anyhow. For now, especially with the hubbub of holiday season, I decided it best to slow down. No more edits. No more queries until well after the new year. I can see the holiday season written all over QueryTracker! 80% of agents are closed to submissions right now, and even if they are open, I have no doubt their attention spans will be thin.

Finding agent representation will take time. No need to rush through it.

So, that said, here are my stats for this year’s queries! I started the process in October, for reference.

Querying is exhausting, but I’ll get there. This is just how the process is. How many times have I queried an agent, thinking “oh, this is SO up this person’s alley!” only to hear back that they’re not interested. But this isn’t something I find disheartening, as I’ve had plenty of agents say they think my premise is intriguing, despite the rejections. There’s a whole slew of reasons why someone might reject, including, from what I’ve heard, that sometimes it has nothing to do with the manuscript itself, and everything to do with the agent’s current life situation or workload.

Sometimes, I have to remind myself that the average author gets 70+ agent rejections before an acceptance. And that’s not even bringing publishers into the picture. I’ve got a long way to go.

Aside from publishing progress, I’ve also hit some forward momentum on The Divine Archive #2. In November, I started hand-writing it, which was not so kind to my wrist, but it helped me commit to a beginning, which I’d been struggling to do for many months prior. All I can say is this: book 2 is going to be so cool, ya’ll.

The hardest part is consistently keeping myself quiet about all the exciting things I’m coming up with. A large group of folks have read my first draft of Blood of the Gods, and a minuscule fraction of that have read my submission draft. I cannot express enough, to those first-draft readers, how much better it is now, how much it has changed, and how different book two is going to be. I’m so in love with this story I’ve created, and I can’t wait for other people to fall in love with it, too.

In other news, some various life stuff:

All in all, this year has been a solid, productive one. Can’t wait to see what (good things) 2025 brings!

Catch ya next year!

Wren Rivers

@corvidarcana [Bluesky, Tumblr]

@corvid.arcana [Instagram]