What's Next?

Beyond COMMUNITY DAY, one short-term answer and one longer-term question

The entirety of COMMUNITY DAY has now been released.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, you can sign up now and access the whole novel. As an enticement: The Prologue and first five chapters are now free.

So what happens now?

Coming to a Device Near You

Soon, you’ll be able to get COMMUNITY DAY via Amazon. That includes e-readers like Kindle.

I’m in the process of editing, formatting, and similar stuff associated with that kind of electronic publication. I’m looking forward to enabling more people to get access to my novel.

Stay tuned for more info.

Rub Some Dirt on It

The tougher question, for me at least, is whether I’ll write another novel.

Let me explain.

Writing COMMUNITY DAY was a pleasure. Yes, it was difficult. Those 85,000 words and characters and scenes and conflicts and resolutions didn’t write themselves. Sometimes they were downright stubborn. But writing fiction is fun and thought-provoking. And it’s very different than writing non-fiction.

It also gave me the opportunity to work through some ideas that don’t lend themselves to nonfiction. I had some stuff to say, and I wanted to entertain people. COMMUNITY DAY let me do that.

And I have some more things to say. Things that I want to say through fiction.

Here’s the problem. The publication process is unpleasant. This will be brief—I’m not one for moping, and I don’t believe in self-pity.

Unless you’re an established novelist, here’s how the process works. You write your novel. That’s the easy part. Then you try desperately to get an agent to take you on and get a publisher interested in what you’ve written. Publishers work through agents, so you have to get an agent to have a chance at standard publication.

You begin the agent-pursuit process by “querying.” You spend time searching for an agent who might be interested in what you’ve written. They have “wishlists,” personal websites, publishing histories, social media, etc. So you research and try to find a potential match.

If you find one who might fit, you hope they are accepting submissions. Many aren’t. If they are, the work begins. You start with a letter. Then you tackle their standard forms. Your book’s pitch, what novels your novel is similar to, your publishing history, your background, why they should pick your submission from among the hundreds they’ve received, and so on. They also typically ask for your first chapter or first 30 pages or something like that. So they can assess your work.

Then you hit submit.

Then you wait.

Sometimes, you get a response in days. More often, it’s weeks. More often, it’s months. In many cases, you don’t get a response at all. The responses generally come in the form of a non-personalized “no thanks” note—along the lines of, “Thanks for querying me, but I’m not the right agent for your work, sorry I don’t have time to provide personalized feedback, but good luck in your querying.”

Then you go back to identifying an agent who might be a fit, hoping they are accepting submissions, filling out their paperwork….

To cut the chase, I sent out about 100 queries and never got an agent.

Yes, it’s discouraging. But there’s no crying in baseball. Rub some dirt on it.

[The question of WHY my work never got picked up is obviously the most important question. I don’t know. I won’t speculate. I’ve found that people who don’t get what they want tend to come up with self-serving answers that cast others as the bad guys. I won’t do that. My style is to say, “I should’ve done better,” and press on. So you’ll get no musing or grievance-airing from me. See above re: moping and self-pitying.]

But, but, but…

I started writing COMMUNITY DAY in 2020.

By 2023, I knew that I wanted to know more about a few of the characters. Ugh, that was pretentious, huh? What I meant was that I wanted to make up more about a few of the characters.

I started thinking about where they came from and what caused them to be who they were in Grangerford (the setting of COMMUNITY DAY).

Over time, I decided which characters I really wanted to focus on. Eventually, I decided when we should first meet them—how far before the events of COMMUNITY DAY. I came up with an idea for how we might meet them. And what would drive that story ahead. In time, I had a setting, a cast of characters, a plot, and four subplots.

In other words, there’s a COMMUNITY DAY prequel in my head.

I just have to decide if I’m going to yank it out. But see above re: the publication process.

Stay tuned.