Ah, the trials and tribulations of an author. The manuscript for Sophistication, my second book, is done, sitting, collecting dust, glaring at me. Can’t really blame the stupid, inanimate stack of paper, either, because I’m hardly holding up my end of the bargain. I made one real attempt to secure a publisher. It was perhaps the biggest publisher, and I worked with them for about a year on the first version and then two revisions. Then they basically told me that it was just too damned violent. And I don’t know how to change that without fundamentally breaking the book.

So I’ve been learning to program in Unity, closing deals at work, overdecorating my house in Halloween shit, dieting, exercising… I bought a new iPad Pro. That’s cool, right? None of it, however, is querying agents and publishers, which is what the fat pile of words in one corner of my living room demands.

It’s time to start into the slow, tedious, stressful, hopeful, heartbreaking, excruciating process of pitching the book again. I’m just not sure I possess the patience. My plan at this point is to fire everything in a scatter-shot query blast and see if anything hits. I’ll give it a month.

At the same time, I’ve decided I’m going to ready the novel for self-publishing, just in case. That means one final professional edit. Print formatting. And my favorite part, working with a voice actor on the Audible / audiobook version. I liked the work Joshua Nicholson did for my first book, Dead Weight, so I’ve already chatted with him about Sophistication and he’s on board. Even after I warned him with apologies that it’s much raunchier in every respect.

So here’s the deal. If the all-encompassing query bomb finds a target, Sophistication will debut sometime next year via traditional publishing avenues. And if not, it will be self-published on December 18, 2018 by the highly reputable partnership of Matt Casamassina incorporated.

Meanwhile, I’m starting into my third book, Degenerate, at the same time. I was thinking I might pile onto NaNoWriMo, but that would require some level of dedication and consistency, so I opted myself out. Still, I expect steady progress because I have every intention of finishing this book quicker than I have any other.