MathiasCavanaugh.com

So, 2014 is underway.  Time to layout the plan for this year.

As of right now, I am still shopping my manuscript for Under the Darkened Moon around.  Been a little lazy about it, and will keep chugging away.  Nothing’s changing on this front.

I now have 3 short stories that, I think, and so does my focus group, are ready to go out into the world.  These will be submitted to various contests and publications throughout 2014 to see if they can garner any attention.

Hopefully one or more of them will be noticed and published.  If not, I plan on releasing them in various formats for download.  Plans are right now that they will be free, in preparation for what might be the need to self-publish my manuscript at some point in the furture.

I’ll keep everyone appraised of my progress on these plans as the year unfolds.  Wish me luck!

Last week I officially started sending out queries for my epic fantasy novel Under the Darkened Moon.  I started by selecting five literary agents and sent them all queries.  I followed their submission guidelines and sent what they requested, whether it was just a query, a query plus a synopsis, or a query plus a synopsis plus sample pages.

A couple days later I got my first official rejection.  It was a rejection based only on a query letter and a synopsis and not the actual story itself, but a rejection none-the-less.  Now I am looking at my set of next five lit agents to send letters to. Read more…

Under the Darkened Moon once had a character named Kal.  Kal, alas, is no more.  Oh, he still exists in the story, but he is no longer called Kal.  His new name in the final manuscript is Tarek.

Why did I change his name?  Ultimately it was because too many characters had names starting with the letter K.  Kyel and Kath were enough, so I changed Kal to something else.

The decision was made easier during the live read edit when my wife was reading the story.  She has this particular drawl to her speech where she constantly replaces the “a” sound in words with an “e” and visa versa.  She also does the same thing with the “e”s to “i”s for some reason.  But she only does it on certain words.  For example, pen is pin, but ten is not tin.  She never pronounced one of the characters, called Den, as Din. Read more…