Summer’s never long enough, is it?

If the reappearance of PSLs at your Starbucks wasn’t clear enough, or the resurgence of Gilmore Girls to the top of your Netflix algorithm, September’s upon us once more and the seasons seem to have finally turned.

Here we go.

I’ve long transcended caring enough about this blog to update it more than sparingly, or to even bother explaining the reason for each long hiatus, but things in Vijayland have been less than uneventful recently. I’m in the midst of looking for a new job, which swallows up time. I’ve also become an uncle to a baby boy, which swallows up far more. No actual details forthcoming, for the privacy of the folks involved, but a rocky couple of weeks for mère et fils look to be simmering down at last, due largely to the care of good maternity doctors, and the tireless, Heraklean support of my own mère. It takes a village, and all that.

I spent this summer querying Shadows of Caesar, as you may remember from my last blogpost. I got through about half the agents on my immense query tracker; in short, almost 40 different agencies – several of whom advertised a particular interest in hearing from historical fiction submissions – sending a tailored bespoke cover letter, synopsis and extract to each one.

Not a single taker, from any of them. Not even a request to read a full manuscript (something that I did actually get once for Legion That Was; a novel that was laughably lower in quality, and when my querying technique was a lot less polished than it is now). Half of them didn’t even bother to respond.

I know at some point I’ll have to finish the job with the remaining agencies, but I fear I’ve depleted my will to do so for some time yet. And frankly, job vacancies are a far more pressing thing for me to apply for right now than literary agents. The agents I’ve already applied to were the ones I wanted most, anyway; they either repped authors I knew or respected, or had good track records of making noteworthy commercial successes of their clients. The further you go down my list, the less and less of that there is.

So Shadows, it seems, is consigned to the sock drawer for the foreseeable future. While it works just fine as a standalone (as all novels should), I planned it fairly brazenly as the first in (what I hoped would be) a quite long series of future novels; my Cato and Macro, or Gaunt’s Ghosts, if you will. Which has the knock-on effect of making me less likely to continue them. You can’t query the second or third novel in a series nobody’s read, obviously. So would you then commit to ten or so intense months each time to create a manuscript you know you can’t sell?

I’m hesitant to self-publish the damn thing as well, for similar reasons. Aside from the money and effort it would take, if the unthinkable happens and I do get an agent further down the line, then any chance of it being publishable goes up in smoke.

So here it stays. Almost 15 months of work, tossed essentially into a time capsule. Potentially never to be read again, unless the market pivots so cataclysmically that the industry is turned on its head.

Which brings me to the crux of this blogpost.

I’m about to start writing another novel. One I’ve had in my head for a good long while (since 2023, before I’d even finished Herakles). One that I’ve been itching to do, because it centres on one of my favourite periods in Greek mythology and one of my favourite fictional characters in existence. One who hasn’t been put in a retelling before, and I genuinely can’t believe I may be the first to do it.

After carrying around the idea in my head for so long, and spending the last couple of months breaking the back of all the reading, I’ve as good as finished the outline for the first draft. It’s over 25 pages long, and it’s probably the most in depth I’ve ever planned a project (even more than Legion That Was). I’ve always found the myth retellings way easier to write then the Rome thrillers, because I know so much more about them and the realism is a lot looser. It’s also the most in-depth reading I’ve ever done for a novel, too. For Herakles I exhaustively re-read all three versions of the Argonautica, and called upon a lot of my nascent subject knowledge. For Ajax, however, I’ve burned my way through the primary…

You either think Graves’ is the best Iliad translation there is, or you are wrong.

…the secondary…

…and any existing Troy or Troyjacent retelling within reach.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more psyched to start a novel. But that coin has two sides; I’ve come to the conclusion that, if this one doesn’t get me published (or at least agented), then I’m probably going to call time on this whole novelist thing as a career path.

No-one can question the gumption of it. 8 years (only 2 of which were non-adjacent) is a long damn time. I’m 8 months away from my 30th birthday, and frankly, I can’t weigh the tenuous chances of getting a foot in the door against the literal years of isolation, sacrifice, and sticking power it takes to shit each manuscript out any longer. To say nothing of the months it takes to run the query gauntlet, again and again, and waiting further months for the agents graceful enough to actually respond. Or the money spent on cover designs and editorial feedback to create products that actually deserve to be sold in the first place, against the (unexaggerated) pennies I’ve clawed back from the meagre numbers that end up selling.

Dreams are fickle things. A lodestar with enough tunnel vision can become a millstone. Especially in this economy.

And yes, I won’t lie. Watching how TikTok and the rise of romantasy have changed the publishing landscape these last few years, blurring the lines between author and influencer beyond belief, and propelling ceaseless waves of vapid, trope-heavy YA into the marketplace that pushes everything and everyone else out, is something I have no wish to stay permanently angry at. Even an uneventful life can be too short. If that truly is the future of publishing, then I’m not going to overstay my welcome in a field that, as has been made so spectacularly clear, is no longer for people like me.

It’s been a nice ride, but rides have to come to an end.

The future of publishing, guys and gals.

You never know. Next summer Christopher Nolan is poised to desecrate the Odyssey for mainstream pleasure in IMAX, so perhaps Trojan War tales are due for a renaissance. Then again, that’s what I said about Shadows, and Gladiator II.

That film sucked ass, as well.