In less than a month my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge will be released upon an unsuspecting world. My editor at Flame Tree has expressed the hopes in the future that we shall be working together on many novels. I have found everyone at Flame Tree to be wonderful, supportive, and utterly professional and welcoming so the idea of working with them on more books is very enticing.

Some years ago, I completed a military SF novel that landed me with a literary agency. While the association with the agency didn’t work out and we went our separate ways, that novel has sparked at least some interest with a couple of publishing houses.

The trouble is timing.

Two other editors are looking at the book, one because we met a conference and they read a few sample pages and the other because I had submitted the manuscript through the imprint’s slush pile. (Slush pile is the name for the great stack of manuscript that are sent to a publisher un-agented.) Both publishers have had the book for over a year now. In that interim I sold, edited, and next both will have published Vulcan’s Forge with Flame tree.

I have decided that I am going to go ahead and send my military SF book over to Flame Tree. I will let the other editors know what the score is but I can’t even be sure that my emails are being read. These are turbulent seas to navigate and the sort where having an agent would be extremely helpful but I have no agent and must sail these waters myself.

I am taking some time to revise the manuscript before sending it over the Flame Tree. When I submitted to that agency I was signed with it was 115,000 words long, not overly long for an SF novel, but the reader and co—owner of the agency had required that I cut it down before he recommended it to his agents and so I brought it down to 98,000 words. I did this by trimming the opening battle but I was never truly happy with that. The massive battle that opens the book is meant to have the scale, weight, and importance of something along the lines of WWII’s battle of Midway and the lighter version I felt didn’t quite get that across. So, I am going back to the 115,000 words manuscript, making minor adjustments and that will by the new version.

Wish me luck.