Today marks the beginning of the Great Rejection Tour of 2014 for my new book Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom!

My first query letter has set out for glamorous New York City in the kickoff for this highly anticipated season of melancholia and despair. There the query will land on the desk of an agent who’s so far out of my league that the true test of the query is whether she’ll even ask to see the manuscript. If she does ask to read it, I’ll know that it’s a pretty fine query letter. If she doesn’t, well, I’ll have contributed something toward the Postal Service pension fund. And that’s worth doing.

Then, rinse and repeat. Ursula Leguin once wrote that in order to find your level you need to start at the top, and then work your way down. Into the yawning maw of rejection, I mean.

The fact is that I’m working my way through a pretty short list of agents on the principle that the wrong agent is worse than no agent. So it’s only going to take me a few months to get rejected by all of them, and once they’ve done their worst I should have finished the illustrations (you see the illustration for Chapter 15 up above).

Then, phase two: The Forgotten Slush Piles of the Damned.

By redefining my terms I’ve now found myself in the middle of the third draft for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. They’re my terms. I’m gonna do what I like with them, and you’re gonna take it… and like it.

I’d planned the second draft like this: two passes through the printed manuscript, resulting in so many penciled corrections that you could barely see the words any more; a line by line edit based on those changes… plus whatever else occured to me at the time; three new short scenes, a bonus expanded scene, and rewrites for two long sequences. Then… a last complete line by line edit.

But by the time I was ready for that final item it seemed like what I had – after all those edits, added scenes, and rewrites – was a second draft; taking another complete pass through the book felt more like a third. So there it is. I redefined what the second draft was and found that I was already working on the third draft. I think this is what they do in Congress.

After this I’ll have to admit that the book in this form is about as good as it’s likely to get. I probably won’t make any further changes until I see some good reasons for them; like, for example, something big is wrong. It’s been hard for me to keep the big picture in my sights due to all the small scale changes I’ve been working on: trees, forest. If there’s a substantial problem with pacing, or if some crucial bit of information is either too subtle or too obvious, or if I completely forgot to plug a plot hole because I can’t see it any more, then that would be a good reason for a fourth draft. (Though I’m still being surprised by the occasional typo that is not a misspelled word; I sure thought I’d caught them all by now.)

Since I continue to distract myself with shiny things you can see a second cover concept at the top of this post; also, I updated the query synopsis and then wrote this alternate one:

The switchboard operators of Retropolis find themselves replaced – due to an efficiency review – by a mysterious system they don’t understand. So Nola Gardner pools their severance pay to hire Dash Kent, freelance adventurer and apartment manager, to find out what’s happened to their jobs.

That ought to be a simple job for Dash, even if his practical experience is limited to heroic rescues (of what he calls entities) from the Priests of the Spider God, in their temple at Marius Crater. But things go sideways once they unmask an insane civil engineer and his horde of black market robots; when a grisly discovery is made, late one night, in a darkened alley; when thousands of cheerfully maniacal scientists burst out of their seclusion in the Experimental Research District; and when, above all, people start shooting. Allied with an unlikely assortment of human and mechanical people, Dash and Nola find themselves in a race to discover the hidden switchboard at the center of a plot that threatens every human person in Retropolis.

Retropolis has found ways to contain its abundance of Mad Science. But in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom we learn that if a civil engineer should go mad… he knows how to build madness on a scale that’s never been seen before.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom (103,000 words, complete) is a light-hearted adventure set in one of our used futures: because nobody else was using it at the moment, and because the author wanted to do for the retro future something like* what Terry Pratchett has done for heroic fantasy.
 
* No footnotes.

The Pratchett reference might go: that’s a thing that could easily do more harm than good in a query. But I’m so fond of a footnote that reads “No footnotes” that I just can’t change it yet.

One curious thing is that even though the book’s word count has gone up and down, it always ends up in the same place. The line edits most often shortened it, but the new and expanded scenes enlarged it; and finally the much more streamlined opening cut it back down again. But over and over again it’s settled back to just about 103,000 words. Contents may settle during shipping. It just seems like that’s where it wants to be.

When the switchboard operators of Retropolis are suddenly made redundant after an efficiency review, they find they’ve been replaced by a mysterious system they don’t understand. Nola Gardner pools their severance pay to hire Dash Kent, freelance adventurer and apartment manager, to find out what’s happened to their jobs.

That simple question leads Dash and Nola down the strangest streets of Retropolis, in the Future That Never Was, where robots consider the effectiveness of collective bargaining; where scientific research has been contained in a single neighborhood – by statute – to limit the regrettable side effects of innovation; where the world’s smallest giant robot rumbles toward its destiny with steps that cover an inch or two at a time; and where that question ‘What the heck happened to my job?’ leads ultimately to the Moon and back in an antique rocket that may be past its sell-by date.

Retropolis has found ways to contain its abundance of Mad Science. But in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom we learn that if a civil engineer goes mad… he knows how to build madness on a scale that’s never been seen before.

Here’s a cover concept and synopsis for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, because I guess I just don’t have enough to do while I edit my way through its (now) slightly more than 103,000 words.

That was irony, if you didn’t notice. I have plenty to do. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made two pencil passes through the printed manuscript, and then applied those edits. That leaves me three short scenes to write (because I wasn’t sure I needed them before) and two large scenes to rewrite; then, after one more complete pass through the book, I hope to have a pretty solid second draft – probably a couple of weeks from now. How solid? Will there be a third draft? Ask me in a couple of weeks.

I try to avoid questions like those by working on cover concepts and the synopsis. I am adept at outmaneuvering my brain.

The synopsis is an interesting exercise but it may also be pretty important. That’s because this time I figure I’ll try shopping the book around to agents and then – who knows? – maybe to traditional publishers. I’d like to see what happens. And a good synopsis, which this may or may not be, is something I’ll need when that day comes.

And then – while the world rejects me repeatedly – I can get to work on the illustrations.