Now Querying: A Nightfall of Diamonds

As promised in my last post, I'm back with an update, now that the second book in Autumn's story is mostly complete (the editor has had her say, I'm just waiting on some beta reader stragglers to get back to me). Book two's working title is A Nightfall of Diamonds, keeping with the theme of each book being named with Grateful Dead lyrics.

If you're curious about what happens in the next book, here's a snippet from the query letter I'm sending to literary agents that gives you a pretty quick synopsis:

It’s 1996 in Quincy, Massachusetts and plus-sized introvert and live music enthusiast Autumn MacLeod has spent three post-high school years knocking on locked doors of opportunity that all require a college degree to gain entry. When her great aunt in South Boston offers to pay for her tuition as an early inheritance, Autumn’s world turns upside down as she embarks on her new adventure as UMass Amherst’s newest—and only—21-year-old sophomore in the artsy Butterfield dorm.

But being older doesn’t mean Autumn has had the type of nurturing, confidence-building life experiences to make her wiser. As the latchkey kid of a depressed, checked-out single mother with a gambling addiction and an absent father who chose to be so—even after meeting her (twice)—she’s anxious about stepping outside her comfort zone of social isolation. Autumn’s reticence to let people in is especially problematic for her new long-distance relationship with her fellow music-loving boyfriend, John Walker. At least she has one old high school friend she can trust on campus: Aidan Murphy, a senior resident advisor in Butterfield, where Autumn is about to call home.

When the dorm rumor mill starts speculating that Aidan has feelings for her, Autumn starts rethinking her relationship with John. Complicating matters further, during winter break her old hometown crush resurfaces from his cocaine addiction with a confession, forcing her to question the past she thought she understood and a future that is arriving far too quickly. As she and her new friends find solace and refuge through music and its fandom subcultures rooted in a deep, decades-long history of communal connection, Autumn must push past the safety of self-reliant solitude to learn who she can trust…herself included.

If you read The Strangest of Places, you might notice a few changes.

Andy Murphy is now Aidan Murphy, and John Bryan is now John Walker. There are a few other name changes throughout, which was partially due to editor feedback and partially my own preferences. I am currently working with someone to format a second edition of The Strangest of Places, which will update all names and also makes a few minor tweaks to the story so that it aligns better with certain plot points as it unfolds in the books that follow.

Though I self-published The Strangest of Places, I am going to seek traditional publishing for A Nightfall of Diamonds and the two books that follow it...yes, two books. Once I finished this one, my mind just kept going back to the story to the point where I wasn't able to sleep at night. I decided to get started on the third book, and it was complete just a month later. The fourth came about similarly, though it wasn't quite as insistent as the third book.

Suffice it to say that this is now a four-book series. The original will remain as a self-published book that no agent or publisher will touch (it's an industry thing, apparently), but I am hopeful that the three books that have not yet been published will be picked up at some point. I'm starting the process of researching and querying agents now, so fingers crossed!