I’m taking a break from promoting Christmas in Pandemonium and whining about stupid stuff to announce that I am now querying literary agents for Live in the Dream: my adult science fiction novel of approximately 79,000 words. I started yesterday and have sent out 20 queries so far. If that seems excessive, just google it and you’ll see its relatively normal.

Live in the Dream takes place in the year 2192 where Lucas Shaffer, an artificial human grown in a jar, works as a wage slave to maintain an economy on autopilot. Half the time, however, he lives in the Dream 97 program along with his virtual family, just like the other artificial workers of the world. On the eve of his retirement, Lucas logs in to find his virtual family has disappeared. Now, he has to travel across the country and the globe to retrieve each of them, one by one, uncovering a conspiracy to destroy the Dream in the process.

I hope to get a literary agent at a major New York or London firm to take me on and get my foot in the door at one of the Big 5 publishers. Hope springs eternal. I’m also getting beta readers for my other two projects: a sequel to Pandemonium and a young adult science fiction project.

Finally, I’ve heard there are scammers on social media pretending to be literary agents. I will tell anyone going this route to be very careful. It’s unlikely someone in the high society of these New York or London literary agencies would DM you out of the blue. I’ve run into it a few times already. If you plan to go the literary agent route, then you should know that literary agents generally want you to apply through an online form or through email, both of which can be found on the agency’s website. There are just too many scammers out there.