May 2025 Update

90 rejections, now we're here

I wrote my first book when I was 23. Bushy tailed, bright eyed, convinced I was writing an absolute heater, I happily wrote deep into the night after working all day.

But after querying 90 literary agents to the tune of 50 rejections and 40 ghosts, I started to doubt myself. Can I write? Can I tell a story? Am I insane?

I ran from that interest for the next three years. I wrote in about every other form – newsletters, twitter, ghostwriting, poetry, white papers, scripts – and yet that tick sat in the back of my mind, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing. I should be writing novels. A few years of cowardice disguised as productivity.

A lot of creatives do this. You get close enough to tell yourself that you’re doing the thing when you’re not. You’re dancing around it. You’re saving yourself from another 90 rejections.

Then a new story idea grabbed me. I read The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant. One of that book’s themes is the idea of history as a pendulum. Capitalism vs socialism, democracy vs dictatorship, bell bottom jeans vs skinny jeans.

It got me thinking – on a pendulum, what opposes technology? What does tech swing to?

As Arthur C Clarke says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus the concept was born.

I’m calling the novel The Pendulum Swings. Think of it as science-fantasy, Mistborn meets Red Rising. Technology falls, magic rises — A book about deeply flawed people making questionable choices when the lights go out and the old powers wake up.

Back to those 90 rejections. Were the agents wrong?

Nope. They were right. The book was okay. This one’s better. Hopefully.

September 2025. Mark your calendars.

Thank you for signing up for my book updates. I plan to send one of these short notes per month.

Cheers,

Nathan

PS. My favorite read of late is The Sun Eater series. Book 2, Howling Dark, is phenomenal.

What book have you enjoyed the most this year?