I may have to stop posting about my agent queries if I keep sending out one a week. This could get boring for anyone following along. For me, on the other hand, every query is a new adventure. Jumping through the hoops, finding or guessing preferences, adapting and polishing summaries and bios and similar tasks are keeping me entertained and on-edge. In this case on-edge isn't a bad thing. But it's not stress-free. I've caught myself, after reading yet another set of guidelines, thinking oh gawd, I sent a query off just last week that includes a feature that is a pet peeve of this agent, now I'm doomed because I bet the other agent hates that too! It doesn't stop me from persevering, but holy moly I'm glad I don't have nuts because at times it feels like I've been kicked in the groin when I think I might have made a mistake. Having said that, the hope is worse than worrying I might have blown my chance to get a good agent. If this was just an exercise in futility I could sit back and flow with the process. Instead I get these jagged moments of maybe, just maybe.
Hey, aren't I supposed to be writing or something like that?
Actually I did get a chance to work on Signet today. Because I've done so much editing recently that I get distracted by thoughts of going back and enriching the setting, increasing tension and all that. It's getting easier to ignore those thoughts, and they're coming to mind less often. I'd say I'm shushing my internal editor, but what's really going on is that I'm getting sucked into the story. The internal editor can scream as loud as he wants once I'm deep into the world. I won't hear a thing.
4 comments:
I like hearing how many you've sent off and what you ran into getting the query ready.
Here's an idea. Why don't you keep a running tally of how many you have out there on the sidebar? And how many rejections you get back? That way we'll know how many toasts to make at the next INK meeting ;-).
I like hearing about that too!
In fact, (and let's see if I can get Blogger to accept this comment this time around), we ought to have a collective (not individual) INK submission tally somewhere. Naturally, we may want to have a collective rejection tally as well.
Sounds good to me! I'll put up my tally under my pic, and then hopefully we'll get a group tally started up in its own spot where it can sit pretty.
While I'm at it, I can add my query list here:
12/27 Artists and Artisans--email sub, probably a no as they only respond if interested and generally respond in a week if they are interested. Even taking the holidays into account ...
1/2/08 Artists Literary Group, email sub
1/2/08 Bob Mecoy Literary Agency--email sub, a polite no for a response
1/14/08 Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency--snail mail sub with sample chapters, probably will be a couple of weeks bare minimum before I hear back
1/15/08 Nelson Literary Agency--email sub, generally an email response in about one or two weeks, if I remember correctly.
So I'm a little ahead of my one a week goal. Yay!
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