Query Report: Resurrection

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It’s time to have a first look back at the querying work I managed to do since reediting Book the First, reworking my query and rewriting my synopsis.

Number of Agents Identified: 12

This could easily be a lot higher – I really should take an hour or two to draw up a list of names that numbers in the low thirties. That part of the process goes a lot faster when it’s done as a methodical crawl through various agent listing sites.

Number of Queries sent: 8

Obviously, this can’t be higher than the number of agents I’ve selected. Beyond that, however, this is a bit low considering I’ve had more than a month to get cracking. Now that I’ve adjusted to the new baby in the house, I should be able to send at least one query every couple of days.

Number of Rejections/Stale Queries: 0

I haven’t received any formal rejection on those eight queries, and it’s a bit early to consider any of them dead-from-old-age yet.

Number of Requests for the Manuscript: 1

That’s good news, but I really do want to see if I get a few more requests before celebrating – my first query generated a first request quite early, and never did again, so this could be another outlier.

Final Thoughts:

Well, it’s an early report covering the dog days of summer. One positive answer and no formal rejections is as good an outcome as could be expected. But I want to see how things turn out before saying I have a solid proposal package. We’ll know more next month.

A Dad and A Writer, Part 1: The First Two Weeks

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Well, it turns out having a newborn baby is hell on a writing schedule.

It certainly didn’t help that my son showed up four weeks earlier than expected. The house was a mess of boxes and bags of baby stuff, the baby furniture was halfway assembled, and that doesn’t even take into account all the stuff we’d put on the back burner in the mad dash to finish up our preparations.

But now that we’re back in the house, we’ve managed to catch up on those tasks (somewhat.) So I should be able to get back on querying and finally, FINALLY, get re-started on Book the Second soon.

I should… except that it’s become really, really obvious that my next few weeks are going to be lived in two-hours increments, which means my usual writing regimen of “mess around for an hour or two to get in the zone, then write until exhaustion sets in” isn’t going to work.  I’ll have to get serious about scheduling writing time if I want to get anything done.

(A tip for future new dads: don’t sweat the diapers. Changing them is really not that bad, it’s nowhere near as disgusting as you imagine plus it’s a couple minutes every three hours. It’s the hour-long feedings and the rock-the-baby-put-baby-in-bed-baby-starts-crying-rock-the-baby endless cycles that are trying.)

On the plus side, in the long run I’ll probably benefit a lot from a more mature approach to writing schedules. It’s just daunting from my current point of view. But I’ll make it work. Hey, I’ve managed to hammer out a blog post, at least. That’s something, right?

This Time, it’s Different

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So, not much progress lately. But for once, I have a good reason for it!

My son was born on Saturday. Suddenly, little frustrations like waiting for answers to my queries don’t seem that relevant anymore.

I’ll get back to work soon. I just need a week, maybe a month or a year or a lifetime, to gaze upon the most marvelous little being in the world.

(Actually, I probably will get back to querying this weekend or early next week. But don’t be surprised if I don’t!)

A Productive Month

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It may not seem like it, but I just had a very, very productive month.

Of course, nobody wants to hear about how I turned my entire office into a bedroom for my soon-to-be-born son, but it was pretty high on the list of priorities (as was baby-shopping.)

But still, I got some real work done: specifically, as of two minutes ago, I’m back to sending queries.

I’ll be putting up a query report in the next few weeks, once I’ve had the time to receive some answers. I’ll probably be starting my counts of queries sent/rejected/accepted all over again, since I’m now querying with an entirely revised manuscript, an improved query letter, and a much better synopsis.

We’ll see how it goes.

…edit, edit, done!

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Whew. I just now finished my re-reading of the novel. Now I just have to enter my corrections, and to decide whether or not to keep my prologue and epilogue.

(apparently, agents really dislike those for some reason, but in this case I think the ‘logues do necessary work. Then again, maybe it’s because I don’t want to rework the information found in those parts into the main text of the novel – that’s a decision for the weekend I guess.)

Once that’s done, I’ll draft another query letter. Obviously, the previous one wasn’t working very well. Then it’s back into the slush pile. Hopefully, I can get started on that next week.

Let’s hope perseverance pays off.

Edit, edit, edit…

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Last time I posted, I’d just realized I probably ought to made a few changes to my book, in order to make it more palatable to agents.

Well, that short revision turned into another revising and editing pass. There are still obvious issues to be fixed (especially in the first chapters) and that’s probably in large part why my querying isn’t going so well.

On the plus side, I’ve re-edited over half of the manuscript so far, and I am almost on top of my real-life obligations as well. Which means I should be able to get back on querying soon.

On the minus side, I haven’t written a new word in weeks. It’s been extremely frustrating: whenever I have the time, I don’t have the energy. It’s the curse of the unpublished author: we can’t justify focusing solely on our writing career, so there’s only so much work we can put on books in a day, and so it’s hard to get published.

Which means I better get back to work.

Real Life and its Inevitable Consequences

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The last month has been extremely busy and exhausting – so much that even banging out quick updates for this blog became daunting.

But that’s over. I’m still recuperating, but at least I’m going into the weekend rested enough that working on my writing will be plausible.

So, what are the plans for the next few weeks?

First, I need to do some maintenance on my query spreadsheet – I need to figure out how many of my queries are still live, and who are my next targets. Then I’ll write a long overdue query report (which will probably be depressing, but oh well.)

I’m also going to reread Book the First. It won’t be a full editing pass (although I’ll surely do some edits) but I need to get it back in mind, because I’m considering a few smallish changes. Specifically, I wrote a short prologue that serves as a framing device, and judging from the feedback I received from agents, it’s not working all that well. I want to see if it’s necessary or not to the story.

And while I’m at it, I should probably give the first three chapters another thorough editing pass (and especially chapter 1.) They’re good, but not great, and apparently great is what’s needed to hook agents.

That’s going to be hard, unexciting work, so I’ll keep working on my other books as well. Unless my schedule takes another hit, I think I could have a Shitty First Draft done by late August.

So that’s what I’m looking toward.

Blank Page Anxiety

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I usually have no difficulty writing stories. Blog posts, however, are a bit harder.

Part of that is because there’s just not much to talk about. I’m working on Book the Second, but not as much as I’d like. Book the First hasn’t found an agent yet. And I’ve been very busy lately, so I don’t have the free time to put on more involved blog posts.

We’ll be due for another dispiriting Query Report soon, but I don’t feel like looking at depressing stats at the moment. So I’ll hold off on that.

I could post some gaming pointers, I guess. I’ve always wanted to do some armchair roleplaying game design, so I guess that could be an option for future posts.

Hopefully, of course, I’ll have something interesting to report instead.

Knowing when to Quit

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I’m not quitting writing. I’m not quitting querying either.

But it’s become painfully obvious to me that I’m not passionate about Book the Second. There’s nothing terrible about what I’ve written so far, and I still think the setting I have in mind has potential, but the characters feel a bit flat and I can’t shake the nagging feeling that the plot will turn out to be underwhelming.

So that’s going on the backburner for a while (probably forever, if I’m being honest.) Besides, I have another idea which I feel much better about, and which will also be an easier sell, I think.

So that will be Book the Second going forward. I’ve written a thousand words or so already, just to cleanse my palate, and now I’m going to go into full plotting-and-outlining mode. The idea is to start writing in earnest this weeked, with the goal of having a first draft done by the end of summer.

So – current word count for Book the Second: Approximately 800.