How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Writing query letters suck, okay? They do. I admit it. I spent, like, forever on every query letter I've ever written, and at some point in that process I've inevitably thought to myself "this is bulls***! I write stories not paragraphs about stories." I don't know of a single writer who's all "you know what my favorite part of writing is? The query letter!!!"* But you have to do them. Or, I should say, if you want to submit your writing to an agent or editor you have to do them. You can hate them all you want, but until an agent can read your mindwaves about what your book's about, she's going to ask you to write a query letter, so stop tilting at windmills and get it done. Here are some of the blog posts I've seen lately that talk about query letters: 1. Here's one from Jessica over at BookEnds that gives the two reasons your query is being rejected. Basically it boils down to either your query sucks or your book sucks....

Recently, over at Fangs, Fur, & Fey, they asked the question about how to deal with the ups and downs of the writing life. They didn't mean, it seems, the day-to-day facing of the page that is writing, but rather the ups and downs of querying agents and trying to get a book published. Now, admittedly, I'm in the very beginning stages of this process, but there have been plenty of ups and downs already, and there are plenty of people I know who have been pushed out of trying to publish their books because of these ups and downs, so I have a teeny bit of experience here. This is what I have learned thus far about dealing with the ups and downs: 1. Stretch the ups as much as possible. When the writing is going good, when you get good news, when things are humming along, enjoy them. Talk about them to a few choice people. Note them in your journal (if you have one). Frame the acceptance email.* Don't move on to the next step without enjoying the current step a littl...

A long long time ago (like in May of last year), I expressed some confusion about people saying "thank you" for rejections. Why, I wondered, would someone send a thank you for a form rejection? What's the point? And now agent Janet Reid has confirmed for me that my decision not to respond to form rejections is cool. I was getting a little concerned that I'd been inadvertently rude by not responding to form rejections, because some agents have said things along the lines of "oh, I like it. It adds civility." Reid's reason -- that thank you emails are polite, but when she's getting tons of email each day, a thank you for a form rejection is just taking up time she doesn't have -- really rings true to me. As someone who gets, literally, 400 - 500 emails a day in my Real Job, cutting down on email every chance I get is a huge priority. I have literally said to people "there is no need for you to send me a thank you email. I assume your ...

This will be a short one: Agent Diana Fox has a message for all writers out there who think "oh, agents don't even read anymore! They don't even recognize a famous piece of literature * when someone changes the name! I bet I could just pretend she requested something from me and she would believe me!" Fox's message is simple: you're wrong . ~~~ *As Guardian writer Jean Edelstein points out , sometimes agents do recognize that someone is trying to pass off famous work to see if it will get published. But they just don't care.

In my Real Job, I spend a lot of time making sure things are perfect. I draft contracts, and review deals, and negotiate terms, and my mistakes can end up costing my company money. (That doesn't mean I don't make mistakes, by the way. I'm not a god . Unless I work with you, in which case, I've never made a mistake in my life, and no, you still cannot do whatever it is that you wanted to do that I already told you not to do.) Naturally, this precision seeps into the rest of my life and, of course, my writing and querying process. I have #9 envelopes so that my SASE fits neatly into my #10 envelopes. My drafts are labeled and numbered and saved to CD. My pens are sorted by color, type (felt, ball, fountain), and line width. (No, I'm not kidding.) Anyway, the other day, I got a request for a full from an agent who's already seen a partial. YAY! I print the whole thing out, put it in a folder, and take it to work (we have a post office in the building), w...

Agent Jonathon Lyons has an entry here describing an author he had an interaction with this week, and can I just say WOW. WOW. Seriously. I mean, I understand being annoyed or hurt by rejection. It sucks. It sucks when you don't get the job you want, or the guy you ask out says "no thanks", or when the agent you're dying to get says "not for me." And I understand the impulse to say, "you're WRONG!" But it's really not a good idea. It's like that scene in A Few Good Men when Demi Moore objects to a ruling by the judge. The judge overrules her. This is where it should end. But instead, Demi Moore asks for reconsideration. "We strenuously object, your Honor!" she says. Oh, you strenuously object? Well, then, you must be right! Or, I'm totally right and you should sit down, Demi. Thanks. I'm assuming that an author's strenuous objection to rejection engenders a similar response in an agent. "Oh, you ...

As an attorney (and an eldest child), I am naturally a rule follower. I spend most of my time interpreting or creating rules that govern the nature of the relationship between my company and the other companies it does business with. These are called contracts. So, naturally, when it came time to start submitting queries, I went online and dig a little investigating to see if I could figure out what the "rules" were. If you are an author who has gone through the submission process, you know what I found - chaos. Some agents want this; some want that. Some want pages; some want chapters. Some want the query letter this way; some want that. Some want you to swear fealty to them and only them. Some want you to submit in goat's milk on a parchment written by the light of the full moon. You catch my drift. As a result, some authors have rebelled and decided to do things their own ways. One author--I honestly don't remember who--did a whole submission package that ...

Despite my absence from this blog, I am not dead and/or on a beach somewhere. I wish I were (on a beach, not dead), but I am not. I would sing a song about how busy I am with work (true), and how busy I am with teaching (also true), and how busy I am with working on the new projects (true dat), and how busy I am with life in general (double true), but the real reason why I haven't been posting here is because I've been querying. For some reason, querying has made me especially leery of posting here. I've seen posts from agent blogs that talk about how they don't want to know that the author they're considering representing has been rejected by everyone else in the world. Likewise, I don't think it's good form for me to post about the responses I've received when the agents haven't given me permission to do so, although some writers do it. I know I wouldn't want to see my query letter posted on someone's blog and commented on, although som...

The wonderful thing about the job I currently have as opposed to the job I used to have at the law firm, is that in my current job, I have my weekends free. Not every single weekend, but 99% of them. At the law firm, it was more like 99% of my weekends I ended up having to work, at least part of the time. I'm not complaining - I was well-compensated for my time - but it was well worth the pay cut to have two entire days off in a row. This weekend, I didn't do anything but clean my house and write. Clean and write, write and clean. (I can't just write for an entire two days - I need cleaning time to think about things.) The result of this abundant time? I finished the revision of my novel. whoopee! I finished the line edit of the first three chapters of the novel (which is different from a revision in my mind - the line edit is the clean-up stage, when I print it out and make sure to get all the unnecessary passive voice and lame verbal tags out of it. It takes, like...