I hear / read a lot from writers who moan that getting published is like Catch-22.

You need to have a contract to get an agent. But you must have an agent to query publishers.

What’s a new writer to do?

Master the art of query writing.

It’s much cheaper than going to conferences, trying to pitch your novel. And if you can’t write query letters, how are you going to pitch your story anyway? The main part of query is the actual pitch itself.

As for my agent hunting, it’s going very well right now. Very happy with responses I’ve been getting.

I submitted my query for critique, and today, I saw the feedback. I wasn’t even expecting to be chosen, so I was very surprised that the agency decided to use mine. Furthermore, I didn’t know that my query was up because I hadn’t had a chance to look at the blog, and my crit partner bragged about it on my behalf on the crit forum. :blush:

All I can say is wow. BookEnds really liked my query. It really means so much to me because query is so difficult to write well. And you know who I will be querying on June 30!

Can you believe it? It’s June now. Wow. That means 2007 is 41.67% over.

Here are my goals for the month.

• Read at least five books.
• Finish revising The Last Slayer.
• Polish The Last Slayer query and synopsis.
• Mail The Last Slayer partial to Jenny Rappaport.
• Send equery letters to all the agents on my list who accept them on June 30.

So here I am. The year’s 25% over, and I feel like I don’t have anything to show for. I don’t even know why, but the full ms submission on March 1 doesn’t even seem to count. I want something new to submit.

So here’s the game plan.

April:

• Finish Nine 1st Draft.
• Outline Carnal Illusions.

May:

• Polish and tighten The Last Slayer.
• Revise Carnal Illusions Outline.
• Start Carnal Illusions 1st Draft.

June:

• Start revising Nine.
• Finish Carnal Illusions 1st Draft.
• Finalize The Last Slayer.
• Query agents.

Also I’m hoping to hear something back from Sil Desire re: full ms under consideration in June. So it’ll be nice to have a short category 1st draft finished.

I think I finally know why I couldn’t really concentrate on Nine. It’s because I have The Last Slayer nagging at me deep down in my subconsciousness. It seems awfully silly to put it away without revising it once more or querying a single agent after spending months on the book. Last year I promised myself I’ll be querying this year so it seems only right that I give The Last Slayer a chance because God only knows how long Nine is going to take. So I’m going to spend February looking it over and getting it ready so that by March, I can start sending it out. Once I do that I think it’ll be easier to work on Nine because I won’t have to worry about letting a potentially salable project gather dust.

pages: 395 / 395 (100%)

So the silver draft is done. Finally!

It looks like it’s not going to be done until January. *sigh* I know I ought to be patient, but it’s so hard.

Now that I’m done with the second draft of Carnal Secrets (yay) and did about 22 pages’ worth of tinkering with The Last Slayer, I think I want to take a break for the day. I’m really tired…exhausted. Of course it doesn’t help that I had a four hour cooking marathon.

Did I tell you I don’t like cooking? At least I have pan-fried fresh oysters to look forward to…

Right now, I cut about three pages from The Last Slayer. I think I’m going to end up with a tighter and shorter story as a result. Still I don’t think it’s going to be a problem since I have unwieldy 396 pages.

Technically 396 isn’t that long. But I’m thinking why kill more trees when I don’t have to and still make my story strong?

I read about Caitlin’s aution story and how she got her agent. It took her ten months of writing and polishing and researching agents before she got her big contract, and I think she deserves it. As I read her blog post, one thing that really struck me is the following:

10 months of writing, re-writing, polishing query letters and researching agents and markets to prepare a sub list that was right for my book. Most writers who get rejected do not do this amount of prep work. They have an MS, they rewrite it (hopefully) and start a-querying.

…

Only when I was absolutely sure that I had a draft that would sell did I start querying. And it was so hard. There were so many moments during revisions when I wanted to declare the book finished, fire up my email and send out query letters. I loved my book, and I wanted everyone else to love it too. Fortunately, my fear of utter humiliation should an agent actually request to read my unpolished words kept my fingers off the SEND button.

And she says in one of her comments:

…some writers don’t take the time they should to polish the MS. Some writers can polish their MS to pro level REALLY fast, but some writers run a spellcheck and consider it done, because they don’t yet know how to scrutinize their writing, so it goes out before it’s ready.

As I read what she’d written, I felt as if she was talking about me. I know I have this god awful tendency to rush things. A really bad habit I developed while working on projects with ridiculous deadlines. Chris always tells me to slow down a little, but I can’t seem to do that. It took me a lot of will power to spend an extra month on The Last Slayer because I was really thinking about start querying last month. In many ways I’m glad I hadn’t. I’m still finding typos and certain things that need to be changed.

Although having the right story at the right time is very important, so is having a good polished book. Nobody can buy your story if it reads like the first draft that has been through Microsoft Word spell & grammar check. (And we all know how reliable that is.)

So I’m taking another deep breath. And then telling myself to take time to make the story sizzle. Because I gotta be able to do that or I’ll never be able to sell.

399 out of 399 pgs

Finally done! I’m one-draft behind, but that’s OK for now. I’m going to have to reread some of the stuff I’ve edited already just to make sure and then let it sit for a while before I do the final edit.

As you’d recall I had a list of tasks to accomplish this summer. I’m happy to report that I did most and then some.

• Finish the red draft of The Last Slayer (due: 7/29 || actual: 7/28)
• Subscribe to Publishers Marketplace and research agents (start: 8/1 || actual: 8/2)
• Finish reading The Chronicles of Narnia (due: 8/17)
• Finish the green draft of The Last Slayer || actual: 8/22)
• Write The Last Slayer synopsis (due: August 27 || actual: 8/23)
• Organize all my receipts and update expense records for FY 2006 (due: 8/27 || actual: 8/23)

Although I couldn’t finish Narnia (it was just not interesting) I’ve already started on the silver draft of The Last Slayer. Yay!