AmQuerying

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I haven’t been idle, though.

Ottawa Swordplay has kept me busy, as usual, I’ve attended writing workshops (online), I’m in the process of buying a house, etc.

But also, I finished writing my book!

I did take a brief break from working on it to go back to working on my first book. I decided the older project was a better fit for the Futurescapes workshops I was attending, so I spent a few months working on that. I came away feeling like it needed to sit a while longer, and with a strong desire to get my nearly-complete novel finished.

I set myself a deadline of June 30, and this time I nailed it. That’s including beta-reads and revisions, everything. I will not make any more edits until I have a specific reason (as in, I have an agent or publisher who wants revisions). I could probably keep revising forever, but at this point, I’d just be going in circles. The complete novel is bigger than I planned, just under 110,000 words, but still well within genre expectations. I also finally came up with a title I like: Meditations on Fire and Destruction. My next step is finding an agent.

Querying agents is rough. I’m saying “Here is this thing I poured almost a year of my life into, I hope you like it,” and I will get multiple replies that amount to “Thanks, but no thanks!” Most of the time I will never know why. I am very fortunate that my first-ever pitch to write an adventure for Dungeon magazine got a detailed response that included the explanation that while it sounded like a cool adventure, it focused on goblins, and they had a whole bunch of adventures about goblins in their queue already. Literary agents generally don’t have time right now to give that kind of answer, so it’s impossible to know if they decline because they don’t like what I wrote or for some unrelated reason outside of my control.

It’s also a lot like applying for a job. I don’t just have a query letter that I send to each agent, I rewrite my query letter for each agent. They are mostly really similar, of course, but if I know the particular agent likes heists, I focus on the heists. If I know they like complex sibling relationships, I focus on that. There’s too much awesome stuff in my book to squeeze into a query letter, so I try and show them each the part I think will grab their attention.

It’s a lot of work. So is finding agents who might be interested, who are open to queries, etc. And each of them wants slightly different things; some want sample pages, some don’t. Some want additional information than the query letter, which sometimes is information that I normally include in the query letter. And the waiting and rejections are draining, no matter how good a face you put on it, and doubly so for someone with ADHD.

In the long run, it will all be worth it. The only question is, how long of a long run?