17 posts tagged “agents”
Some stuff:
My street is a wildlife sanctuary now, with baby buns and squirrels running up and down, chasing each other around the medians. This is cute but alarming, because the street isn't going to be closed forever. This is a whole generation of critters failing to learn that the street is a Dangerous Place.
I thought the German secretary talked a lot. Now with the reshuffling, though, we've got three other departments down on our floor. Verdict: History secretary talks a lot more than German secretary. In fact, History secretary has not shut up since she got here this morning.
Dude riding your motorcycle without a helmet. At first, I thought you were just an idiot, but then I noticed that you were wearing one of those really nice, padded, Motocross jackets. That's so thoughtful of you, so that when you're in a wreck, even though your brain will be splattered all over the pavement, your kidneys and liver and other internal organs will be protected from damage. Thanks for thinking of all those people waiting on the transplant lists.
I like getting requests for manuscripts in the mail. Makes me feel like I didn't waste the stamp on my SASE.
I hate getting e-mail rejections. It's like the final frontier of disappointment. Oh, and agents who reject by e-mail when I've queried by snail mail, what are they doing with my stamps? Bastards.
I'm feeling a little guilty, because all the crazy weather that trashed Manhattan and flooded Iowa, well, it's really delivered some lovely spring-like weather to Lawrence. Normally, summer would already be heating up here, but that last two days have been delightfully sunny and cool. Sorry about that.
On my errand to the post office, I had a near disgruntled encounter. The postal clerk was so pissed off, she was pacing up and down in her little cubicle, muttering to herself. She glared up at the line of people and snarled, "Next!" I said, "I'll come back later." When I did, she wasn't there. I bought my stamps and got the hell out. That's all I need, getting shot on a Tuesday.
These two lovely women, who have been together for more than 50 years, finally got married today. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, if that doesn't warm the cockles of your heart, you don't have one. I almost cried listening to this story on the radio this morning, because I had this sudden, completely uncontrollable feeling of hope. I don't get that a lot, but this morning, it seemed like maybe someday, we really will have equal rights for everyone in this country.
It's not just the case in knickknack stores--it's true about writing, too. Thanks to a timely reading by the esteemed Val, I've concluded that the first chapter of my aforementioned fantasy novel is busted. I broke it, probably with too much revising, editing and a little over-vigorous "polishing." I've always known this about my rather pathetic attempts at poetry. My first and second drafts are usually pretty good, but never really good. My third and fourth drafts are usually crap. I don't know why, that's just how it is. It has not ever been that way with my fiction, but perhaps that's only because my fiction is sturdier, more able to stand up to 20 or 30 drafts before it crumbles under the sheer weight of my tinkering. Now I know.
As of today, I've got about a week to go back and unbreak that first chapter in time to query the book on March 11.
Luckily, the boss is away for the rest of the week, so I'm in the clear for a couple of 8-hour writing days.
Or at least that's what I keep telling myself...ten rejections down, I'm ready to send my eleventh query for the fantasy novel. I'm giving myself until March 11th to get it ready. After all, that's when Mercury goes out of retrograde.... Now that I've broken my rejection streak on the short story front, I'm declaring this my new theme song.
Sad but true: the unending work/slack of doing query letters and submissions is sucking my soul out. I stayed home "sick" yesterday because of it. I decided that I could face either going to work or working on submissions, so I just stayed home and drove myself slightly more insane. Like a reverse mental health day.
It's this labyrinth of researching, reading, googling, more reading, finding writers I like, finding out who their agents are, finding out what the agents are looking for, what their submission process is. And that's the easy part. The hard part is writing the query letters with this sinking feeling that it really doesn't matter. A perfect personalized letter hardly seems to have a better chance than an average standardized letter. Luck is more important than effort or skill.
Still, I read the news and feel lucky.
I made it to the age of 36 without my father throwing me off a bridge, or my mother stabbing me with a steak knife. I didn't inadvertently marry my twin brother. Also, John Kerry hasn't given me his endorsement kiss of death. (Poor Obama.) So, all in all, everything's coming up Redzilla.
It's true. All I've done today is slack and it's quite tiring. Of course, my slacking looks like real work to most folks. In the last five hours, I've:
- finished a draft of a new short story [small town deputy discovers that law enforcement is open to interpretation]
- critiqued three other writers' short stories
- posted new short story for critique
- worked on my critique for somebody's novel [sound of sharpening knives]
- researched agents for an older novel I'd abandoned. (A reader and fan of that novel made me feel guilty this weekend by saying, "Aren't you ever going to try to get that one published.")
- researched markets for a couple of essays
- worked on yet another draft of my stupid query letter for All of Flesh [whimper]
- started another story
So, I'm not ignoring you all today on purpose. I just have a lot of slacking to do.
If not, I suggest you move along. That's all that's going on around here today. With a little pouting on the side, and the occasional heavy sigh. This submission business is taking the starch out of me. A rejection comes in, I rally, put the sucker right back in the mail. I'm prepping the one book for agents, another for a contest, a third for an application to a workshop. The worst part is that it takes time away from the thing I really enjoy: the writing. If I spend three hours a day on writing related stuff, only half an hour of that is actually putting new words on the page. The rest of it is working on submissions. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, but it just makes me feel depleted. Depleted, but still dangerous, like uranium.
Nah. Not really. In fact, it burned so little that I--gasp!--forgot to post about it. I got my little rejection letter (for the story Word for a Thing, which I sent to Fiction magazine) on Saturday. On Sunday, I sent it right back out to Grasslimb. Neener.
I'm also counting agent query #6 as a rejection. She's a non-response, both to the original query and my follow up saying, "Hey, did you get my query?" There's one more thing to hate about e-mail queries.
Anyways, the plan for this week is--rewrite the query letter again, and send it out to #7.
To cheer me along, my friend Spucko sent me some Savage Chickens:
And there's a lot of it. This is me, really effing tired of doing paperwork. It's not enough that I have to do new payroll forms for everyone who got a raise, plus all the new hires, who come with their own avalanche of paperwork. I also have to do travel reimbursements for all the faculty members who went to Europe for the summer. Poor babies.
Oh, and let's not forget the other things on my to do list:
- Finish my 12 short story submissions that need to go out after September 1.
- Work on query #7 for All of Flesh (#6 is feeling distinctly like a non-response five weeks after I e-mail my query.)
- Keep slogging on Lie, Lay, Lain.
- Work on a query package for Desire Machine, but first, make up my mind about whether it's primarily science fiction or primarily suspense, while trying to figure out just exactly how much explicit sex between a 40-year old and a 16-year old is too much for the mainstream market.
Yup, it's rejection again, speeding to me in a mere 21 days. Oh, sure it's a form rejection, but I'll give Curtis Brown this: they reject people on nice stationery.
I feel like an expectant father in the waiting room, but instead of a nurse coming in to tell me if it's a boy or a girl, I just get an e-mail saying, "It's a form letter."
I may as well keep with my Vox tradition and post the actual thing:
Dear Redzilla,
Thank you for submitting to Prospect Agency.
We greatly appreciate your submission, and have
given All of Flesh careful consideration.
Unfortunately, your project is not a good fit for
us at this time.We wish you the best of luck in finding an
enthusiastic agent and in your writing career.
Again, thank you for thinking of Prospect Agency.Respectfully,
Prospect Agency
At least it's not a reject letter, but it's still a downer. It think it's the complete and utter impersonality of it. A form letter seems to confirm that the person on the other end has glanced oh-so-briefly at the cover letter and first page. If it had been more than a cursory glance, the letter would contain something specific to the actual submission. I wonder, do agents and editors think writers are fooled by merge documents? Back in the old days, when I typed up a rejection letter, if I typed in the author's name and the title, it meant something. Now, of course, it just means that the agency knows how to use Word's merge function.
The truth is that this rejection doesn't just go to eleven. This one goes to fourteen. That's how long my original list of likely agents was. This was #4. Ten left. Here's hoping I don't have to work my way through all ten.
