18 posts tagged “querying”

Sometimes you get a rejection that makes you erase the play board and start over. 

I drank too much coffee yesterday and was awake too late, thereby putting myself at risk of the dreaded unexpected late-night e-mail rejection.  It was one of those rejections that's hard to set aside, because it was personalized and it came from a place I'm already familiar with: obvious writing talent and not a commercially viable project.

I know this about the book I've been querying.  It's too big, too convoluted, a bit too smart to be straight genre, but I love the book.  I want people to read the book, but I'm not without a certain amount of pragmatism.  After eleven rejections, knowing what I know, I'm putting this one on indefinite hiatus.  It's time to move on.

The next book I'm querying is distinctly more commercial, so at least I don't have that hurdle, but that whole issue is weighing on me pretty heavily as I try to decide what project to work on next.  I always have about half a dozen things waiting in the wings, but as I work on a decision, I thought I'd ask my Voxy neighbors what kind of things you're interested in reading these days.  What sorts of stories, issues, people are you interested in?

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.

It's already been that kind of week.  I got my annual review yesterday and my boss gave me "exceptional" marks on all categories.  That's me: Redzilla the Exceptional Secretary. 

I am not currently Redzilla the Exceptional Writer, because along with my exceptional marks as a secretary, I got three (3) rejections yesterday.  I'll return when I feel more like an Exceptional Blogger.

You know how I can tell?

It was foggy this morning and 45.  After so many weeks of 15 degree mornings with tundra-like blasts of wind, 45 and foggy is like frolicking around in a sauna.

The garbage man and I smiled at each other.  Our city has manual garbage trucks, with two guys riding on back to empty the cans.  I see this same guy every Monday, running the route about four blocks from my house.  It's a quiet, narrow street and I almost always cross right behind the garbage truck.  (You see how predictable my life is?)  Garbage Guy is about 22, skinny, and he wears a Jayne Cobb hat in the winter.  Today I crossed the street behind the truck just as he was returning an empty garbage can to the curb.  We passed each other just as he jumped back on the truck, and for whatever reason we gave each other a huge grin.  Wonder what he was listening to on his headphones.

Stumpy Skwerl was sitting on my window ledge when I got to my office.  He's missing all but about 2 inches of his tail and I often leave him my apple cores on the window ledge.   As a promise for later, I set my apple on the inside of the window ledge so he'll know to come back after my morning break.

I sent off a query to an agent who reps a good friend of mine, so if nothing else, I feel pretty sure he'll ask to see the manuscript. 

Plus, I actually feel pretty good about the manuscript today.

Yup, gonna be a good day.  Hope you have one, too.

At long last, Dana Fredsti is here to blog about her experience getting her first novel published.  Dana is a mystery novel, short story and screenplay writer, B-movie actress (okay, C movie actress), zombie aficionado, exotic and domestic feline advocate, swordfighter, wine lover and beach glass junkie.   You can visit her online at DanaFredsti.com. 

Getting published is not an easy thing.  And how’s THAT for a most simplistic stating of the obvious statement you’ve read in a while?  But it’s true.  I’m sure there are publishing urban legends the equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore; some of them might even be true.  But most of the time the instant success stories are fabricated by publicist spin-doctors.  The kid who wrote Eragon, for instance, self-published the book and promoted it relentlessly with the help of his family, building up a readership at fantasy conventions and such before being noticed and then picked up by a major publisher.   Good for him, btw!    

The first draft of MURDER FOR HIRE: The Peruvian Pigeon (henceforth referred to as MFH) was written in a month, by my best friend Maureen and myself.  We alternated chapters and character POVs and wrote the entire thing longhand.  I had semi-legible handwriting back then (it’s since deteriorated into ‘I should be a doctor’ illegibility) and Maureen printed instead of using cursive, so it wasn’t too hard to transcribe it with my step-dad’s then state-of-the-art word processor.  He had a snazzy dot matrix printer.  Remember those?  The ones that used the paper that came in perforated folds and you had to separate each page and remove the side strips? Yes, folks, that’s how long ago we wrote the first draft.  There were a few gaping holes in the story; places where we’d scribble ‘need action here!’ or ‘this doesn’t make sense. Fix!  But we pretty much had what we thought was a pretty smokin’ first draft.   In fact, we thought it was so good, we sent out a slew of query letters before we’d even typed the thing up.  We figured we’d have a few months before hearing back from any of the publishers (this was back in the days when you could still send manuscripts directly to publishers and have a shot at it being read), which gave us plenty of time for typing and tweaking.  Imagine our surprise -- and panic -- when we got a reply with a request to see the entire book from an editor with St. Martin’s Press less than a week after sending out the first batch of queries.   

This prompted a three day and night marathon of revisions and filling in those holes as we typed it up.  I did the actual typing because I was the better typist.  Maureen sat in a chair next to me and added her opinions/commentary as I typed.   We were hopped up on chocolate and/or Beringer white zinfandel for most of the marathon. The sugar/caffeine/alcohol cocktail combined with sleep deprivation made us very loopy by the last night (and all of this no doubt account for some of the things that made their way into the finished first draft).  I still remember typing madly at 3am by the light of the word processor and a small desk lamp when Maureen suddenly said in a singsong voice, “Dude, if you were a supermodel, would you rather be Cindy Crawford or Paulina what’s-her-name?”  After staring at her in disbelief, my reply was a borderline hysterical “I don’t know! I don’t know!” before turning back to the computer and continuing to pound the keys like some insane pianist.   Maureen, btw, preferred Cindy Crawford.  I still haven’t made my choice.  

I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that St. Martin’s Press politely declined to publish the first incarnation of MFH. Maureen and I are still both a bit mortified we thought it was even close to publication-ready when we sent it in.   But talk about a wasted opportunity.  The mystery market wasn’t glutted at the time, we’d gotten a crack at a major publishing house without even trying…and we blew it because we didn’t have the common sense to make sure our finished product was a: finished and b: well written before sending off query letters.  Points for hubris, same points taken away for stupidity.  

It took me approximately 16 years from the time the first draft was written to get MFH published.  During that time span the manuscript was: stuffed in a drawer (or the electronic equivalent) for a few years; underwent massive rewrites at least 5 times; waited patiently while query letters and the first three chapters went out to agents and publishers; collected many rejection letters, and was occasionally sent  out in its entirety to interested parties.  Sometimes it was returned with polite ‘no thanks, not what we’re looking for’ and twice it was returned with ‘we like it, but it needs work in these areas.’  So I’d do rewrites and try to fix the problem areas indicated, but could never get it to the point the interested parties actually wanted to publish it.    

During this same 16 year period I had short stories and essays published and a couple of screenplays produced, but I couldn’t seem to break through the wall of book publishing. I really wanted to get MFH published and had built a pretty solid emotional and creative barrier that got in the way of really committing to another novel project.   My break finally came because of a writer friend, Brad Linaweaver, who’d read every draft of MFH (except for the first one, which is buried in a secret crypt never to again see the light of day) and thought it deserved to be published.  He championed it to James Rock with James Rock Publishing Inc. and after a long wait during which James Rock read two incarnations of MFH, it was accepted for publication in February 2007.    It was a long road to publication, but so worth it to finally hold the finished bound copy!   Now I’m on the long road of publicity, but that’s a story for another day.

Please feel free to post any questions you have for Dana, and she'll be around to answer them.  Meanwhile, The Peruvian Pigeon is for sale at amazon.com and other fine retail establishments.  Thanks, Dana!

  

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.

I wish I were on strike.  I wish I were marching around outside my office with a protest sign.  Except my protest sign would read something like, "Down with synopses!"  or "E-mail queries suck!"  Instead my strike is of a different kind.  As in strike while the iron is hot.  Or at least, strike while I have the energy to do it.

I'm caught in the vicious circle that is querying, with the knowledge that I'm against incredible odds.  Oh, sure, the odds of getting published are better than the odds of winning the lottery, but only slightly.  That's just getting published in general.  The odds of getting this book published are perhaps a little worse.  It's a fantasy novel by an unpublished writer and it's pushing 600 pages.  Making it more precarious is what I jokingly call its "literary pretensions."  It is not straight genre fantasy.  The characters are like real people, I don't tell you at every turn what they're feeling and there's no easy good vs. evil dichotomy--the good guy is a stone cold killer and the bad guy has noble motivations.  The good news is that it's not impossible.  Just last week I read a fantasy novel from a previously unpublished writer that clocked in at 880 pages.  880 pages.  I didn't read all of them.  I read the first ten, lapsed into stunned boredom at all the blah-de-blah* and floo-de-floo*.  I flipped ahead and tried to read another ten, and then gave up.

Acknowledging how hard it will be to get the fantasy book published, I now face the ugly prospect of trying to get two other books ready to query.  One is a suspense/sci fi that comes in at a neat 85,000 words.  The other is, I suppose, somewhere along the lines of women's fiction, but of the nasty sort, not the cuddly sort.  The books themselves aren't that horrible to get ready.  They're both getting closer and that's work I enjoy.  To query, though, I must also now write a query letter for each and a synopsis for each.  These are not fun tasks, but I figure I better strike while I feel able.

*Blah-de-blah and floo-de-floo are technical terms which describe the kind of filler you find in larger, boring books.  Blah-de-blah is when the writer fills up whole pages with historical back story that you don't care about.  Floo-de-floo is when the writer fills up whole pages with soaring emotional descriptions that you don't care about.

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.