Words About Writing

That horror of horrors: querying. I'm doing it. I sent out 3 queries yesterday, three today, and intend to do three tomorrow. Everyone says "5-10 at a time", so I thought 3 a day would make a nice NINE queries out before Nano, and then I can do an additional one as rejections come back, or turnaround times pass. Tonight, I got my first rejection! I'm so excited! Looking at the email the agent responded to, I noticed that this is one of the queries that did not include any part of the manuscript. Most ask for a few pages or chapters. So that tells me that my pitch needs work. It's good feedback. Three queries a day may not seem like much, but for each letter I'm consulting the agent's website, their preferences, my own spreadsheet, and for some, the draft query letter I'd already written. So it takes about an hour for each one. It's a mentally and emotionally taxing job. Anyway, I'm excited to be sending out the letters. I hope I can remain posi

I love editing! And this edit especially, is a breeze! I really am just touching up wording here and there, and I'm ahead of schedule. I should finish the edit in just two more days, and I'll have time to draft more query letters after that, maybe sending out my first batch BEFORE November! Wow. I've signed up for Nanowrimo again. I have a story idea, and writing will be a nice break between querying in November, but I might just edit one of my other drafts instead. I have three other novels sitting in first draft form. Overall, I'm happy with my progress. High hopes! 

Whew. All feedback is compiled and the consensus is: I need to curate a better list of readers. Two got back to me a week early. One had very general, gushy comments. (One of the friends that they say never to use as readers.) The other early finisher had more complete notes, and valuable ideas. Which is good, because the last two never finished the book. I managed to pull a few detailed notes from them, but will never use them as beta-readers again. The good news is, I have good ideas for fixing the beginning, which I knew was a problem for querying. So I'm into the final reading and edit. All the simple changes are done, and I started working on the troublesome beginning, but need a little more work there. Then I'll just do a final reading and fix tiny things I notice as I go. As far as querying, I finished the list I was working on, then went to one of the other websites I'd found. I made a new page on my spreadsheet (to track which website I'm getting names from) an