I’ve done a 180 in my publishing plan for ORIGIN: Book of Truth. All the offers for representation aren’t pouring in from Literary Agents all over the world — as my fabulously confident ego had promised.
In addition to writing the novel itself, in order to ‘pitch’ to an agent you need to write yourself a neat, concise and killer query letter just to get their attention. Well, how difficult could that be? I mean, you just wrote an entire novel, right? Umm, yeah. After a disturbing number of “thanks, but no thanks” letters in my email inbox, I decided to throw the letter into an author’s ‘show your work’ forum for feedback and critiquing. I joked that I wanted them to have at ‘er with make-me-cry cruelty — only they didn’t get the joke part. These folks let me have it with a no-holds barred attack. They were saying things like “vague” and “wordy” and I took each like a bullet in the chest. Wordy? Me? Pffft… impossible.
After an hour or two curled up in the fetal position, I decided to engage these folks — take their feedback — and turn it into something positive to fix the query and make it work for me — instead of the ‘against me’ plan I had already implemented on my own. So, a simpler, more informative (and less wordy) re-write of the query letter is on task for the day.
In addition to the total re-write of my pitch, it was mentioned that I may want to consider changing the fiction genre from Adult to YA. Bigger audience, more literary agents, and an easier market to break in to. I, clearly, have no idea what I’m doing — so, why not? I’m going to drop my protagonist’s age a couple of years and clean up one — slightly spicy — scene in the rain. ::cough::
And there’s more, it was also suggested that I send other work out for publishing in literary journals, and the like, in order to gain more pulishing credits. Apparently, nobody cares if you’re newspaper or magazine published, but if you’re in a literary journal — hey, you’re somebody. I dug through my old trunk-of-doom and found a plethora of material to send out. SO – literary journal success here I come! And maybe a children’s picture book to boot!
Fingers crossed in I-think-I-can positive affirmation! Boy, am I ever going to laugh when my fabulous novelist life starts.
~uberscribbler
Punctuation gets a bad rap these days. There is little concern for the art and mastery of grammar in an acronym-texting world. We don’t even realize how much we are missing. There are some of us who break out in the sweats when we see a sign in a storefront with incorrect grammar or a wayward apostrophe dangling dangerously off a newspaper headline. There are even those of us — in that select group — who sneak about at night with permanent marker stained on our fingertips, creeping through the city restoring the balance of commas everywhere. Proper punctuation is just good manners and truly good manners are invisible. As Lynne Truss wrote so freely, they ease the way for others, without drawing the attention to themselves. How many friendships and relationships have been broken due to fundamental flaws in correct punctuation? Take this letter for example – written to Jack — from Jill, with an obvious loving message.
For 23-year-old Willow Alice Jane, sanity has a very slippery meaning. She has learned to protect her secrets well, especially the growing intimacy with her “imaginary” friend, Boon. But Willow has more than one secret buried deep in her subconscious.
