Agent Horror Story #1

Since I've been writing and querying, trying to get published, I've done a lot of querying. Most of those queries, thus far, have ended in a form-letter rejection. That's a little annoying, to be honest, but nothing especially traumatic.

Some of the queries have resulted in a partial request. My Horror Story #1 features one of these.

This agent was kind of near and dear to me... I followed her blog, left comments and well-wishes due to some news in her life, and she commented back on mine. I really felt like I had a connection with her, even though it was entirely virtual and totally tenuous. I got excited when she let me know that she would be reviewing my partial.

When it came close to the time she was going to review my partial, tragedy struck and she had to take two months off of work to take care of herself. I was trying to be understanding, but when it's your dreams on the line, it tends to drive you beyond crazy to be in limbo. Other queries came in and out, but I had my heart kind of set on this agent.

Then, on the day before my birthday, I received an email. It was a rejection of my partial.

Was it a nice letter, with a snippet of advice or a tiny nugget of insight, given the fact that I had effectively networked with her?

Nope. Form letter.

I had a birthday party the next day that I had to put on a brave face for. I received a few books as gifts, and I had to give them to my roommate to hide, because even the sight of a book was hurtful. I felt like my boyfriend just broke up with me (even though I'm a confirmed bachelorette right now), or like the kid from Little Miss Sunshine who found out he was colorblind and therefore disqualified to be a fighter pilot. A bit of my dream died that day, and I was heartbroken.

I suppose it worke dout for the best, as the agent recently changed the focus of her business and is no longer representing clients, and she still had clients that hadn't sold their manuscripts.

Unexpected Sources

I did something a little odd last week.

About a year ago, I got a clairvoyant reading on my past lives, as I was at a total loss as to where my life was going. I didn't know where my life was headed, and I was beginning to get very frustrated with the direction that things were going. Whether or not the delightful psychic was accurate or not didn't really matter to me at the time, as I really just wanted to feel better about where I was going, and let go of some of the frustration and anxiety I was feeling.

She told me, during the course of the reading, that my past lives had a very strange pattern... I would have a "big" life where my soul would learn a huge cosmic lesson, and then I would have a few "small" lives, where I was taking time to connect with the people and the places around me. The lives would swing back and forth along the path, and they led to this life, which is a life of synthesizing the desire to connect with those around me and the desire to connect to something higher. Kind of awesome, right? And whether or not that was the truth of the matter, it made me feel one hell of a lot better (and she was cheaper than a psychologist by a MILE).

So, since my life has not been going in the direction I want it to at this time, I figured I'd drop her a line to see if she was still in the business and if she was free. She was, fortunately, and we had a reading about what the heck I needed to do in order for my life to go where I wanted it to. She gave me a gentle, supportive kick in the root chakra, and told me that I was getting bogged down in my negativity, and I hadn't been doing nearly enough to make my dreams come true. She told me to keep trying, to edit my script, to make it perfect, and to put myself out there more, and I could have my silly tale published within a year.

Thus heartened, I attacked my quest with renewed vigor, and I feel energized by it. I'm writing and gathering a few sources to start querying again, and I think that a successful attack on the publishing world could be in the cards.

The economy might still be in the toilet, dear readers, but remember this... I taught junior high. It takes a lot more than no jobs and no money to scare THIS lady!

Stupid Author Tricks

Now that I'm facing the staggering process of querying, I feel like I'm not above posting a few mistakes I've made in previous query-fishing.  Let this serve as a cautionary tale... please do not make the same mistakes I have!

For good measure, I have included a few mistakes that other author friends have made.  Try to spot which ones are mine!

1. Addressing a query to "Mr. Greenleaf" when the agent is a Ms or Mrs.
2. Expounding at length about the plot of a novel, without remembering to include the title.
3. Discussing an agent's blog or website in the query letter.  To another agent.
4. Including a space for a word count of the novel, without actually adding said word count.
5. Querying the same agent twice in two weeks.
6. Signing off on an email with your pen name that doesn't match the name the email is registered to.
7. Querying the wrong agent entirely.
8. Sending a query letter for a novel to an agency that only represents screenplays.
9. Forgetting to update the date on your query letter.
10. Not researching your title to ensure something has not been published under it.
11. Misspelling the word "query".

All of these can be fixed by a little proofreading, or a simple Google search.  Consider yourself warned... these are simple mistakes, and they can seriously mean the difference between your query being selected for a partial and your query being used to line a birdcage.

Querying!

I just sent out my first query letter this evening.

I'm going to pay more attention to this in another entry, but I'm going to gloss briefly over how I chose the agent I queried.

My three basic criteria for a literary agent are as follows:  they understand the genre, they have demonstrated sales, and they're not too "big".  I define big as someone like Christopher Little, who was the incredibly lucky, lucky, lucky agent that took on what was to become the Fantasy Juggernaut That Became The Merchandising Empire of Harry Potter.

Not that big agents are bad (I hope to have one someday, thanks to my own efforts), but I'd rather not have someone TOO large, as I would like to have someone that has the time to pay attention to my project, but is a step or two up from some guy with delusions of grandeur with zero contacts.  I think there can be a happy medium, and I would love that to be my agent.

Ah well.  Let's see how this initial salvo goes.

Weekly Roundup!

Well, it's over.

My novel has been written!  It's shorter than I anticipated, 11 chapters, prologue, and an epilogue instead of 12 chapters, prologue, and epilogue, and 65K instead of the 70K I was looking at.  I think it's a decent length, as it's over 300 pages now that it's been formatted

I'm a little nervous about the querying process... last time, I was emotionally killed by querying for like, three weeks.  I think, though, since I'm approaching this novel so differently, from the writing, to the editing, et cetera, and learned a lot of lessons from my first two attempts, I might actually have success this time!

Anyway, I also bought webspace (www.katrinarue.com) and I'm going to spend the next week building that, as well as sending out queries and editing.  Keep me in your thoughts!

First Things First

Hello, Internet!

My name is Katrina Rue.  I'm a Chicago-area author, though I am not yet a published one.  As of this writing, my third publishing attempt is at just over 52K words.  I've got approximately 70K in my mind as a goal.  

I write science fiction and fantasy with a young-adult focus to it.  Ideas for the novels I've written generally come out of my nightmares, which is something that I suppose is a little morbid and weird, but I promise, they were really interesting ones.  If I publish something from the most recent batch, I'll be sure to share the gory (not really) details here.

I'm a little dark, a little silly, and a little quirky, much like my fiction, though still accessible at the same time.  Not out there enough, and people get bored.  Too out there, and people get confused, and in both cases, they get angry.  At least, this is my perspective.

Getting a little more personal... I usually watch television in my genre, but I do have a very odd fascination with reality TV.  I really wonder how much of it is as edited as the participants claim, if their TV personas are who they truly are, or if the camera forces them to do things they may not necessarily do otherwise but feel compelled to do with the unbiased eye staring at them.

I also read a lot of classic literature.  My favorites are Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.  There's something about literature from those days... though I no way think my humble monster stories can compare, I love the careful crafting of literature from the 18th and 19th centuries. 

I'm not exactly sure why I'm blogging for this novel when I haven't blogged for the other ones, but I'm trying something different.