I’ve been a little lackadaisical about my blog posts, and that’s because my writing has been lackadaisical. My novel is out with beta readers for the final polish and I generally get a little ‘omg, what do I do with my hands?’ when I don’t have a clear writing goal.
Last week I researched my first batch of agents, wrote my query letters and synopses (of different lengths), and put it all together to send out my query letters. But since it was the first time I’ve done this particular task, I backtracked to check things three or four times in an attempt to give each agent as close to what they wanted in a query letter as possible. I even made an excel sheet to organize.
I got my first form rejection letter by the next day. It was faster than I was expecting. I celebrated it as the beginning of my ‘writer’s school of hard knocks’, but at the same time, I thought I would be more upset about the rejection itself. Perhaps the time listening to Gabriela and reading articles on how rejection is never personal, that agents reject manuscripts for all sorts of reasons, actually sunk in. Agents all have their preferences. I just have to find that agent whose specific preferences line up with what I wrote.
As for straight up writing, I have close to 2k words on a new story, but at the same time I struggled with the idea of starting a new project when I know I’m going to be writing The Huntsman for NaNoWriMo. The solution finally hit me Friday night. I pulled out ‘The 3A.M. Epiphany’ on Saturday morning and did the next writing prompt in the book.
Prompts are an excellent way to write without having to have a project. And the prompt gave me a great idea for a unique pov that I may use in The Huntsman. I played around with pov in The Storyteller and it was rather enjoyable. So I want to keep that up. I think I may like playing with weird povs. Maybe it will become one of my things?
So the writing life is still going well. Every time I worry that I won’t be picked up by an agent, I remind myself why I write in the first place. I’d love to get my stories out there to share my friends and their worlds with other people, but I’ll keep writing even if I’m the only one who reads about them.
