Conquering the fear of agents.

No word from those three agents.  Sigh.  Guess it’s time to send an email nudge to them.  Maybe.  AND, more importantly, start sending out blind queries to agents who are interested in my genre.  Sure, it’s easy.  All I have to do is go to through my Writer’s Market book, or better yet, get on the Writer’s Market website and start searching for……..historical fiction?  Literature?  Women’s fiction?  All of the above?  How do I even pick?

I usually call my novel Crossing Paths historical fiction because it takes place a while ago, during WW II.  The historical events are real, the story is imagined.  A lot of research was needed to verify all those events.  That included a few trips to Latvia, where it takes place.

But how do I find that agent or agents who not only read historical fiction, but will like my writing?  Seems like worse than the cliché “finding a needle in a haystack”.  So, here I sit, worrying about what genre the book is and not doing the research on agents and letting life happen all around me.  Except I keep thinking about it.  It’s time, I say.  Past time.  Just do it.  And then……another day goes by……and I didn’t do it.
 Can one of you give me a swift kick in the backside?

It’s so much easier for me to talk to those agents at a conference.  After all, I practiced talking to them for about 7 years at the Philadelphia Writers Conference.  I was on the agents/editors committee that brought them to that conference, so I had a bit of an in.  I practiced querying them about my novel.  Some were interested, others were not.  Nothing dire happened to me as a result.   So -- what am I afraid of?

 This past February, at the San Francisco Writers Conference, I queried agents for real.  I practiced my pitch and rattled it off, sounding self-assured.  All six wanted all or part of my writing.  What a high that was.  You already know the details of that story if you’ve been following this blog since the beginning.  If not, you can go back to the first blog I wrote.  Or not.

Even though I made it through that process fairly successfully, my inside was like unset Jell-O the whole time.  Now my outside is unset Jell-O, just like the inside.  What do I have to do to make the Jell-O set and get firm?  Any ideas?  Anyone out there who has conquered this particular fear?  If so, I’m open to suggestions.