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.

Where have all the agents gone?........and procrastination.

I'm late on posting this bog.  I wrote it on April 5.  I'm new to the blogging process and started a blog on another site and then started this one.  Trying to decide which one to use full time.  I don't plan to keep up more than one.

Still no word from the three agents who have all or part of my novel Crossing Paths.  Are they so busy they haven’t looked at it yet?  Or did they reject my novel and are of the mindset that an email doesn’t have to be answered?  I’m sure I don’t know.  Now it’s time to start querying the gazillion other agents.  No, I haven’t started.  And I have a confession to make.  The whole idea is scary.

Why is it scary?  I don’t even know those people.  They’re nothing to me.  But wait.  In a way, they hold my future in their hands.  Or do they?  Another thing to examine.  Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC) said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  A fascinating concept.  So, the topic this week is procrastination and the issue is to examine it.

 Why do we procrastinate and find ways to wait another day?  I don’t know why all the rest of you do, I can only examine why I do it.  Feel free to comment with your own reasons.

When it comes to me and querying agents, the reason can be told in one word:  fear.  To examine that word further, it could be the fear of failure and it could be fear of success.  And it could be both.  I haven’t wanted to examine it at all, it’s much easier to procrastinate.  In fact, I just walked away and made a small pot of decaf coffee to put off finishing this.  The coffee tastes good, even if I didn’t need it.  And I’m doing laundry, too, so I’ll have to go take care of that in a minute.  It feels good to get the laundry done.  So why doesn’t it feel good to get those blind query letters out?
How can I turn it around and make it feel, if not good, at least okay?  I guess I could let go of expectations.  No expectations as to the outcome.  Hmmmm.  Sounds good on paper.  But it’s hard not to have feelings around the outcome.  Will have to work on that one.

Another load of laundry folded, last load’s in the dryer.  It came to me while I was folding.  Judgment.   Those agents will be judging me.  Another part of my brain asked, really?  More examination.  Judgment is the wrong word.  The truth is that they will be reading my writing to see if it engages them.  And if it doesn’t, that isn’t necessarily a judgment about my writing.  Not everyone likes historical fiction.  Some people prefer__________(fill in the blank). I was going to name a genre that I don’t care to read and decided to let you fill in your own.
Okay, so those agents aren’t judging me, they’re seeing if my writing is something they want to read, if they want to keep turning the pages.  More work to do.  My goal is to conquer the fear and get past the judgment thinking and just do it.

I'll let you know how I'm doing.  In about a week.

Still waiting……and reading…………plus nano and writing.

For those who are following my agent process, here’s a quick update.  Three agents out of the six I met at the San Francisco Writers Conference have not rejected me yet.  They have all or part of my novel Crossing Paths and I’ve heard………. nothing.  One more week and I’m going to start sending out blind queries to agents who say they like historical fiction and/or literary fiction.

 In the meantime, I finished reading Stieg Larsson’s book, The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I had asked last week why you keep reading and specifically mentioned this book.  Thanks for the comments.  It’s fun to hear the differing views on why we keep turning the pages.  For this book, I only kept reading because I’m a stubborn sucker.  I skimmed through the parts that were plainly boring.  The story got exciting in the last hundred pages.  And mind you, this is a 724 page book, so that was a lot to get through.  I’m glad I found out the ending, maybe.  It ends with a cliff-hanger and now I’ve got to read the next book to find out if the heroine survives.  I’m not ready to do that yet.

 Another thing I did this week is go back to my fairly new spy thriller.  I started writing it this past November, which is National Novel Writing Month (affectionately called nano).  There’s even a website devoted to it (http://www.nanowrimo.org/).  Last year, over 200,000 writers world-wide participated.  The idea is to start a new novel on November 1, write 1667 words or more a day and cross the 50,000 word mark by the end of the month.  If you register on the site, you have your own page with all kinds of goodies, including a chart to mark your progress.

 30,000 writers reached the goal in 2010.  No, I was not among them.  I wrote just over 35,000 words and that was okay.  A few things, like life, got in the way.  Participating definitely brought a new excitement into my writing world.  In fact, I think I might do it every year.  It’s not a bad way to spend November.  It’s amazing how much you can write when you decide to just sit down and do it.

I started the spy novel with a germ of an idea that I’d had FOR YEARS.  Don’t even ask why it took so long to start writing it.  Or why, after I wrote about half of it in November, I didn’t look at it again until yesterday.  It just is.  And now I need to get back to it.

I wrote this on March 30, sorry for the late posting.

Query letters and ……..turning the pages.

Okay, you might be bored reading about my agent process by now.  So here’s a very short update.  If you’ve been following along, you know I had six agents to query as a result of going to the San Francisco Writers Conference.  As of last week, I had sent out 5.  They wanted varying amounts of my writing, from 10 pages to the entire manuscript.  So far I’ve gotten three rejections. 

This past Saturday, I was finished, as much I could be at this moment in time, with my full manuscript and I sent it the agent who requested the full.  I got an immediate email back, saying that she is too busy to take queries right now.  The second paragraph said that if she met you at a conference, she would still be taking those.  Whew.  On Sunday I got an email from her with two words – Got it. 

So now I’m waiting for responses from three agents.  How long that will take is a total unknown.  But as I said before, after four weeks, I’m assuming a no and moving on. 

Here’s my question for those of you who are still reading this.  Why do you keep reading?  What makes you keep turning the pages?  It’s something I’ve thought about a lot during my journey of writing.  I’ve been wondering that even more lately, since I’m hoping agents will keep turning my pages. 

There’s a series of three books by Stieg Larsson that are huge bestsellers right now.  The first one, Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, was given to me by a writing friend.  I had a hard time getting through the first pages.  I probably wouldn’t have kept on reading it but I brought it along on an airplane for a 6 hour cross-country trip.  A flight attendant walking by asked me how I liked it. 

I said, “Not much.”  She said, “Once you get past the first 200 pages, it’s great.” 

What?  I had to read 200 pages to get to the good parts?  Yes, I did.  I skimmed those first 200.  Some random thoughts while I did that:  too much back-story, he’s giving us everyone’s point of view and it’s confusing, too many characters, too many adverbs, meandering plot.  I can’t believe someone published it like this.  Where was the editor?

But on the other hand, I can’t argue with the fact that all three of the books are huge bestsellers.  There are probably many reasons why so many people are willing to keep turning the pages of these books.  I just can’t figure out what they are.  Right now I’m struggling with the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I skim through the parts that are boring to me.  I’m only reading it because I’m fascinated with what makes this a bestseller.  I’m on page 400 out of 724.  Along with my other complaints, it’s too long as well.

If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.  If you have an opinion or idea about this topic, I’d love to hear it. 

Sent out the query letters, waiting for responses, editing while I wait.

Last week I blogged about sending out query letters, most by email, to the agents I met at the San Francisco Writers Conference a few weeks ago.  I got back two rejections immediately.  In the past week, no responses to the next three I sent out.  It seemed the time was right to do a search on-line as to how long I should wait.  Lots of opinions.  One answer was – as long as it takes.  What does that even mean?  Other answers were expressed in weeks or months.  A few years ago I got a response from an editor 6 months after I sent the full requested manuscript. 

What are the chances that there will be no response at all, I wondered.  I searched that.  Apparently, it’s getting more acceptable not to respond.  Hmmmm.  How long does it take to send an email?  A few seconds to write “No, thank you.” and one second to hit SEND.  Are agents really so busy that they don’t respond unless it’s a yes?  If that’s true, no wonder more and more authors are self-publishing. 

I think I’ll give them all an arbitrary 4 weeks.  If I don’t hear within 4 weeks, I’ll assume it’s a no.  After all, if they’re interested, they would get back to me right away.  And if it’s a no, that’s okay.  If they don’t love my writing, then they aren’t the agent for me.

I still have to send my full manuscript to the one agent who requested that.  I’m taking a little time to go over the entire ms again and making some more edits.  At writing workshops over the past few years, I’ve heard other writers ask - when do I know I’m finished editing?  The published writer’s usual answer has been – when it’s published.  While on-line searching for how long to wait for an agent to respond to a query letter, I got bored with that and started searching for information on how many times published writers have edited their own work.  I came across some fun quotes about the editing process:

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"Ernest Hemingway once confided to George Plimpton during an interview that he rewrote the ending to "A Farewell to Arms" 39 times before he was satisfied. Why so many rewrites? Plimpton asked. Because, Hemingway responded, he wanted to get the words right."

"There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting." -- Harry Shaw "Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them"

"Books are not written--they're rewritten." -- Michael Crichton

"Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear." -- Patricia Fuller

"My wife took a look at a first version and said, 'That's high school stuff.' I had to tell her to wait until the seventh draft." -- James Thurber

"There are passages in every novel whose first writing is the last. But it's the joint and cement between those passages that take a great deal of rewriting." -- Thornton Wilder

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." --Richard Cormier

"Tolstoy revised WAR AND PEACE seven times, by hand, and his long-suffering wife typed out every page on an ancient typewriter, seven times."

“I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again. — Leo Tolstoy

Good writing is essentially rewriting. — Roald Dahl

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Guess I’ve got some work to do.  I’ll report back in about a week.