Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Sabbatical

Did you know that a lot of agents take a sabbatical from about December 15th through January 15th? Neither did I. So, I guess I'm on a forced sabbatical too-- from submitting to agents, anyway. But the time won't be wasted! My new, revised, plan: have 10 agent submissions, plus my synopsis, ready by January 15th. We'll see how it goes. Too bad the rest of life can't just stop a while so that I have time to do all the writing I want to do...

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Holy Crap, Somebody Found This Blog!

I don't know who you are out there in California, and if you reached it by mistake or on purpose, but thank you. Nice to think that somebody is reading my rambling (or, at least, accidentally dropping in) besides me.
Onto other news... Okay, so I need a synopsis. My goal had been to send out my query to two agents a week, but I'm beginning to realize that it may take even longer than that. For one thing, they ask for different things. One agent wants a query and five pages of manuscript, another wants just a query, another wants a synopsis. I was hoping to get away without the synopsis-- which shows you just how truly inexperienced I really am. The other thing that is taking a while is that my query letter really can't be just the same for each agent. Not only do they want different things, but they seem to like different things (surprise, surprise). Some like a query that is personalized, others want to get straight down to business... I guess it all comes down to knowing as much about the agent as you can, and then trying to customize each letter to them.
So, I am busy writing a synopsis that hopefully I will be able to send out in the next couple weeks. I will probably read it to my writing group-- ANWA (American Night Writer Association, in case you want to know, which actually has chapters in a lot of different places). By the way, somehow I ended up being the "host" house for all of next year! I'm not sure how that happened... I've only been two times. For some reason I had convinced myself that cleaning my entire house so that others could meet here was somehow easier than getting in my car and driving somewhere else. Crazy...
Anyways, back to writing. My goal is to have two agent submissions by Christmas, and then the rest will have to wait until my synopsis is complete. It's all a waiting game, isn't it? Good thing I'm not counting on writing to make a living! But seriously, wouldn't that be awesome if I could?

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

What I love...

that I use this blog mostly for the blog list on the side. Sad, sad, sad.