Must Love/Hate Queries

Snapple Real Fact #878: Only male fireflies can fly.

(At first I was a little indignant at Mother Nature’s slight against the female of the species, but then I remembered chasing fireflies as a kid. Only the ones flying in the field got captured and placed in jelly jars… or worse!)

This week’s rant is all about query letters. What’s a query letter? Perhaps you’re better off not knowing, but since you’re probably still reading, I’ll keep writing. A query letter is a one pager designed to pique the interest of a literary agent who (if the stars align in your favor) will champion your book with established publishing houses.

It sounds so easy, right? After all, I’ve already written 300+ pages and finished my first novel. What’s another page?

Well, that one page was more difficult to write than any page in the actual manuscript. Maybe more difficult than writing all of the pages. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t challenging to condense 300 pages into 1, but that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was the pressure. The knowledge that this 1 page was bound for a harried agent who probably reads thousands of query letters a month (and likely rejects 99. 9% of them). Oh, and did I mention that I was going to query the agents who represent some of my favorite authors?

Yep, that’s PRESSURE. Three paragraphs designed to make them say ‘I want more’; three paragraphs to make an impression.

Needless to say, I agonized over the query for hours on end. I agonized over it for days, actually. I changed words, bugged my proofreaders, and chugged Snapple all the while doing my best to ignore Sabot, my seemingly attention starved cock-a-poo.  The end result? One very numb butt (I really need to get cushions for my dining room chairs) and one edgy query.

I don’t know what the odds are of gaining literary representation. Probably 1:1,000,000. Probably I have a better chance of hitting the Mega Millions, but you only live once. So I’ve sent out twenty query letters and now the really hard part starts: waiting.

I’m not very good at waiting. Ask anyone who knows me. I’ve been checking my email like a crazy person since I hit send on the last email. It’s actually getting a little compulsive. My husband says this is a good exercise in patience and actually had the audacity to suggest that I limit myself to checking email once per day. (Yes, I know. It sounds like I’m married to a complete stranger… because there’s no way I possess that kind of self-control).

So, this is me (crazy/impatient) with my fingers crossed hoping that a little bit of talent and a little bit of luck will take my journey to the next level!

J.J. Bonds