The Query Letter Monster

The other day, a friend of mine and a fellow aspiring author (the illustrious Rebecca Mallary, whose blog I shall take a tiny moment to shamelessly promote) mentioned that she was trying to keep her blog posts focused. This made me stop for a moment and realize: mine are never focused. Instead, I just tend to write and write about whatever I have (or, as happens much more often, haven't) been writing about lately. So I thought that perhaps I should give this organized, focused thing a shot.

Brainstorming ideas for this blog post led me in a giant what-do-I-write-about-circle, and the topic that I kept returning to was the dreaded query letter.

This is something that's been rather giving me the fits lately. See, I finished Summer of Betrayal. I edited it and rewrote it until I was (mostly) satisfied. These are both good things, but in order to attempt to get it published, I need to convince an agent that it is utterly the most fabulous book in existence right now. And in order to do that, I need to write a brilliant query letter.

I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret: I'm horrible at summarizing.

The idea of having one letter --one chance-- to convince someone that my book is worth their time absolutely terrifies me. I cannot possibly talk my book up in a few paragraphs! Summarizing is all well and good when it's someone else's work, but ask me to summarize my own and I freeze.  And it isn't just summarizing-- it's summarizing well, and talking myself up, etc. Essentially I am writing a one-page persuasive essay entitled "This Is My Novel and This Is Why You Should Represent It Instead of That Other Girl's".

Right. I'll get right on that.

I've shied away from the task for far too long, however. It's time for me to put my big girl pants on and get to work. I've got a few sites bookmarked and I plan to research, research, research until I know how to write the most incredible cover letter known to man, but I thought this would be a good place to ask about it as well.

So? Anyone have any advice about query letters for me? I send enormous amounts of gratitude in advance!

Wherein somehow it has been EXACTLY a month. And I'm even more sorry. Sort of.

Didn't I promise to update no later than a week from my last post?

This just goes to show that I cannot be trusted, guys.

In BETTER NEWS, I have officially transferred ALL edits from my printed copy of Summer of Betrayal (seriously, I'm beginning to think that this isn't going to get renamed-- I don't know what my deal is, I can write an entire book but I can't title it?) to the electronic version. All that is left before it is DONE DONE DONE is to write three small new scenes!

Is this seriously my life? I'm actually about 5% away from finishing a book for real, what?

ETA:  I would like to jump back in here and edit this to point out that it has now been three and a half years since I began work on this. So...I'm not bragging or anything. It's taken me forever to get here. I really hope that the others in this quartet move faster. :|

Naturally the result of this is that my brain has realized that it is soon going to be allowed to plot and fiddle with new projects ENTIRELY GUILT FREE. And it's getting a bit ahead of itself.

Now, I would like to defend myself by pointing out that I don't mean NEW new projects, I just mean projects new to my poor brain. Things like the book that has been simmering in the Moleskin for months and managed to spill a bit of prose into a Word doc last week; or World Enough, the book I wrote half of during NaNoWriMo and absolutely adore; or poor Rosie's book that desperately needs a good editing. Nay, deserves, because it is excellent (and by that I mean told in a really fun voice)-- it's just that it's basically a giant hunk of ugly marble and I need to chip away all the crappy parts so that all the awesome can be seen.

Anyway. My arm is starting to hurt and I need to save its typing power to write those new scenes.

Wherein it has been nearly a month, and I'm sorry.

To the two of you out there who read this, my apologies for continuing to be so terrible about this updating thing.

I have done literally nothing since my last post. Well, that isn't entirely true-- I've gotten a few notes down about the project that I mentioned was entirely confined to my Moleskin, and I've gotten a craving to write ridiculously cliche teen drama, so we'll see where that goes.

I really need to force myself to blog more often. It makes me feel ashamed of all the stuff I haven't done to blog about.

Short blog post is short. My entire left arm is feeling ouchy, thanks entirely to today being Hannah-makes-a-bajillion-invoices-day at work. Hopefully I'll do a weekly update sort of thing. Which means I need to do something this week that's worthy of updating about.

Transitions

Why I decided working on multiple projects at once was a good idea, I'll never know.

Actually, lies. It's because I have the attention span of a squashed gnat. With ADHD.

So, current tally:

• Summer of Betrayal -- Needs a couple light scene/sentence edits here and there, then it's ready to (omg) show to agent-type people.
• Rosie's Book That Needs a Title -- Sleeping Beauty re-appropriation. Needs heavy edits that for some reason are nowhere near as daunting as the edits for SoB were. Likely because Rosie is a badass and pretty much writes this one herself, actually. It is for that reason that this is next on the list.
• Autumn of Discord -- The second Camlain book. Thanks to my attempt to start it during NaNo, I have the first...oh, three to five pages or so. It's not a bad beginning, actually; good enough to make me want to work on it again, which is a good sign.
• Wild At Heart -- Needs to decide if it is a standalone book or a series. And if it's a series, that's the series name, so what are the individual book titles? Most of Chapter One of this exists, thanks again to NaNo, but the characters are far more well-developed than any visible plot. Needs more outlining.
• World Enough -- I wrote this the majority of the time during NaNo and even though I skipped around and there are chapters from all over the place I reread it Friday and I love it. Love it. I have a full outline. I know my characters. I know my world. I just have to make myself focus. It would be easier to do this if I didn't have the attention span of a squashed gnat with ADHD. Ah, brain-that-loves-multitasking, you are both a gift and a curse.

I wonder if I left anything out. I only included the ones that already have existing prose-- counting the other two Camlain books, I have...four others (five if you count that one of those four is made of two separate novellas that are going to be smushed together with another one to make a book).

Any agents out there want to take a chance on a slightly indecisive, somewhat unfocused but ever-witty (in my fiction, at least) and overly imaginative authoress who really needs to pay off her student loans?

Please?

I told you.

I'm really bad at remembering to do things that I should! But I'm doing it. Or at least, I am now.

Since my last blog, I've only managed to paper-edit the first two chapters of this novel. But in my defense, three things happened-- I got sick, babysat my sixteen-month-old cousin (not in that order) and got inspiration for a new project. This new project is, for now, solely confined to my moleskin until I get this last round of edits done on Summer of Betrayal (seriously, people, I'm still looking for a better title here-- something involving treachery, intrigue, suspicion and summertime. GO) which I plan to have done by Sunday. Why Sunday, do you ask? Because my best friend just finished a very stressful semester of pharmacy school and has put up with me working on this book for the last three years, and has heard all about it, but has yet to get to read it. She comes home on Sunday, and I promised I'd have a copy printed out for her to read (what she doesn't know is that it comes with a red pen for her to use as liberally as she likes).

Sidenote: I have strawberry tea by Wedgwood and it is amazing. I'm on my last box, so I'm hoarding it like I'm on one of those A&E shows.

Next up on the editing list is my Sleeping Beauty re-appropriation. I've already made a start on it, back in September sometime, and I think I might have made it through the first chapter. I can already tell the editing process for this is going to be completely different from the one that I've used for Summer of Betrayal. Rosie's book needs more work than SoB (See? I cannot keep this title when it's abbreviation is SOB) in some ways, but it needs less in others-- namely character and relationship development. Mostly for this book it's that I wrote it for NaNoWriMo so it needs much paring down in some areas, and a large amount of expansion in areas that I decided I could totally skip last November. Such as wrapping up the entire end of the plot in a timely manner (I may have rushed right on through that one so as to finish the book itself when I finished my word count on November 30th).

This new project? Is the reason that I love tumblr (also, shameless self-promotion, but if you don't like Harry Potter, NCIS or other completely random things you might not like it-- my tumblr is here). I follow a blog called Crackships, which essentially makes or posts graphics of completely random celebrity pairings. One day there was an animated GIF someone had created of two characters from TV shows that did not exist at the same time or in the same country or even remotely in the same world-- and I was intrigued by the juxtaposition. It's been a downward spiral from there.

It really goes to show that inspiration can be found anywhere as long as you allow yourself to have your eyes and ears open to possibilities. So that's today's moral, kids-- keep your eyes open, your ears listening, and your notebook and pen at the ready. The world is yours for the manipulating.

Whoa, I still have a blog?

I always forget that this blog exists. Maybe if I remember to update it more often, I'll be able to use it as a tool to keep myself motivated. I'm going to try to hold myself accountable to posting at least once a week, and we'll see how it goes from there. (Haven't I said this before? Ah well.)

Currently, I am printing book one of a young adult fantasy quartet I have been drafting and redrafting for over three years now. Also, this printer is driving me insane, because for some reason we have no printer tray and so some, but not all, of the pages are out of order. This for some reason infuriates me more than if they were all out of order, and tells me that I need to stop this horrid habit of forgetting to put page numbers on anything.

Currently titled Summer of Betrayal, though I am looking for less...didactic...suggestions, should anyone care to toss some my way, this poor novel has gone through no less than four drafts, the addition of a new male protagonist and the switching of the former male protagonist into somewhat of a villain (for now, at least-- who knows where he'll end up?), and the battle between my two main female protagonists as to whose book this actually is. It began as Genevieve's, then Her Majesty Queen Marina took over, and then Genny wedged her way back into the main plot in a very large way, so I've told them they have to share.

Neither of them are very fond of this idea, but as they both have major plot arcs (that divert from one another in both type and location) in the rest of the quartet, they shall simply have to deal with it.

Novel printed (in 10 pt font because the less ink I use, the less likely my mother will whine) and not quite in order yet, I shall take it to work tomorrow, gratuitously borrow their three-whole-punch, put the book in order and in a three-ring-binder and let the editing games begin. Again. For the third time, with this book.

Hopefully, it will also be the last. I'm ready to shop this baby around, and frankly I'm ready for it to be completely done so that I can really dive into book two, and then after that books three and four, for which I now actually have plot arc sketches (thank you, Whitney, for your patience, and Wikipedia for your random article leaping that led me to an inspiring idea).

Till next Monday, then! Or sooner, should I be so inspired.

We'll see.

ETA: I was going to write about how I only managed 30k for NaNoWriMo this year and totally failed at keeping my attention on one story (that's right, I switched around four times), and the point of that was to lead into talking about this book because I burnt myself out the weekend before NaNo finishing it doing 22k in one weekend and this little ramble is mainly to explain why the URL says "nanowrimo-2010" when there is nothing about NaNoWriMo in this post.

I am a writer.

I have to remind myself of this often.

In my parents' world, this doesn't really count. I'm starting to get extreme lectures because I haven't found a job and I've been out of college for three months, despite the fact that I've applied for about a thousand jobs this summer (all right, if we're talking actual numbers, it's really probably only been between three and four hundred-- and I'm serious). But I've been putting solid work in on my novel and despite the fact that I have about twelve chapters and ten days, I'm still determined to have this round of rewrites done by the time September begins. The family is going to the outlets shopping tomorrow, I think, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to take advantage of that time and bang out a couple of edited and rewritten chapters.

But back to the job search. I'm either overqualified or underqualified for just about everything out there. My eighteen year old brother dared to lecture me today because I hadn't applied at places like WalMart, but here's the thing-- I want whatever job I end up getting right now to count for something when it comes time to apply for that golden job that I find and really want. And a job at WalMart isn't really going to count as relevant job experience.

I'm getting disillusioned. Bored with life, and the world. And I don't like it, because typically I'm the optimist in the room. The delusional, refusing-to-be-jaded optimist.

How do I get that back?