#and querying

[atinylittlepain]

im gonna rant a little sorry about it but, so

i know that ninety-five percent of putting your writing out there - submitting to lit mags, querying, submitting to contests - is rejection. i know that. i know that it's all subjective too, right? there isn't really one Objectively Good piece of writing - one person loves it, one person doesn't get it, one person hates it etc

that being said, i have been getting a lot of rejections lately, and i am starting to get seriously weighed down by them. i'm already in a bit of a slump with my writing, and add the rejections on top of that, i start to question if i'm actually any "good" at this thing, or if i should just quit while i'm ahead.

i don't know, just feeling really fucking sad and discouraged about writing rn (this does not include fic writing) and i guess i just wanted to say the quiet part loud if there's anyone else who reads this and is feeling the same way - it's fucking brutal out there, and i'm starting to not even want to play the game anymore

[malenjoyer]

[ Play Aliyah’s Interlude - IT GIRL ]

This is for the corner of Edward stans and fellow hench people to enjoy

[mimicben]

A quick drawing i did of my designs for Query and Echo because i love women

[thebibliosphere]

Not to be an unbearable plot tease, but I'm editing/rewriting a chapter from Hunger Pangs book 2, and while I adore all of my characters equally, Vlad and Ursula getting to know each other properly might actually be some of my favorite moments.

His realization that he can pester Ursula to tell him more about random historical events as they actually happened, not how they are portrayed in history books, is so, so sweet. He's like an excited labrador who just found a dinosaur bone.

Ursula's very much not used to this kind of attention.

She's used to people only being interested in her power. And here's a werewolf who couldn't give less of a fuck about exploiting her magic for his own gain, and a vampire who wants to ask her what textile production was like circa the fall of the Ecrecian Empire.

[neil-gaiman]

i know most of your asks are about sandman and good omens, so im gonna go against that trend and instead ask about a niche short story of yours from 1985. its understandable if you dont remember but i thought i'd give it a shot anyway

so in "when is a door" from secret origins, you mention the characters quiz and probe as part of the riddlers backstory. the dc wiki states that these are the same characters as echo and query (created by chuck dixon) and query and quiz (created for a cartoon i think?? or by doug moench. i dont remember). in your opinion, do you think these are all the same characters or are query and echo separate from quiz and probe? this is a long standing discussion between riddler enjoyers and im curious to hear you weigh in

I'm pretty sure it was Query and Probe in Secret Origins. I'm pretty sure that was their first appearance anywhere, and they have transmuted since. I forget whether they were originally my idea or Matt Wagner's (ditto the male assistants all called Mark).

[nemoys]

Can't stop thinking about how professor veritas ratio was blushing over his potentially dead boyfriend on inter-stellar live television. He is so lucky he has that bust of his because nothing else is shielding him from that fanclub of his after this one

[faxxmachine]

how come the drag story hour dudes don’t want to read stories to kids as themselves? why do they want to do it as their adult entertainment personas? why are they so hell bent on putting a degrading mockery of females in front of kids who are largely spending every waking hour with their mothers? most of these men are supposed to be homosexual men. would that not be better representation? 

[pitviperofdoom]

Anybody who knows about query letters have any advice?

[colubrina]

How I Got My Agent, Take Two

I’m so ridiculously over the top happy to say I’ve signed with a literary agent to sell my magical bookbinder book.  This has been a long process that started in 2017, and I’m genuinely overjoyed.

It played out thus:

Write book one.

Write book two. Query the book.

Write book three. Query the book.

Write book four. Get into Pitch Wars with the book. (Yay!) Query the book.

Write book five. Get into Author Mentor Match with the book. (Yay!) Query the book.

Write book six.

Write book seven.

Write book eight.

Write book nine.

Get a Revise and Resubmit offer from an agent for book five. Do it.

Start querying book six.

Get an offer from the R&R (Yay!)

Write book ten.

Book five dies on submission.

Start writing book eleven.

My agent and I amicably part ways.

Start writing book twelve.

Finish querying book six.

Query book ten.

Start writing book thirteen.

Go back to book eleven.

Go to a live pitch event. Pitch book eleven to two agents. Neither likes it. One asks what else I’m working on, and when I do the one sentence pitch for book twelve, says, “I could sell that.”

Pivot to finishing that book.

Query book twelve, sending queries first to four agents who only want queries and who are actively requesting off those queries. Get a 75% request rate. Query is fire. Check.  Unfortunately, every agent rejects when they see the opening pages, which turn out not to be fire.

Revise opening

Resume querying book twelve.  In case you’ve lost count, while this is the twelfth book I’ve written, it’s ‘only’ the seventh I’ve queried.

Finish drafting book thirteen in NaNo. Revise. Send to CPs.

Have existential crisis on a Tuesday. Meltdown on Tumblr. Weep in my living room. All my books have failed.  I do not know how to write a better book.  Maybe I should give up. This turns out to be a very well-timed dark night of the soul within the narrative.

Get two full requests for book twelve on Wednesday.

Get an email telling me one of my short stories has been held for consideration on Thursday.

On Friday get an email that the woman who handles submissions for one of those agents from Wednesday loved the book but she doesn’t think it’s a great fit for the agent I queried.  Would I mind if she forwarded it in-house to a different agent?  In shocking news, I would not mind this. 

On Monday, get an email asking for a call.

On Wednesday, which is Valentine’s Day, have a call with the agent.  She’s lovely in every way, her thoughts on the book are so good, every editorial idea she floats is good. Like, really good.  She is super enthusiastic about repping the book and offers to do so.

There is an etiquette requirement at this point that I tell any agent who has the book that I have an offer on the table and give them two weeks to respond, so I go around nudging all the agents with a full (four people) and several agents who only have a query. Three more agents request fulls. The rejections start trickling in.  People are very sweet and complimentary, and I am deeply, deeply relieved that I never waver from how much I adore the original offering agent.

I sign with her on February 29.

Final stats for Book Twelve (THE ARCHIVE OF THE WORLD):

Total Queries Sent:  39 Requests Before Offer: 8 (20.5% request rate) Request Rate Including Post-Offer Requests: 28.2%

Year I Started this Nonsense:  2017 Total Queries Sent across 7 books:  456

Takeaway wisdom:  The query trenches are a soul-mangling machine into which we all keep putting our souls and most of us don’t make it out unmangled.  I am not unmangled. BUT, I am a persistence hunter, and I will walk steadily towards publishing until it lies down in exhaustion and gives up.

Thanks for hanging out with me as I do.

Also, this book is so much fun.  You’re going to love it.

[ktsghost]

god I wish that was me

[snuize]

excuse me waiter, i'll have more of these menaces please

id like to thank the local idiot who keeps showing me these (but with the sims 2) in the middle of ethics class @expired-rice

[froot-batty]

Eddie and friends :]

[aritany]

i truly think the best thing you can do for your writing is remove the sense of urgency.

this especially applies if you're hoping to break into tradpub (or publishing in general). there's this pervasive feeling that you've got get it done. get it polished get it ready go go gogogogogogo, because the querying process takes forever, and then being on sub takes forever, and getting published after getting a deal takes forever on top of that, and all of those timelines are one hundred percent out of your control.

the logical step is to speed up the part of the process you can control, right? it's tempting to try to rush to the finish line.

don't fall into that trap. let your writing simmer. it takes time to tell a good story. allow yourself that time. it's a gift.

[mimicben]

Riddle us this?

The girls n' the gay are my favourite

[patticalkosz]

Not much snow in NYC this winter… but there’s magic all around, if you look.

With illustrator @xiaostudio17 on Instagram. 

[pangur-and-grim]

OKAY, HERE’S THE FINAL DATA!

I started querying in January with the lefthand letter. in May I finally found success (!!!!!!) with the righthand query letter.

over those 5 months of querying, I picked up 65 rejections. the vast, VAST majority were copy/paste form rejections, but a few included personalized criticism, which actually helped me a great deal. I rewrote the first two chapters from scratch based off the advice in one of those rejections, and I think that proved vital in eventually finding an agent.

(one of the personalized rejections was also unnecessarily mean, so now I have this grudge against a random man I’ll never meet)

was I ready to start querying in January? probably not! I didn’t understand all the speculative fiction subgenres, so ended up bothering people that I never had a chance with, and because my letter + manuscript weren’t polished enough, I basically guaranteed rejection for myself early on. BUT I don’t think I’d have learned enough to know I wasn’t ready if I hadn’t just gone ahead and started. 

and in the end, I’m thrilled with the agency/agent I’ve found myself with. it took a lot of time and research and reworking of everything, but you gotta have the persistence of an annoying fly that refuses to be smacked to death!