#wow that process sucked

[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.

[muffinlance]

Isopuppy Sewn Pattern Update: At long last, I've found time to get back to working on this! AKA I didn't feel like writing this weekend so LET'S GO SEWING YAY.

Current status: I have the final pattern worked out (plus or minus some seam allowance adjustments) and I've moved from junk fabric to final fabric. Hoping to get a good way into cutting/construction tomorrow. Unless I feel like writing. Who knows! Not me!

[crimeronan]

side effect of having my hydroxychloroquine work really well is that i'm forgetting what it felt like to be Really Horrifically Sick. both because of the emotional distance and because of my general memory issues. the memory issues are a LOT worse concerning Times When I Was Horrifically Sick.

so i'm actually pretty grateful to my past self for the amount of time i spent oversharing here. if i scroll back like seven months in my autoimmune tag i can find posts of me essentially going "eh, i'm sleeping for 22 hours a day but i don't really care anymore bc i've accepted i'm gonna die" and "life sux. can't breathe or think or feel my chest but that's constant so i don't wanna go to the ER about it AGAIN" and "docs took 14 vials of blood 4 x-rays several lung images several lung tests and an EKG before i even left the hospital today. even tho they havent gotten my test results back yet" and i'm like god Damn.

I REALLY LIVED LIKE THIS????????

[screambirdscreaming]

At the bus stop one time there was a gaggle of preschoolers waiting to catch the bus for a field trip day, and someone walked past with a couple of friendly little dogs, to great general delight.

But after a little bit, the dogs were getting overwhelmed, and the preschoolers were gently coaxed to back off so the person with the dogs could continue on. Specifically, one of the preschool teachers said, "Sometimes, when you're small, being surrounded by big people can be a bit scary and overwhelming. Even if they are friendly."

This was recieved as great wisdom: after all, the preschoolers were also small, and understood how scary and overwhelming big people could be! And the dogs were indeed even smaller than the preschoolers, so it made sense.

What was funny and charming was that, upon absorbing and reflecting on this wisdom, they all felt the need to tell it to one another. In tones of great insight, they turned to one another and said, "Did you know? Sometimes when you are small, being surrounded by big people can be scary and overwhelming! Even if they are friendly!" Back and forth, without any particular concern that they were all saying the same thing. Have reached comprehension of an insight, it must be shared!

I must say that this behavior is less charming in tumblr users than in preschoolers. Not least because tumblr users, having gained a little analytical skill to misuse, insist on Summarizing and Generalizing and Unifying the insights they repeat, quickly turning any interesting new information into formulaic dogmatic mush.

[crabs-brencil]

yk i probably should have gotten my stomach pumped a few(?) hours ago but i passed out instead and now im making myself chicken nuggets and if that's not a sign that god is playing me like a kazoo then idk what is

[paeinovis]

I feel like I need to be financially compensated for being raised to not know how to do like any fucking cleaning

[martinskiseyes]

btw i bought myself aeropress recently and im mastering my coffee now😌

[yo9urt]

bald gate.

[orchidsangel]

kudos to everyone who writes long fics for real !! bc i reach 1.7k and tap out, if the pacing is awful I just deal bc i don't know how to build a real story !!!

[broodsys]

I don't wannaaaaa go to bed bc then tmrw will happen and then I'll have to needlessly be like I don't wannaaaaa take my T shot all day long even tho it's literally fine

[lovebugdotcom]

Values…………….. *punches a wall*

[g1rlonl1ne]

hysterically sobbing over can’t handle this by bo burnham again because being an artist sucks and the world is cruel

[moregraceful]

i will say one thing i learned this year - besides don't ragequit your benefited full time job with health insurance before you have a clear plan for what to do next - is that job interviews do in fact get a lot easier the more you do them. possibly because in my last job i was just continually failing up so they were willing to excuse some pretty atrocious interviews, but having done...several...interviews for new-to-me workplaces in the past couple of months really is like, it gets easier to do with practice. at least for someone like me who has a lot of anxiety, just getting out there and continually having to talk myself up and present my experience as something valuable and earned rather than given has been really good.

[pussy-ache]

[areyoudoingthis]

my mother texted me while i was with a friend and i called her on purpose while my friend was nearby so he could offer emotional support and she had the cheek to get rude and dictate that she would call me later because i was busy even tho I said i was free to talk then jesus fucking christ who does she think she is

[marsixm]

i had a mini dnd session the other day to do backstory planning and learn more about how my abilities work bc im too neurodivergent and a minor to even handle playing dnd most of the time. anyway i teleported a dude into a pocket dimension to secretly kill him so i think i figured out how to do shit