Searching for an agent, self-doubt, and Kevin, the voice in my head
Welcome to July! June sure was busy, and as we bid farewell to Queer Pride Month and welcome Queer Wrath Month, I’m hoping that July will be a little less hectic, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m still plodding through the revision of the book I’m working on. At the moment, the second draft is clocking in at 58,255 words, and I have about six more chapters to revise, so I think I’m a bit ahead of where I expected the word count to be by this point. That’s okay, though; I think there’s some cutting that I can do from the earlier chapters to tighten things up. It’s felt like I’ve been taking a meandering route to get to the point of the story, and I know I’ll want to pick up the pace more.
My goal, fingers crossed, is to finish this revision by the fall, which is when I’d like to start looking for an agent to represent it.
What does that mean? It probably sounds like nonsense to most of you, and count your blessings for that! It’s kind of nerve-wracking if you’re a writer. Basically, a literary agent represents your novel to potential publishers that may be interested in putting out your book.
Basically, think of it as matchmaking. I’m looking for a matchmaker who is willing to work with me to find my novel a husband—er, I mean a publisher.
I’ve been down this road before, and it’s not exactly the yellow brick road. I wrote a novel in graduate school that was a near future dystopian climate fiction novel—basically, a woman’s farm was going to dry up in ten years thanks to climate change, and her estranged astronaut brother wanted her to join his mission to colonize another world. I thought the timing was good for a story like that, but I couldn’t find a match and maybe the writing wasn’t good enough, who knows. Anyway, it’s in a drawer and I’m trying again with something else. (Does that make that novel a confirmed bachelor? How apt.)
If you’re me, this process dredges up all kinds of self-doubt: the voice in my head that says what makes you think you’re a real writer and it didn’t work the last time, what makes you think this time would be any different and maybe you’re just not good enough. We discussed that inner critic in my introductory fiction class this past semester, and I even gave him a name: Kevin. (Apologies if that’s also yours/your child’s/your husband’s name. They’re probably much, much nicer than the Kevin in my head, who basically drives a Zamboni of doubt over any shred of confidence I may have had.)
Enough about Kevin, though. So where does the process start? Research. I’ve started by narrowing down the field of agents to those who a) represent my genre and b) are open to unsolicited submissions. That could be a monumental task, but I’ve been doing it a little at a time, one day a week, for the past year or so. After that, it’s a matter of getting a feel for books and authors they have represented and figuring out if I could imagine mine being on a shelf with those books.
So, where has that gotten me? I have a list of 43 agents that I think may be potential fits for the work in progress. I’ve been compiling the list for… well, a long time. Of those, at the moment 21 of them are open to queries. (That means the other ones are either only taking solicited queries—that is, they’ve asked someone to send them something—or they’re so up to their eyeballs in their slush pile that they can’t see out.)
Obviously, I have to finish the revision first, so that takes priority. My ballpark target date for wrapping that up is October. Activity tends to throttle down toward the end of the year, so that target date may mean waiting until the beginning of 2025 to start sending it out. If I can get it done sooner, I will. But I don’t want to rush at the expense of making it as good as I possibly can. Fingers crossed.
What I’ve Been Reading
June was a good month for reading! I finished three fantastic books that I highly recommend.
Maggie & Me is Damian Barr’s memoir about growing up gay and poor in Scotland during the Thatcher years. It’s a pretty bleak time, as anyone who was alive at the time can recall, but in Damian’s working-class town, when the steelworks closes down, it gets downright perilous. That bleak picture is leavened with some much-needed humor, but it’s still heavy. At the same time, it’s hopeful and ultimately he comes out the other side, not unscathed, but definitely happier. It’s recently been made into a play that just wrapped up touring.
We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson is a YA novel that came out several years ago. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while now, and I’m glad I finally moved it to the top of the stack. Henry Denton is a teen who’s been abducted by aliens off and on for years, and now they’ve told him the world is going to end in 144 days… unless he presses this red button that they show him. Problem is, Henry isn’t sure he wants to. His family’s a mess, he’s a pariah at school, and his boyfriend died by suicide last year. Then he meets someone who makes him question, well, everything. I devoured this book and can’t recommend it highly enough.
You wouldn’t expect me to be interested in a YA novel about college hockey rivals who are vying to be the top NHL draft pick, would you? Yeah, me neither… unless they have a magnetic attraction to each other that they’re finding hard to deny. That’s the premise of Icebreaker by A.L. Graziadei, and the engaging, complicated characters and witty banter kept me turning pages to see if they would make it work.
My stuff:
While you’re eagerly awaiting my next book (you are eagerly awaiting it, right?), you can catch up on my previous titles over at my website, where I also have some stories you can read.
That’s it for now. See you next month!.
