Query Queasiness

Another Monday has arrived. Wow, is it just me, or do the weeks seem to go by faster the older you get?

We had another successful RWA meeting this Saturday. I want to thank the goddess that is Wendy Corsi Staub for braving the monsoon that blew saturday to come speak at our meeting, when she has 5, count'em 5 deadlines to meet by June. Her talk was really inspiring. She's now on my list of writers that I admire along with Jennifer Crusie, Marley Gibson, Eileen Rendahl, Meg Cabot and Lani Diane Rich.

She shared a really difficult time that she had recently which led to her writing the book of her heart, which is now being published in December of this year, after intially being rejected by publishers. See, even writers who have published 60 books can still get their proposals rejected which made me feel slightly better. I mean this is a woman who survived writing Fabio's romance novels (Yes, Fabio didn't wrote those books. Shocking I know.)

She also suggested that we be prolific. While we're sending out one book, start another which is going to be my philosophy for now on. I have too many books in my head that I want to write, to spend more fruitless years trying to get just one book published.

I'm hoping that like Madeleine Hunter, a publisher will say to me, 'what else have you got?' and I can drag out the opus that is Nearly Famous and dust it off.

Right now, I'm working on my query letter, which for me is worse than writing the synopsis. The query letter is the first thing that an agent sees, sometimes it's the only thing they see. If they don't like the query, they may never request a partial from you, so it's crucial that the query convey your story in such a way that they can't wait to get a copy of the book in their hot little hands.

In the case of my YA 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love,' I need to convey not only the story, but let them know that my book is inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that there are actual fairies in my book.

Hopefully I'll post the blurb in a few days, to see what people think if I'm brave enough. Right now, I'm in the refining stage. I sat down this morning and started to write it out. It's a little choppy and needs to be edited and punched up considerably.

I've given myself a deadline of the end of the month, to get the revisions done, and to start sending out the book to agents. Mercury goes into retrograde the first three weeks of March, so it won't be a good time to start submitting.

In other news, I've sent in my form for the NEC conference in Natick, and I've signed up for an agent appointment, so keep your fingers crossed.