Wish Me Luck!

The rewrite of the first few chapters is complete. After several back and forth e-mails of suggestions on her part and revisions on mine, Jessica, my editor, says it’s “in good shape.” She wanted me to tighten it a bit more, and I tried, I really did, but I was only able to pare it down by a sentence here and there. She doesn’t like the title either. She says it needs to be more active and let the reader know that this is a fantasy. I’ve thought about shortening it to The Remaking, or possibly Forging the Blade.

I also had Kris, a friend who teaches English and Writing at a community college, take a look at it. She critiqued the manuscript in a totally different way than Jessica. As an English teacher, she mostly looked at sentence structure and length and word usage. And because she’s only read the first three chapters she was able to give me a viewpoint of someone who’s just picked up the book. Her suggestions will be the subject of the next few blogs. The important thing is to get as many eyes on your writing as possible. Each pair will have different ideas and see different things.

I let the revised chapters sit for a few days before I did the final proof reading. It’s always a good idea to do this because it gives you a fresh perspective. New ideas come to mind and you catch glitches and typos that you would have missed before. A week or even a month break would have been better, but I wanted to get moving on the query letters.

Yesterday I sent query letters to six agents that are looking for YA fantasy. Most of them had rejected the manuscript two or three years ago, but they are top-notch agents and I wanted them to see the new query. I checked with few agents at the 2010 Willamette Writers Conference and Jessica, and they all said they had no problem with re-queries but the author needs to mention that this is a resubmission and the manuscript needs to be significantly different and hopefully better.

I pasted the first two chapters at the end of each query letter I sent. Looking back over my notes, I find that I should have just pasted in the first few pages. Oops.

In a few weeks I’ll send out 6 more.

So now the waiting game begins and Lady Luck is in control. If right person reads my query letter; or if she’s just sold a book and is searching for another; or if she’s feeling optimistic and ready to gamble on a newbie; or if a publisher has just asked her for a new YA fantasy; or even better, all of the above; then I will have myself an agent!