Suspense, Day 4
Mar. 2nd, 2006 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousOn Sunday night, I finally did email the Shiny Young Agent to ask if she'd had a chance to look at the full ms. It's been ::counts on fingers:: five months now since she told me she'd received it, and six months since she requested it, so I gather it's not beyond the pale for me to ask.
No answer yet. Maybe I got stuck in her spam filters. Maybe she's awash in work and hasn't had a chance to read my email. Maybe she got the message on Monday, hadn't had a chance to read the ms, and is reading it Right Now, in the hope of giving me a final answer Very Soon. There are hundreds of perfectly good reasons that might explain why she hasn't responded. And it's only been four days. I suspect that, if she had already read far enough to make up her mind and had concluded the Big Book wasn't her cup of tea, she'd have sent a rejection by now. Who would pass up the chance to shrink the office ms pile by 986 pages, when one little form letter could make all 986 of them go away?
My tutoring hours are going fine. I slip into Teacher Mind, and the suspense fades for as long as I have a student in front of me. Priestessing the New Moon circle last night went well, too. But at all other hours of the day, the suspense weighs on me. It must be very difficult to be an agent, to know that one has this kind of effect on other people. I never liked what the Power of the Grade did to my students at the university, and this feels bigger than the Power of the Grade did.
Dan, as usual, displays impressive amounts of good will, and attempts patience, which I press.
I wrote to the end of Ateket's incarceration, forced him to recognize the Terrible Price that had been paid for his release, and sent him home to puzzle over whether the shapeshifters who came to him while he was in solitary confinement were hallucinations. That ought to keep him busy for a while. My three big protagonists want back into my brain, but I have to turn them away while I work on the short book. I miss them all terribly.
There is some risk that I may whine. Please allow me to apologize in advance, in case whining occurs.
No answer yet. Maybe I got stuck in her spam filters. Maybe she's awash in work and hasn't had a chance to read my email. Maybe she got the message on Monday, hadn't had a chance to read the ms, and is reading it Right Now, in the hope of giving me a final answer Very Soon. There are hundreds of perfectly good reasons that might explain why she hasn't responded. And it's only been four days. I suspect that, if she had already read far enough to make up her mind and had concluded the Big Book wasn't her cup of tea, she'd have sent a rejection by now. Who would pass up the chance to shrink the office ms pile by 986 pages, when one little form letter could make all 986 of them go away?
My tutoring hours are going fine. I slip into Teacher Mind, and the suspense fades for as long as I have a student in front of me. Priestessing the New Moon circle last night went well, too. But at all other hours of the day, the suspense weighs on me. It must be very difficult to be an agent, to know that one has this kind of effect on other people. I never liked what the Power of the Grade did to my students at the university, and this feels bigger than the Power of the Grade did.
Dan, as usual, displays impressive amounts of good will, and attempts patience, which I press.
I wrote to the end of Ateket's incarceration, forced him to recognize the Terrible Price that had been paid for his release, and sent him home to puzzle over whether the shapeshifters who came to him while he was in solitary confinement were hallucinations. That ought to keep him busy for a while. My three big protagonists want back into my brain, but I have to turn them away while I work on the short book. I miss them all terribly.
There is some risk that I may whine. Please allow me to apologize in advance, in case whining occurs.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-02 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-03 04:56 pm (UTC)Since you've given advice on several occasions to keep novels, at least first novels from unpublished authors, within 125k or so, why did you ignore your own advice and write one nearly three times as long? Can it be broken up into a series?
Anything new about placing the "Atlantis" story? Have a nice New Jersey weekend anyway. I hope you receive some good news, both for you and for the rest of us.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-03 06:22 pm (UTC)I'm focused on this agent because she's the only one who has requested my ms. Now that it's under consideration with her, it would be very bad form for me to continue shipping it around to other agents. You can query everyone in the world at once, and some people will even allow simultaneous submissions of full mss if you tell them outright, but the default assumption in the industry is that, if you've sent the full ms, the person you've sent it to has exclusive consideration of it unless and until one of you says otherwise in writing.
If I don't have a straight answer from her by the beginning of May, I'll have to tell her that she won't have exclusivity as of the start of Writer's Weekend in June, so I'll be free to pitch it to other agents there. A pitch at a conference has more punch than a query letter does, so that's the moment when I'll be broadening my search, assuming the search is still ongoing at that point.
I gather that it is difficult to find an agent--some say that it's harder to get an agent through the agent's slush pile than it is to get an offer of publication through a publisher's slush pile. (I don't have a direct basis for knowledge on that claim, though.) Exactly how difficult depends on what your project is and how well you've executed it, what the market's doing, and the personal idiosyncrasies of the person/people you're querying/submitting to. For an explanation from a credible source of why she thinks odds have nothing to do with it, read Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blogosphere classic, Slushkiller (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html).
She's an editor, not an agent, but I suspect her description of how professionals think about the slush pile carries over.
Even though I'm going to sound like a broken record now, and expect to more and more as June approaches, I highly recommend the Writer's Weekend (www.writersweekend.com) conference as a way to educate yourself in the workings of the industry. Most of what I know, I either learned at that conference in 2004 and 2005, or learned by following up on my own on things I first got a glimmer of while at the conference.
Ah, the word count problem. Well, it was like this: I wrote the first draft of the book before I had educated myself about the industry, so it wasn't until I arrived at Writer's Weekend in 2004 that I first discovered the length of my project was an issue. At that point, I'd already invested an enormous amount of time and energy into it, and had produced a very strong first draft of a book that was obviously going to turn into something very good, if I really put my heart into the revisions. The people I talked to (and both of the agents I pitched to) were very encouraging about the story I had to offer, to such an extent that it seemed to make more sense to cut the book in half and revise for brevity than to abandon the project altogether. One agent said, "Get it down to 200K, and I'll want to see it." Alas, I think Vol 1 can't be compressed further than to 250K without the story falling apart. I had to find that out the hard way. Hence my push this year to produce a short book.
No new word on the Atlantis story. Two months would be quick turnaround for a magazine, so I'll be surprised if I hear before the start of May. Thanks for your good wishes!