Well, I finally did it. I sent a follow up or nudge on Wednesday morning to the agent with the full manuscript. As I've detailed here, it's been over a year since I first queried her and now it's been seven months plus since she's had the full manuscript. I may not like the answer I receive (if I receive one), but I'd like to know for sure what's what. I say if I receive one, since my last nudge, in February went unanswered. It's not like this agent isn't out there socially, as she tweets about most of her queries. I have never seen mine, which only means I didn't get rejected out of hand. But no matter how you slice it, seven months is a long time to wait.
The thing I like least about the writing process is the business-side of the equation, which right now is the query and wait game. You wouldn't think it would take that long to send a standard letter to a new agent, but I think each one takes about half an hour. Now true, some of that is spent double and triple checking to make sure you've got the right information in the letter/email and have attached the right amount of the manuscript, which is anywhere from nothing to 50 pages. (One agent wanted the entire manuscript, but thankfully as an attachment not embedded.)
And there seem to be so many little things in the process that seem to work against you. You might work out the perfect query letter in Word, but when you paste it into Outlook, there are several lines between the paragraphs, that even editing in Outlook never seems to fix. This is not meant to be an advice blog, but it never hurts to send your query letter email to yourself to see what the agents will be receiving.
So I have to painstakingly rewrite the letter into an email. One trick I've learned is to blind copy myself on the query and then move it back to the draft folder once I receive it. Again, I'm not writing to give advice, but that helps keep me from constantly rewriting the same query.
Another thing that makes me mad, is that for some reason there are passages in A Killer Blog that when I paste them into Outlook change font colors to blue. I've tried taking the sample from different versions of the book and retyping that passage in the email, but every time when the email gets sent those passages are blue. It doesn't help that the first time is the paragraph where J.D. meets Abigail Dietrich, who is working in an underground club as a waitress and J.D. notices how much cleavage she's showing. Sort of over emphasizes the blueness of the passage.
But I digress.
As far as actually writing, I didn't really work on the rewrites like I had hoped. Instead, I did some work on the comic book, in this case, doing some summaries of the stories already written. That exercise and working on the queries took up most of the time for writing this past week.
I did actually write a review this week, not for the Shakespeare film we watched this Friday, but for the new Avengers film we saw on Saturday. I'll be posting it in a week or two. It's not as if my reviews carry any weight, so there's no real hurry. I did publish one review this week for Stand-In (1937) from my backlog of reviews.
In the next week, I am hoping to get back to the rewrites. It's usually a case of time rather than desire, but I'm always hopeful.
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