Where was I? Ah, yes. updates. I haven’t done much since the last post. I’ll cop to it: I could not muster any enthusiasm for queries the last couple of weeks. But today, I forced myself back to the task and found myself surprisingly energized. I’ll blame the Bloomington Writers’ Festival I attended last weekend for that–a great event, and very motivating.

So where are we today? According to my submission spreadsheet, I’m up to 8 total queries, 3 of them completed today. It’s such a time-consuming endeavor, these queries, and I’m not even talking about the wait to hear back from anyone. I would feel guilty complaining about that after listening to one literary agent speak at the festival this weekend about receiving 3,000 queries a month. I understand why it can take a very long time to hear back about a submission with that kind of work load.

No, the time-consuming part for me is, and always has been, that each agency is so different in what they require. Take 2 of the 3 I completed today (hopefully someone will). One was very old-school: snail-mail only, absolutely nothing by e-mail, and roughly 60 pages–query letter, synopsis, and 3-chapter sample–to print out and send. Just the printing took half an hour! And of course, then I opened my address book only to find I had used my last stamp yesterday. Grumble, grumble…Add in a trip to buy stamps.

The other agency could not have been more different: e-mail only, no attachments, don’t send us any paper or we’ll hunt you down and horse-whip you and make sure you’re never represented by anyone. (I added that last part, though it was clearly implied in the submissions FAQ.) Sigh. Why can’t they all be like that? Minus the horse-whipping, of course.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed trying to follow each agency’s specific directions, which is probably why I took a couple of weeks off. But then I started trying to think of the steps as a sort of quest, a test of my endurance and my determination. Maybe, just maybe, if I jump through all these hoops they lay out, this’ll be the one that bites. Not in a pejorative sense (though this process definitely does)–I mean like the big fish biting at the hook I’ve so painstakingly buried within those reams of paper.

Here, fishy, fishy, fishy…stay tuned.