Tag Archives: Submissions

And the beat goes on…

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.

 

Ups and Downs…

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One of my new favorite songs to warm up to on my runs is “Tippin’ on the Tightrope” by Janelle Monae. There’s a section of the lyrics that seems particularly fitting as I work toward my writing goals:

“You can’t get too high/You can’t get too low/’Cause if you get too high/No, you’ll surely be low”

The last couple of months have been a period of quite a few highs and lows for me, to be sure. After accepting what felt like my 500th rejection notice, I was feeling pretty low and thinking about updating my resume to start looking for a “real” job. Down.

Then one of my freelancing roles suddenly expanded, bringing me a bit more steady work. Up.

I was turned down for acceptance to grad school–again. Definite Down. But, just this morning, I read in the local paper that, due to tough financial times, the university in question “admitted the smallest class to its Graduate School this decade”, accepting nearly 100 fewer students this year. Okay, so not a true Up, but it did make me feel better to think that it wasn’t just me who got the shaft from the Admissions Office–there were a whole lot of us out there.

However, feeling better about it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t accepted. Um, yeah. Down.

But then an agent whom I’d queried months ago (and who, I must confess, is the one agent with whom I’d most like to work) contacted me and requested a partial review of my revised manuscript. Way Up.

And then today, two rejection slips: one for a short story I’d submitted and the other for an article I’ve been shopping around for a few months. Back Down.

Up, Down, Up, Down.

Is this what life in a “real” job would be like, I wonder? There’s certainly a respectable amount of appeal in a job that would come with a steady paycheck and reduced mood swings, I think. So I wonder.

Sometime this next month, if the agent’s estimate is accurate, I expect to hear back from her. Will it be Up (a full manuscript read)? Or will it be Down (No, thanks, even less interested this time around)?

Also this month, I expect to receive word on my status in The Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series Competition. I’ve applied before: In 2008, I made it into the top 20 (big Up), but only the top 12 were accepted. (Need I say more?) I did submit for both the fiction and creative nonfiction categories this time, so hopefully that doubled my chances, but who knows? Up. Down.

Yep. Who knew making a go of this was going to require so much intestinal fortitude? It’s enough to make a lesser woman seasick.

Fortunately, I’m not a lesser woman. Hang on, I’ll be right back (it’s time for me to spin around in my chair a few more times.)