One quest is complete. A new one begins!
So, I've been sitting on this for a little while, at least until it was official, and today, it finally is. I would announce it tomorrow, but tomorrow is the start of Crazy Week at work. I actually love Crazy Week because there's lots to do on a deadline and I'm good at it and it makes the week fly by. However, there's no downtime for updating LJ.
Anyway. Ahem. *.... drumroll....*
I am proud to announce that I am now officially represented by Jennifer Mishler of Literary Counsel. And here's my page. :-)
Since I've been planning on using this .gif for a year for the occasion:
A lot of people tell their "how I got my agent" story at this point. Mine is pretty unglamorous. I queried a lot. Forty-nine initial rejections, thirty-one non-replies, and twelve requests (full or partial) that were subsequently turned down, bring the the total rejections to ninety-two.
That's about a 15% positive response rate, which is great! But I think it's also important to note that I didn't get a single request for pages until I spiced up my query letter even more than I thought it already was. If I recall correctly, that was roughly three months after I first started querying and I'd sent out twenty or so?
Anyway, I got lots of varying reasons to be turned down. "Just couldn't connect with the characters", they thought it was "too close to [something already out there]", they thought the world-building was confusing, etc, etc. To help me not get snarly, I kept in mind of all the books I like but don't love (even when other people do) and books I love that other people don't.*
(And sometimes I failed at not being snarly, but hey, I'm only human, and it can be hard to keep your chin up. We all need to vent. I kept the snarlvents to myself AND my very close, intimate writing circle of awesomely super nerd-girl friends. And carried on. 20,000 grown-up points for me!!)
Also, the person who said the worldbuilding needed more tightening wasn't wrong, though I do think I might have realized that even before he/she said as much. Over the winter I went on a brief querying hiatus and did another editing pass to make even more changes to the early parts of the book and then ramped 'er up again. The quest, that is.
In this batch, I got a few more bites. Including Jennifer, who read the manuscript in a few days, asked if we could have a phone call, and the rest you can guess from there! I was in the middle of the Day Job when I got that email, and after reading it forty-six times in a row, I told my boss I needed to take a few laps around the atrium, and if she found my head on the ceiling, would she kindly pull it back down for me?
I'm really excited to be working with Jennifer. One of the most important things I was looking for in an agent was someone who was comfortable with a potentially broad range of genres and target age groups, because I can never predict what I'll want to write down the road, and Jennifer and Literary Counsel were perfectly willing to do just that!
So. Here we go. More editing. More submitting. More rejection. Eventually... the right match.
Bring it on!!
*When I was in college we were on "block" tuition, which meant I could take 16 credit hours for the same price as 12 credit hours. So, just because I could, I took a Children's Lit course. For fun. It was me and a room full of education majors. At one point there was a Harry Potter quiz which I complained loudly about not having studied for all morning. Anyway, one of the books on the curriculum was A Wrinkle in Time which thrilled me beyond belief because it's one of my favorite books of forever and I'd already read it at least seven times since my childhood and I was excited for (and envious of) my classmates for getting to experience the amazing journey I remembered for the very first time. On the first day of A Wrinkle in Time discussion, I was crushed and honestly a bit shocked to discover that my enthusiasm was not only a minority, it was a VAST minority. There were at least thirty people in that class and only about five of us said we liked the book at all, let alone loved-with-all-our-heart-and-soul. It was just to "out there", too "hard to relate to", they said, and that was one of my first lessons into the fact that when people say they don't like or get sci fi, they weren't just saying that because they'd never never tried it. They might not actually like or get it. It was a sad and illuminating day for me.
Anyway. Ahem. *.... drumroll....*
I am proud to announce that I am now officially represented by Jennifer Mishler of Literary Counsel. And here's my page. :-)
Since I've been planning on using this .gif for a year for the occasion:
A lot of people tell their "how I got my agent" story at this point. Mine is pretty unglamorous. I queried a lot. Forty-nine initial rejections, thirty-one non-replies, and twelve requests (full or partial) that were subsequently turned down, bring the the total rejections to ninety-two.
That's about a 15% positive response rate, which is great! But I think it's also important to note that I didn't get a single request for pages until I spiced up my query letter even more than I thought it already was. If I recall correctly, that was roughly three months after I first started querying and I'd sent out twenty or so?
Anyway, I got lots of varying reasons to be turned down. "Just couldn't connect with the characters", they thought it was "too close to [something already out there]", they thought the world-building was confusing, etc, etc. To help me not get snarly, I kept in mind of all the books I like but don't love (even when other people do) and books I love that other people don't.*
(And sometimes I failed at not being snarly, but hey, I'm only human, and it can be hard to keep your chin up. We all need to vent. I kept the snarlvents to myself AND my very close, intimate writing circle of awesomely super nerd-girl friends. And carried on. 20,000 grown-up points for me!!)
Also, the person who said the worldbuilding needed more tightening wasn't wrong, though I do think I might have realized that even before he/she said as much. Over the winter I went on a brief querying hiatus and did another editing pass to make even more changes to the early parts of the book and then ramped 'er up again. The quest, that is.
In this batch, I got a few more bites. Including Jennifer, who read the manuscript in a few days, asked if we could have a phone call, and the rest you can guess from there! I was in the middle of the Day Job when I got that email, and after reading it forty-six times in a row, I told my boss I needed to take a few laps around the atrium, and if she found my head on the ceiling, would she kindly pull it back down for me?
I'm really excited to be working with Jennifer. One of the most important things I was looking for in an agent was someone who was comfortable with a potentially broad range of genres and target age groups, because I can never predict what I'll want to write down the road, and Jennifer and Literary Counsel were perfectly willing to do just that!
So. Here we go. More editing. More submitting. More rejection. Eventually... the right match.
Bring it on!!
*When I was in college we were on "block" tuition, which meant I could take 16 credit hours for the same price as 12 credit hours. So, just because I could, I took a Children's Lit course. For fun. It was me and a room full of education majors. At one point there was a Harry Potter quiz which I complained loudly about not having studied for all morning. Anyway, one of the books on the curriculum was A Wrinkle in Time which thrilled me beyond belief because it's one of my favorite books of forever and I'd already read it at least seven times since my childhood and I was excited for (and envious of) my classmates for getting to experience the amazing journey I remembered for the very first time. On the first day of A Wrinkle in Time discussion, I was crushed and honestly a bit shocked to discover that my enthusiasm was not only a minority, it was a VAST minority. There were at least thirty people in that class and only about five of us said we liked the book at all, let alone loved-with-all-our-heart-and-soul. It was just to "out there", too "hard to relate to", they said, and that was one of my first lessons into the fact that when people say they don't like or get sci fi, they weren't just saying that because they'd never never tried it. They might not actually like or get it. It was a sad and illuminating day for me.