Friday, April 20, 2012

Continuing Progess to Report

Oh my! It's been a while since I have posted here, but fear not! I have been very busy in working on and for the book. I completed a third draft and feel pretty comfortable that all it needs now is some editing. On to the query letter! That's where you try and sell the idea to an agent in a one page format! This has been a challenge but with some help from some friends I think it's beginning to shape up.

This whole process of book writing and then attempting to get it to the publishing stage is much more persistence than anything else. Some days I can't even face looking at this stuff and other days I wake up full of ideas and ready to roll! There was a day a week or so ago when I was beginning to hate the Tale! Now that I have gotten past the hump of trying to write the query letter, things have settled down again. I just have been making myself deal with each challenge as it comes up.

Speaking of which, I find I am enjoying trying to pick a likely agent/agency to query. I have gone through the entire 2012 Guide to Literary Agents and marked possible agencies. Now I have started a spread sheet to ferret out within the possible agency, who might be the agent to query and what is the criteria for querying that agent.  It's sort of fun going on the agency's web site and seeing what they offer and which authors they represent. Most of the web sites give a little bio on the agent so I make sure to read those to see if anyone happened to go to Rollins College or Indiana University or had any other possible tie in with the book. One agent was into college level rowing ... I wondered if that might be something that she would click with the story even though it's only a small mention in the Tale. Of course just querying an agent doesn't mean they will be interested in your story ...

Stayed tuned all to see how many agents I pick to send off my terrific query letter!

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Second Draft

I completed the second draft  of the Peacocks Tale last night. I am now in the waiting mode so that I can get some distance from the manuscript before I take a last look at it. I really want to get the process of querying agents on the road, but I think that the manuscript needs to be tip top before I do that. I listened to feedback from first draft readers and changed parts of the story - not a great amount, but enough to sort of make it clearer what my intent for the characters were. It was good to do that second draft, as it was important to clean up the mistakes in the manuscript plus add to the manuscript to make (hopefully) a better story. I'll tell you what I think of the completed story later this week!