The Intermittent Hodgepodge #2: Recalibrating
Sometimes the quest to become published feels like an unending process of reinventing myself. Like a piece of clay in the hands of a total amateur. I’m not completely sure what the final sculpture is necessarily supposed to look like, yet I keep kneading.
I’ve paused sending out literary agent queries for the last couple weeks; however, here are the current stats:
Total queries sent out: 67
Total full manuscript requests: 1
Total query rejections: 27
Total queries pending response: 40
Honestly, I thought I had more rejections than this. That’s somewhat encouraging.
However, I’ve taken a break for the last couple weeks to work on developing the “non-writing” portion of building a writing career from scratch. I’ve done some networking with agents, looked into some classes through Writer’s Digest, developing this blog (and my Medium page), and trying to build readership by serializing Waypoint here.
On another encouraging note, the prologue for Waypoint got some great feedback. I even heard from an acquaintance I haven’t seen since High School, which was awesome. They said:
Hey man! I read your prologue and really liked it. I would love to know when you have more of it out! Congrats on your writing and fantastic work!
Talk about warm and fuzzies. I also sold a copy of Artifacts and A Drop in the Bucket as a result of this publication. Truly, this is the sort of stuff that keeps me going and keeps the fire burning.
I’ve also taken time to re-work my author query, my author biography, and I plan to redo parts of my first three chapters to make them a bit more palatable to agents. I suspect some of the language and descriptors may be turning agents off. This really gets to pacing - I realize you don’t want to go too extreme early on in the novel. I also plan on doing some freelance writing work to get some extra cash on the side and build out my writing resume a bit more.
I also plan to publish the first chapter of Waypoint in the coming days to memorialize the launch of Artemis 1. Y’all should check out both!
Back to kneading for now. Perhaps one day I’ll look back to figure out when I became the sculpture I was shooting for. Then I’ll know this non-writing work will have paid off.
-Chris
