Agents and More Agents

This week I got serious about contacting some more agents, and went through old Publishers Weekly mags, looked the AAR website, and perused some web sites, books, what have you. Looked just about everywhere but my navel. Found about 12. Divided them into possibilities for World of Mirrors and Promiscuous Mode. Wrote query letters to all the World of Mirrors agents. Today I will try to get queries out to the Promiscuous Mode people. Writing a personal letter to each. Googled everyone. Updated my "contacts" spread sheet with all. It can take an hour to get the query ready for each agent. Sigh. That's valuable writing time. My character could be dogding Molotov cocktails in Festival Madness.

One agent I queried by email shot back a "not for me" so fast I didn't have time to blink. At least it wasn't a canned response. At this point, I think something is definitely the matter with the query, but it's been vetted by an editor and my writing group and follows the advice of all the books and articles. I'm wondering if I should forget about marketing it as suspense and try the mainstream market. Well, that will be next, after 85 rejections. Arbitrary number. Should go for 115. What the hell?

So it's off to the post office. Swing by the cows with camera, and hope the new calf is visible. The natural world brings the joy into my daily life that the (so far) fultility of trying to get these novels a home takes away.

Sucking it up is not something one wants to do on a daily basis.

I found a really cool blog that combines gardening and food. I'll post a link soon.

I ain't down yet, as the Unsinkable Molly Brown (also from Colorado) said.

Grapeshot