Reassessment of Readiness

I’ve been avoiding this post. It’s the reassessment post. I’m two weeks out on my queries now, and as of yet, no positive responses. The rejections have been nice, reminding me that they pick up a slim number of writers to begin with and wishing me luck. But, no one’s biting.

So, now I have to ask myself a couple of questions. Was it a mediocre query letter that got me shot down? That’s the easier fix. I can redo the query letter in half an hour, well, maybe longer. It took me forever to write the first one. Maybe my comparisons were bad. Maybe the first paragraph needs work. I’m sure I need to sell myself in there a little bit. All right, I’ll rework the query. But I have more questions.

Was is a crappy synopsis? I really should look at that again to see if I can tweak it anymore. There might be a few things I can leave out, or reword. It is not that easy to condense 70,000 words into 150. It’ll be worse to do with a longer novel.

Is my novel not long enough? I know the low end of urban fantasy is supposed to be 80,000, but it can’t hurt for the freshman performance to be a little shorter. Might make it more likely for people to read. Or something.

This is the big question: Was the novel not ready to be queried? Do I have more work to do on it? This is different than asking if I’m happy with it. I’ll always find something I’m not happy with. Something I want to change, but there’s a difference between me not being happy with it and it being the best damn thing I can put out there. You know what, maybe I was too content with it being done and the run through I gave it. Sure, there was plenty of editing, but did I find the characters sarcastic little voice? Probably not.

I think I just answered my own question. So, I’m going to let it sit until the middle of next month when most of the agents (all but two) said they would get back to me or pass and then rip out the novel’s heart and figure out just who Megan Abberline is. Then, rewrite my query, my synopsis and requery.

If I get a response before then that’s positive, all the better. Then I’ll know I’m just being paranoid. I do have those tendencies. In the meantime, I might as well finish and try to sell some short stories. It’d be nice to get my name out there.