I currently only have one active query out there and it's in Dream Agent's hands (or more accurately, his inbox). As I said before, I don't query far & wide. I research carefully and look at who's a good fit for what I write.
The rejection on the partial includes this: "Though I found your material to be unique and intriguing, unfortunately I've decided this project is not right for me. As a reader, I did not connect to your narrative enough to take on the project." Then he said he was sorry it wasn't a good fit and it was signed.
So that's a pretty good rejection. I know the story isn't for everyone and it's going to take a certain agent with a certain level of chutzpah to say "Yeah, I'd like to shop this around to publishers." More than WS would take, I know.
What else I take from the letter (and maybe I'm reading into it) is that it's the story he didn't dig, not the writing. Thing is, as an editor you can help fix up bad writing. You can't really change the story and if you don't like it, there's not much that can be done to remedy that.
But I was waiting to hear from this guy b/c I sent out this ms (land mail) on the same day I got the "yeah send me a full via e-mail" from Dream Agent. So I'm hoping that's a sign that I'll hear from DA sooner rather than later. He never responded to my nudge but I'll give him until March before I nudge him again.
Via Mari, this is the original:
The Jobs Meme for Writers
How many books have you written? Two complete
How many copies of your books are in print? Zero!
How many of your books did you write on a Mac? Zero
When did you buy your first Mac? Never
The Jobs Meme for Readers
How many books do you read a year? Hrm. If I can get to one a month, that's good. Sometimes more. So I'll say 15.
When was the last time you bought a new computer? We got a laptop in October, for NaNo
When do you expect you'll buy your next computer? No plans
When do you expect you'll buy your next cell phone? No plans
On a scale of 1-10 how important do you think it is that we support reading and literacy? Of course I think it's a 10. Increasing literacy would help with issues like poverty. Who doesn't think literacy is important, other than Steve Jobs?
So I printed out a copy of the new story (I'll call it "Cole" after the one character for now) for Hawk to read. Apparently he read it sometime last evening. His single comment on it was "Is this based on someone you know?"
Yes. I know so many rock stars and, as you know, I am a world-traveling music journalist.
He did the exact same thing w/ RFM. To this day he insists he is Seth. This means he is a 19 year old drifter who writes poetry and smokes weed.
See, I made the mistake of once writing a story that was based on something real that involved him: Time Bomb. It was a fun little piece that I actually got published. He loved reading about himself. Since then I've written two books and I don't know how many short stories and he keeps looking for himself in them.
I think he'd be better off to look for me in what I write. As I was working on my NaNo, I realized that I have some very definite theme that I write about. There is always a sibling relationship that somehow drives my MC. This is strange as my siblings (I'm an adoptee; they're biological children of my mother) want nothing to do with me and never have. Probably why I examine the theme so often. Another theme that has come up in each book is an unintended pregnancy. In WS, it's central and in RFM, it's incidental; in Nine it's a false alarm that works as a catalyst. That probably comes from my fears in my teens & early twenties and then issues beyond that within marriage.
Naturally the core of most everything I write is sex. I'm not sure what all it says about me but I know it says a lot. I'm sure psychiatrists, behaviorists, etc. would enjoy the analyzation. It was hard to keep it out of this short story. I had to fight it off (but there's a little something in there). When I told Hawk, "Be prepared. There's no sex in this." He said, "But you always have sex in it." I think he was disappointed. In fact, I'm sure he was disappointed.
When I was actively writing and publishing BDSM erotica, he was under the impression that I was 100% into everything I was writing about and putting myself in the female role (even in my ultraflash guy-guy story so I don't know how that worked). That's not to say I wasn't interested or that I didn't find it exciting; that's pretty much the point of the genre.But he couldn't draw the line between me and my characters.
I ran this latest reaction past a writer friend and she said, "I can see he'd say that. Because, of course, everything authors write about is always true." We went on to have this exchange:
Because that's just how we roll in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania -- teeming with potential rockstars and journalists who share a common love of engineering and marijuana.
I had a cool dream last August with a fairly realistic plot. I woke up before the dream was over but I thought, "I could make this into a story, I think." All writers have this plan approximately 27 times during their careers and it rarely works b/c dreams aren't like that.
So I wrote some when I could and it kind of fizzled out. I didn't know the ending and I didn't know, in terms of it being a short story, what I wanted to say with it. I had some symbols in mind, dependent on a real life setting. I had two characters, the narrator being one.
I went to open Nine yesterday, saw this and thought, "Work on this." So I did.I didn't know my end point, whether I had the right narrator, whether some backstory I put in was too tell-y and should be excised, etc. So I made a Google doc and shared w/ three writing buddies. Then today I managed to make time to finish it up. Jam gave me some good insight on it last night & made me think that in terms of an ending, I was looking beyond the natural end. So I took her advice and brought the endpoint closer and it seemed to work.
Since it's a first draft, it'll need more work (of course) and I'd like to get it under 5k but I think I'll be able to send this out before too long.
Oh and it needs a title. I would rather send it out to a dozen journals than have to come up with a title. I hate titles. I'm so bad at them and when I come up w/ one it's boring or bizarre. I could actually call it "Untitled" if I wanted to b/c that's kind of a part of the story. Hrm. That might work. I'll think about it.
