Why I Both Love and Hate the Month of October

There are the usual reasons why I both love and hate the month of October. I love Halloween, but hate trying to fit into any of the cute Halloween costumes for fear of looking like a stuffed sausage. Being in the hot-as-Hades South, I love the change in weather as it begins to actually feel like fall but hate that I always seem to get sick when that happens (completely feel that coming on, by the way).

But there's more now that I have delved into the World Wide Writing Web with a finished manuscript. I have only been in the WWWW since the summer, but I am finding that October is a very exciting literary month for the unpublished such as myself. Here are a few reasons why:

1. GUTGAA is still going on and is now in the final contest--the Small Press Pitch Contest. Editors from Sapphire Star, Bell Bridge Books, Entangled Publishing, and many more will be browsing the finalists' entries and hopefully asking for more. I've made it into the first round with a completely revised query and judging starts tomorrow! I will probably be posting about everything I learned after all is said and done next week.

2. Over at New Adult Alley, they are going to be doing their Editor in the Alley Pitch Contest starting October 3rd. Since I believe my MS is most definitely NA, I am VERY excited about this. The editor is from Entangled Publishing, so I'm not sure my MS fits with them but it is still bound to be a great learning experience even if nothing more comes of it. Needless to say, I am entering and hope to get in.

3. The clever minds over at Writer Therapy are holding a first page contest. Submissions are now closed (Yes, I entered) and finalists are going to be announced this week. I like my first page (especially since I submitted the first page to chapter one and not the prologue--another lesson learned with GUTGAA I will get to next week). Now I just hope they like my first page.

And last but not least....

4. Harper Voyager is officially--as of this moment while I am typing this and not watching the Writer Therapy webisodes (gah, they make me want a critique group)--accepted unsolicited manuscripts for their digital press series thingy that they do. They'll be accepting submissions from October 1st (NOW!) to October 14th. Do I plan to submit? A big hell yes to that! I have a finished manuscript that I am currently repolishing and since it is digital press, their word count allowance seems to be a bit higher. Mine is still much higher than that, but I'm working on it and crossing my fingers that they won't turn it down based on that.

So how could any of this possibly be bad? I thought you might ask (or the announcer guy in my head might). Well, none of them are really. Just anxiety inducing. Let's go through the list one by one.

1. Querying is a pain. All writers know this. Querying an epic fantasy is a HUGE pain since you need to do it in around 250 words. I gave up on counting my words and just tried to keep the new query crisp and concise while leaving the reader scratching their head as little as possible. I'm still not sure I accomplished this though and never feel like my query does my MS justice. One of my biggest issues with it? I had to pick one character to tell the story from in the query when their are really five with equally important stories. Pretty sure working on this query has given me an ulcer.

2. See number one. Also, I will add that since I am submitting to editors, I had to prep a synopsis. If you are a writer, you understand. Synopses come in a close second to queries on the writerly pain in the ass scale. Oh, and I just finished said synopsis. (Special thanks to Lindsey for critiquing it for me!) Fairly certain my query-ulcer now has a twin in the form of synopsis-ulcer.

3. This one isn't really all that stressful, to be honest. I'm pretty satisfied with my first page and have gotten some pretty good feedback on it so far in GUTGAA. Crossing my fingers to get in!

4. Did you see the part where I said I am still re-polishing my manuscript? I have a copy editor that I refer to as the word-cutter extraordinaire when speaking about her (Stephanie, you rock) but unfortunately volunteer copy editors have their own lives to contend with. She's given me some great insight in her feedback so far and I am trying to apply it to the rest of the MS to cut the words down some. But there's still no way I'm going to finish in the next day or so seeing as how I am only on chapter fourteen of twenty nine. I'm working off a hard copy (I edit better that way), so I still have to apply these fresh edits to the digital MS. Makes me glad I am off work tomorrow.

In summary: Hey, is that an ulcer party in my stomach or is it just the month of October?

GUTGAA Meet and Greet!

I am very excited to be participating in the 2012 Gearing Up To Get An Agent blogfest and pitch contest! Our first task is to get to know some fellow participants, which might be the most exciting part for me. I am only now foraying into the writerly community, and I completely geek out at the connections I've made with other writers. So without further blabbery, I will get on with the questions Deana posted for us!

Word Count: The New Bane of My Writerly Existence!

A few weeks ago the bane of my writerly existence was synopses, shortly followed by query letters. Now? Well, now it is just word count. You would think that words of any sort--counted or not--would be a writer's best friend. Right? Wrong. At least, not when you are writing something that falls into the Young Adult category and have a word count that is over 70k.

Like, way over 70k. Twice that to be precise.

Writerly Query Experiment

Instead of writing anymore on book three (even though progress is lacking), I have decided to take some time to work on my query letter since I had a stroke of inspiration for it. And since it has been a whole five minutes since I blogged, I thought I would leave it to my wonderful readership to help me decide which to use. Or if I should scrap the entire thing and start fresh. All (polite!) comments are welcome. Except for spam about male enhancements. Or spam in general.

On to the query letters!

The first also happens to be the one that I so boldly (and possibly stupidly) sent out almost two weeks ago to twenty four literary agents. I might owe them apology letters. You guys tell me. I sat down and wrote this, hoping to capture some of my writerly essence in the voice, and then didn't bother to revise much at all.

Writerly Confidence

An odd title for a blog about receiving my first rejection letter, but there it is. Yup--I got my first rejection in today! Let me just start off by saying that I really hate the term "rejection letter" because it has such an obvious negative connotation. Rejections are personal. They are usually synonymous with heartbreak and can lead to some pretty overwhelming feelings of insecurity.

Rejection letters from literary agents are not necessarily personal. They might write you personally, but that's not what I mean. It doesn't mean that they think you are devoid of talent or that they think you are the lamest writer in the world with no hopes of selling your book whatsoever. It just means that they don't think they can sell your book. Maybe it didn't speak to them. Maybe they already have three dozen other YA fantasy novels they are trying to work. Whatever their reasons for rejecting your query, the bottom line is that they didn't think it would be a good fit. And you really have to ask yourself the question: Would I want someone who doesn't really believe in my novel as much as I do trying to sell it? The answer should be a firm "no" possibly with a few expletives for emphasis.

Writerly...Insanity??

Call it insanity, if you will. I call it daring. Okay, maybe daring isn't the right word for what I just did, but I'm not convinced insane is either. Not yet.

Now, friendly readers, you might be asking yourself the obvious question: What the hell did you do already?? I'm not trying to build up dramatic suspense here. It's just a little hard to say out loud (which I tend to do as I type--again with the question of insanity.). So what did I do?

...I queried.