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!

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.