Who Do You Want To Be?

This goes a long way toward explaining why I have such a difficult time with this whole publishing bidness sometimes. These are not the queries I would have chosen.

Many years ago, when I was first getting into this nut house, I was but a naive young student of creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Actually, I was a computer science student about to change my major. The English department held a poetry contest, free to anyone to enter, so I submitted my three best poems because, at the time, I was a serious poet, not a fiction writer.

A guy named Iggy who lived down the hall from me decided it would be fun to enter, too. Iggy was an original skater dood. He wore pajamas everywhere - to class, to dinner, to the bars on the square, even to bed. Iggy's intention was not to win - it was to satirize the pretentiousness of academic poetry, which he hated. He did so by writing a short poem about a black woman drinking at a water fountain (Ole Miss, with it's history of racism, was the perfect venue for this subject), which was actually blatantly symbolic of a woman giving head.

None of my three entirely forgettable poems even received an honorable mention, but Iggy's suck my dick poem won third place.

I should have known then how difficult this career path was going to be.

Sometimes Silence Ain't So Golden

After I finished writing The Thieves' Guild, around about the year 2000, I began looking for an agent. I sent out about 20 query letters and ultimately I received some kind of response to most of them. There may have been one or two that were ignored.

Last June, I began looking for an agent again. I ultimately sent out 40 query letters over the next five months. I received a few positive responses. But here's my gripe. Of those 40 query letters, one in four has never received a response at all. Silence.

It gets worse.

Fifteen days ago, I began sending out 42 email queries for my new screenplay. Of those, I have received just one response, and that one was within an hour of my hitting the Send button. He said, all I'm really looking for right now are fast balls over home plate - easy sales. The others have not responded at all. Silence.

Just one of the many joys of being a writer - the golden silence provided by impossibly high walls.

Update: Edited and redacted. Still no response on the screenplay queries, and one response on a previously pending novel query. Hurray for them, it only took six months to send me a form letter.

Also, I should note that short story markets sometimes have even longer waits, though not as many just never respond at all. I have several stories that have been out close to a year, and one that has been under consideration for more than two years. I don't even count that one anymore, but they still haven't responded.

And then there was the time, back in 2002-2004, when a major publishing house kept a novel of mine for 745 days before I finally got fed up and pulled it from consideration. Funny thing is, in addition to ignoring my query emails, letters, and phone calls, they also never responded to my withdrawal letter, so technically, the novel is still under consideration. That's six years and one month since I first sent it to them. So what am I complaining about, right? It could be worse.

Speaking of, last year I extracted a novella (Ananke) from that novel and got it published at Theaker's Quarterly.

Another Brick in the Wall

I've just started looking for professional representation for my new novel, Some Day. The story began as an outline for a novel about five years ago, which I turned into a screenplay two years ago, which I then novelized in April, May and June of this year. Funny way to go about it.

So I'm looking for an agent when I come across this bit on a website for a New York agency:

... our advice to writers seeking representation is to search out writing groups or writing teachers that can give support to your work and can provide recommendations to agents when they feel your work is ready for submission to a professional publishing person.

First it was publishers who stopped reading unsolicited manuscripts. Get an agent, they all said. Now the agents are starting to not read unsolicited manuscripts. Not all of them. But things seem to be trending that direction. You have to sell a novel and have it sell well to get an agent, but to sell a novel that will sell well, you have to have an agent present it to a publisher capable of promoting it well enough that it sells enough copies so you can get an agent who will read your work and sell it to publishers capable of promoting it well enough that it sells enough copies so you can get an agent who will read your work and...!

Yes, the publishing world has finally evolved into Escher's "Relativity."