Time flies by fast. I can’t believe it’s been two and a half weeks since I last posted on here, but it has. To be honest, not much has happened. We are preparing to query again soon which has been somewhat stressful. We’ve received rejections or closed out our last batch which is sad and a relief at the same time. It’s sad that we didn’t get any hits off our query letter, but it in a way it is a relief because it means we can move on to the next step.
As of right now we’ve completely updated and improved our query letter in hopes that it will attract an agent’s attention and interest. There were a few things past agents brought up, and I think we addressed them in the new query. Such as one agent said there is no internal conflict between the characters, it’s all external. Our characters do in fact have internal conflict, but we didn’t realize we didn’t show this enough in our query letter. Or that an agent would reject our story because of this. Live and learn as they say. We’ve been feeling pretty good about the new query, but we took a hard blow this week.
We entered the Miss Snark’s Baker Dozen contest two weeks ago, and Monday she announced on her blog that she picked the 25 winners by email. We did not receive an email. Which means that agents don’t even get a chance to read our first 250 words. I figured that we might not have any agents pick our entry, but I’m surprised that our’s wasn’t good enough to even make it as one of the 25 picked. We realize it was out of 130 entries, so there was a lot of competition, but it still hurts. Even though we were told we have a strong first ten pages from the course we took (see Strong!?!), it has become apparent we do not have a strong first 250 words.
Because of this major disappointment and some feedback we received from others on the Query Tracker Forum, we decided that we should really reevaluate our first five pages and more importantly the first 250 words. We’re currently working on this, but as you can guess, it’s not easy. We’ve been told our manuscript should start sooner (about page 4), yet there is a scene in our book that we feel can’t be in the story too soon. Maybe we just need to say screw it, or cut/change that scene. In the end we I’m sure we will figure it out.
We’re planning to query at the beginning of next month so our revised first five pages will be posted under Current Projects by then. Always remember we welcome feedback, and if you don’t feel comfortable posting under comments check out at Where To Find Us. Our email address is on there and you can send us a message that way. Thanks for reading and until next time…