Done!!!

Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to send out queries when you constantly lose your internet? Well, I officially know. And let me tell you, it's so frustrating that I'm surprised I have any hair left. Last night, I would manage to send out one or two queries, then I'd lose my signal. Half an hour later, it would come back and I'd get another query sent, then lose it again. I finally gave up and decided to go to sleep early, so I could work on them in the middle of the night. I figured I'd have a better chance with it then since the people who I'm pirating from would probably be asleep. Yeah, I was wrong.

Been working on queries for about 2 hours and I finally got the last 5 of them done. Oh, and right now? I'm writing this blog with NO internet signal. I opened the page and then lost my signal. Not sure when it will be back so I have no idea when I'll actually get this posted.

Oh well. Onto my blog. I am now officially DONE sending queries!!! Yay!!!!!! So now I get to sit here and wait for the rejections to start rolling in. I'm not deluding myself into thinking I'll get a lot of requests for more, or that I'll actually sign with an agency on this first go-around. I'm being realistic here and preparing myself for the rejections. But by getting them all done, now I can start writing my next book and know that I've done everything I can for Life After Death.

I sent out 36 queries. Maybe it's smarter to only send a couple at a time. I know I've read that somewhere. But here's my thoughts on that: If I sent out 10 queries and waited till I heard from them before sending more, chances are I'd be so discouraged by the rejections that I'd give up. No, I wanted to get them all sent before the rejections started; while I'm still keyed up enough to KNOW my book is good and should be published.

So here's my news. Thursday night I sent out 20 queries. I started with 11 agents who only wanted a simple query, then I worked on the synopsis, polished up the first few chapters, and sent out 9 more to agents who wanted those things.

And I woke up Friday morning with 2 emails. One was a rejection, which I expected. But one of them was a request for the first 100 pages, saying he was intrigued by my query. It was an assistant to an agent, of course, and I realize that chances are I'll still get a rejection from those first 8 chapters that I sent him. But I'm ok with it. It made me happy to see a request. I have confidence in the book. What I don't have confidence in is the query itself. I always worry it's not enough to catch somebody's attention and get them to want more. Obviously it worked for one person, though, right?

So I decided I'm going to keep track of stats, kind of like agents do on their blogs. Here's my stats so far:

Queries sent: 36
Rejections received: 2
Requests for partials: 1

I'll keep updating this each time I post. Now I think I should get some more sleep because I have work to do this weekend on my next book.