Free book!!!

Sandra Alonzo is giving away a copy of her new book Riding Invisible.

There are many ways to enter.

Go check out Linda Benson's blog for more information.

New stuff....yummy

I am currently writing this on my little, tiny netbook . It makes me happy. Income tax came in and in a matter of hours I spent about $3000. lol That's a lot of money to spend in such a short time. But I got my drawing table that I've been wanting, and I found a great deal on computers at Best Buy. I wanted a netbook, and the cd-rom has been out in my laptop since last June, and the kids' desktop computer has been dead for awhile.

Best Buy had a desktop with a 20 inch flat panel monitor, a laptop, a netbook and a router for $1,299. It was supposed to be an online only deal but I have no patience so we went to the store and convinced them to put it all together for us there for the same price. It took FOREVER (2 hours at Best Buy is way too long) but we got it all home last night and spent all day today getting everything set up.

It's so weird typing on this little keyboard. It's going to take some getting used to but I love it already.

Oh, and I started writing my other book! It's a YA paranormal romance, kind of a spin-off from Life After Death. I came up with the idea for this one while I was writing the other, and I decided it makes sense to finish a book in another genre that I can start querying because it increases the amount of possible agents. The title for this one, as of right now, is Death Becomes Her, which is a great title considering the subject of the book, but it kind of bugs me since it's also the name of a movie.

Two more things to say real quick. I got another request for a partial today, although it was just for the first 5 pages. It was from an agent that has an online form you fill out instead of sending a query, though, so it's kind of her first glimpse at my actual writing. I'm still not getting my hopes up but I have faith that eventually something will pan out, with at least one of the books I write.

Last thing is, I spent over $160 on books at Borders last night. A lot of times when I shop, I end up feeling guilty afterward, like I shouldn't have spent so much when there are other things I could have spent it on instead. But I really don't feel guilty about buying books. I feel excited and anxious to read them all. I had the hardest time last night deciding which one to read first. lol I bought a couple of YA books, which I haven't really done since I was a YA and I'm more excited to read those than any of the others. I didn't start with one of them, though. I started with one that's a sequel because I read the first book the other day. But I think when I get done with this one, I'll be jumping into Eileen Cook's What Would Emma Do? and then get to the YA series that I bought.

Ok, I think that's it. I should get back to writing before I get too tired.

Updates

Queries sent: 36
Rejections received: 10
Requests for partials: 1
Requests for full MS: 1

I've been pretty lazy lately. Partially it's because we didn't have internet for a few days. I think the neighbors got theirs shut off over the weekend. It's back now, though. That really isn't an excuse for me not working on the next book, I guess. I don't really need internet for that. But not having internet drives me insane. I've spent the last few days playing games on the Wii with the kids instead. lol

And that's probably what I'll be doing for the next couple of days too. Income tax comes in next week and I'm hoping to get a new laptop and a netbook that I'll use specifically for writing. It will make it easier to keep track of everything I'm doing. Plus I'll be paying to get my internet back, which will be really nice.

Over the weekend I was having to check my email on my cell phone, which sucked because I have Cricket and it doesn't work real well with the internet. I got more rejections in during that time but there was one email that I got on Sunday that I wasn't able to open. It kept saying it had some error. I finally got my computer back online last night and opened that email and it was a request for my full manuscript.

I was excited, of course. But then I realized the agency was a pretty small one, with only 2 agents and both of them look so young. That makes me nervous. Still, I try not to judge those things so I just sent them the full MS and synopsis as they requested. A few minutes later I got an auto-response saying that she's not viewing any new work until April and will be deleting all emails that come in from February 1 - March 30. Huh? She asked me to send it. I'm hoping that she'll still open it since she'll see it says "re:" on it. I guess I should have put "requested materials" in the subject line instead or something. It's a little bit frustrating to me because I don't know if I should just wait to hear from her or if I should resend with a different subject line. I guess I'll wait for awhile. It would be nice if she replies to me and tells me that auto-response doesn't apply to me since she requested the material from me.

Anyway, kids are home so I guess I should get off here and get back to the game we've been playing together. More later, I suppose.

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.

A quick note on finding an agent

I've gotten a lot accomplished in the last 2 days. I got my query finished yesterday and wrote my complete synopsis. I also managed to go through the first few chapters and polish up the writing for those agents who immediately want to see some work. And I've started sending out my queries.

In fact, I'm just taking a quick break to write this blog because it's something I've been thinking about. People who don't understand this process think it shouldn't take any time at all to send queries out. They figure you can mass email them to 20 or 30 agents and it only takes a few seconds. Or that you can just cut and paste over and over again.

Every agent is different, which really should be a no-brainer and I have to wonder why I even made that statement. But because they're all different, they all want different things. Some want just a short query. Some want a short query, a full 2-page synopsis and the first few chapters of your book. Because of this, I'm sitting here going back to each website and double-checking on what they want, then tailoring each email to fit the agent that I'm submitting to.

Sure, it takes a lot of time. But honestly, don't I expect the same from them? Yeah, I expect to get a lot of form rejection letters, but I would hope that each agent (or their assistant) will first be taking the time to read through my query and really consider if they might like to represent me. Becoming a published author takes a lot of time and work, and a lot of people don't realize that actually writing the book is only a small part of that work. Finding an agent; working closely with them to find the proper editor; working on rewrites, rewrites, rewrites; and then, when you THINK your work is done because YAY!!!! SOMEONE WANTS TO PUBLISH MY BOOK!!!!! you still have a lot to do to publicize your book so you can be sure it doesn't end up dying out after its first run.

I've done a lot of research. I've spent years reading agents' blogs and websites, and the numerous books I have on my shelf about becoming a published author, in order to know exactly what I'm getting myself into. But I realize that people who haven't done this research really don't understand all of this. Many of my friends think it all should be easy and don't get that finding an agent can be a full-time job in itself.

Speaking of, I should probably get back to work. *sigh* Got more queries to send out. But I have another blog I want to write later. I'm making myself wait to write that one until I finish my work.

Pushing myself

I am literally forcing myself to get going today. I've been sitting here pretty much doing nothing, finding excuse after excuse not to get my query and synopsis written. It's funny how I can sit here and crank out a book in 10 days with no problem, but it takes me weeks and weeks to write a simple query. It's the brief description of the book that I get hung up on. So much is hanging on those couple of paragraphs and I find it's really difficult to describe my own book.

Jamie finished reading Life After Death the other day, so last night I gave her some homework. I asked her to write a couple of paragraphs describing the book, kind of like you'd see on the back cover. I was gonna send her the description I had written and just have her give me opinions on it but I decided it would be good to get a totally fresh perspective on it. I was glad I did because she took a completely different approach than I did. Now I plan to take the two descriptions and find a way to meld them a bit. I wish I had some other people who were finished with it so I could get more feedback first, but I really need to get moving on these queries so I can start my next book.

Writing books is fun. Working on query letters, sending them out to agents, waiting for replies that are generally just rejections, none of that is fun. So I tend to want to just skip all of that and move on to writing the next book. I'm not letting myself do that this time. I need to get more serious about the publishing part before I've got 20 finished manuscripts sitting here and nobody is getting to read them.

A lot of it is confusing to me, though. Some agents ask for a query AND a synopsis. So I did some research on writing a synopsis, and found out that all agents are different. Some want a 2 page synopsis and some want 20 pages. I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to know what they want when all they say is "synopsis." Really, how much information should I be including in this synopsis? Should I go chapter by chapter and put everything in there? Or should I only put the key points of the book in there? I honestly don't have answers to this and I haven't really found an answer that I trust on the internet. So I figured I'd just write it, and see how it goes.

The synopsis was scaring me quite a bit. More than the query, actually, because I've written queries before. But as I was reading information on how to write them, I realized I've pretty much already done it. I always outline the story in a notebook before I start writing, and I update that outline as things change. So I should be able to easily turn that outline into a synopsis that I can send to agents.

Hopefully. We'll see. Gotta go get started on it.

I really am a pirate, I swear

I really hate it when I do this. Last night I was laying here on my bed reading through some agent's blog and I fell asleep....not because it was boring. I was just really tired since I only got 4 hours of sleep the night before. Anyway, it was only about 7pm so of course I woke up around 11pm and was wide awake. And now it's 6am and I'm STILL awake.

What have I been doing all night? Oh, you know, the usual. Sitting here for hours and hours on end compiling my list of agents to send queries to. It's entirely possible that I'm OVERLY organized sometimes. I've seriously spent the last 2 days just going through agency websites. I went to AgentQuery , of course. And if you haven't been there, you should go. It's a great site because you can look for agents who handle your specific genre.

So I wrote all of the agencies and websites down the day before yesterday. Last night I sat here and went to each and every website, went through their submission policies, read about each agent, and wrote it all in my notebook. I designated a page for each agency so I can make notes on when I send them queries and if/when I hear from them. I have 46 agencies to send to, which is a lot better than I originally thought but still not enough to make me feel confident that I'll find somebody.

My brain kind of feels full of this stuff right now. But I'm determined to focus on this part of the publishing process before I get started on another book.

Also, I'm a pirate. No, really, I am. Our cable and internet got shut off yesterday. Do you think that every author goes through this before they find an agent? I need to go find a job, but I know once I do that, I won't have as much time to devote to writing, and I don't like that idea. So, anyway, my bill wasn't that late. Only a week or so. But apparently Comcast hates me, which of course means that they don't know me. Cuz dammit, everyone who knows me likes me! (Just let me believe this, ok?) But, you know, it's just cable and I can live for a week or two without that, and luckily for me, I have some neighbors who haven't figured out that they should make their wireless accounts secure.

So I'm a pirate. Not a very good one, unfortunately. The signal is so low and crappy that my connection is sketchy at best. Ah well. It's better than no connection, right?

Some day......hmmm......some day I'll have my full-time desk job that brings in the bucks and doesn't suck too badly, and I'll have my agent and book deals to fulfill my creative side. And I won't HAVE to be a pirate. But, you know, just for those other struggling authors out there, I'll keep my wireless connection unsecured.

I'm all about encouraging pirates.