Querying update.

It's going well. I'm sending out a couple new queries each day and have been steadily for over two weeks now. I am getting some nibbles here and there. I am feeling hopeful about this book. It's definitely not a "sure thing" kind of book (if there is such a thing at all) -- I know it will require a lot of luck to find the absolutely correct agent for it, and to hit him or her at just the right time. And then it will require the same amount of fortuitous timing (and agent savvy) to find precisely the right editor. And then that editor will have to convince Acquisitions to actually buy it. So I'm expecting a lengthy process, but I am feeling hope.

More news when something becomes news.

Querying.

I am currently in Query Hell. It's good to be back. I feel I'm not getting nearly enough responses (rejection or otherwise) compared to how many queries I've sent out, but maybe the process is different with agents who focus on literary fiction and not genre fiction, as was the case with my last visit to Q.H. Plus I went after the upper crust of agencies only, so perhaps their backlogs of emails are larger. Probably.

Doing my written test for 911 dispatching today. First step in a long process. But it will be a good backup if my book never sells and I wither up in shame and die unpublished, surrounded by angry cats, with a bunch of brilliant manuscripts rotting in my sock drawer which my niece and nephew will discover long after I'm gone, posthumously publish, and make the millions I should have earned off my own genius. You're welcome, Henry and Agatha. Auntie loves you.

Also looking at taking a second job, working on my three days off a week. Doesn't that sound fun.

Pre-emptively setting the record straight

So...when I wrote my query letter and then submitted it for critique at Absolute Write, I expected a few people to object to the general content of my book. Vladimir Nabokov once said that there were three taboos in American publishing: incest, interracial marriage, and "the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106."

Happily, interracial marriage is no longer the taboo it was in the 1950s. Incest will always remain a taboo -- or at least I predict it will remain taboo in my lifetime. Who knows what the future might hold. As for the third publishing taboo, obviously Nabokov was being hyperbolic when he described that scenario. A book about a happy, useful person who never has any troubles and dies in his sleep is boring, and boring will always be verboten in publishing. But the point he was trying to make was sound, and unlike interracial marriage, a book which portrays atheism as a solution to a problem, or at least as something that's okay, something that doesn't need to be fixed, is still going to have a tough time getting off the ground.

That doesn't mean I think my book is doomed. It merely needs to meet the right agent and editor, and I then I think it has quite a good shot of selling well. But finding the right people to work with this book may be difficult, and my experience with my query letter on AW points out why.

DONE!!

54,474 words. First draft, anyway. There are a lot of scenes I intend to work back into what I've already written. I still think the final version will come in somewhere around 60K.

But after two years and a lot of setbacks, Baptism for the Dead has reached "The End."

I feel relieved. Now I'm going to have some wine.

Update

46,000 words. Past a major turning point in the book. Heading toward the final conflict and the resolution. Looking like it might top off at 60K, which is short, but not absurdly so. I hope.

Progress

I'm making good headway on Baptism. I am very relieved and happy to report this. In the past three days I've written over 5000 words, which is more than I've written over the past eight months or so. Long story short: One of my biggest stressors seems to be all wrapped up and as out of my life as it's ever going to be, and the psychological effect on me has been incredible. I feel awesome.

I've set a goal for myself to finish the first draft by the end of February. After that, revisions should come together swiftly, since I've actually been doing a lot of revising as I've worked on the first draft. I am planning to start searching for a new agent by mid-March. I've already got my first one targeted, researched, and ready to query.

Let's sell this goddamn book already!

The Universe is trying to tell me something...

Just kidding; I don't believe in a higher power that tries to tell anybody anything. But I do have an amusing anecdote for you, if you still read this blog.

With Mitt Romney maintaining a baffling hold on the competition (such as it is) for the Republican candidacy, and with the well-deserved success of the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, and with the internet being positively bombarded with those obnoxious "I'm A Mormon!" banner ads, the stars all seem perfectly aligned to assist me in selling Baptism the moment it's finished. (Not that I'll be surprised if it fails to sell anyway. I've been at this novel-selling game for almost three years now, and I am a hardened cynic with regards to the publishing industry. It's almost enough to make me drink whiskey and write poems about drinking whiskey, Bukowski-like.) I know the timing is as good as it will ever be for this novel, so I've been wringing every drop of writing energy out of myself through my fog of depression.

(I am happy to report that I did finally find a job -- a permanent, full-time job with benefits, which is something I haven't had in nearly six years -- and as I've adjusted to the working life once more my writey feeling has increased daily. I think I will soon be back on a regular schedule of writing, and Baptism will come together quickly once I am. Hooray!)

Anyway, along with Mormons being everywhere in the zeitgeist just now, a funny coincidence happened a few days ago that has zapped me in the butt like a cattle prod and has made me leap back toward this book with renewed focus.

I got a call from my ex-husband the other day. "The Mormons came looking for you," he said.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, two guys knocked on the door and asked for Melissa Ricks." Melissa Ricks was my legal name back when I was a member of the Church -- I have since legally changed both my first and last names, but not to evade the Mormons. "I told them you don't live here anymore and asked them what they wanted with you. They said, 'We're from her church.' I said, 'She doesn't have a church.' And they said, 'Well, she's in our records.'"

We had a good laugh over it, and I told him it must be God trying to tell me to hurry up and finish Baptism for the Dead because He's not going to keep the circumstances favorable for my publication and the birth of my career for much longer.

I truly don't believe in signs, or "things happening for a reason," or anything vaguely mystical or "cosmic" in the hippie sense of the word. It's all just confirmation bias, which is a fascinating enough psychological phenomenon on its own that I think it's rather insulting to our magnificent brains to assign some kind of winking, nodding, knowing significance to everyday coincidence. But I have to admit to being entertained by this particular coincidence -- the Mormons haven't sought me out for twelve years. Why now, when I'm working on a novel that explores Mormon culture?

It gave me a good laugh, and it's stoked the fire under my ass, and that's all I can ask from the universe.

So yes, I am still working on Baptism, and I am feeling extremely cheerful about its potential. Thank you, Elders, for showing up at my ex-husband's door!