It is of course the most wonderful night of the year; the fireplace is on, the wind rattles the windows, and crispy leaves scatter the streets outside. I hope this evening finds you with impertinent children at your door, and a heavy nostalgia for ghost stories in your heart.
I should probably preface this post with the fact that yes, to me, Halloween is the high holy day of my existence. Most years I spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on a costume no reasonable human would attempt (see evidence below) but this year I find myself celebrating in a quieter way—as strange as that is.
In the spirit of a good scare, today I want to reflect on a topic that often terrifies me; the dreaded limbo of querying, pitching, and all around growing pains of the writer lifestyle.
Typically, I approach any discussion of querying with the same lip curl of someone who believes discussing politics and religion is a major faux pas. The problem of course, being that the discussion invariably opens up the opportunity for creatives to more or less neurosis-dump in public.
I will not be doing that. There is plenty of discourse online already about the terrors of the Query Trenches, and the horror stories about ‘Bad Agents’, and if that’s what you choose to feed your brain, please go right ahead—preferably somewhere else.
Yesterday was the #PitDark pitch event on the service formerly known as Twitter. I opened up my app to discover (just before noon) that it had started at 8 am. Well. No one has ever accused me of being well prepared.
So, in a flurry (between client meetings I might add) I wrote nine pitch posts for The Last Dawn of varying efficacy. Thus scheduled, I decided to go about my day, checking in occasionally to retweet a few pitches that I’d like to read, and of course tweaking my pitch posts a few minutes before they’d go out.
Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. I showed up to #PitDark like a chronically late student that missed the first three classes of the day and was hoping no one would notice. What did surprise me though, as I scrolled through the tag, was the variety of pitch styles. Lots of tropes. Lots of emojis. Lots of… confusion?
I tried to figure out if I’d misunderstood the pitch style, realized perhaps I did, but also ended up in a weird straddle. Should I reduce my novel to goth emojis and trope tags? Is that what agents really want?
Dear Reader, I could not.
Another thing that stood out to me, was the unexpectedly nice feeling of author support and community throughout the day. As someone who really wasn’t participating in the event with any goals of agent interaction (more on that in a moment) I was genuinely pleased to feel in a larger sense some kind of community around writing. Querying mostly feels very dog-eat-dog, the system essentially pits writers against each other anonymously—if you’re familiar at all with the QueryTracker ecosystem you’ll know what I mean.
Through the pitch event, I started assigning real people to manuscripts, and it was oddly refreshing to think of it that way. No longer was I up against faceless ‘Romance, Fantasy 80,000-89,999’ but real working writers with their own hopes and dreams. That was so comforting somehow.
That experience alone made participating worth it, though I’m fairly certain I won’t be getting any Agent attention as a result. Another thing about querying that I’ve learned, is you need to treat every experience as a win. I know that sounds trite and terrible, but if you don’t find some way to do that I fear you’ll never make it to the end.
For example, yesterday I got not one, but two query rejections from agents while I was at the same time very much trying to pitch my novel like a professional. Now, I’m not saying I’m immune to rejection by any means, but it no longer feels like an excuse to pity myself. It just isn’t personal and that’s the long and short of it. You simply need to keep moving on.
I know I’m proselytizing in rarified air as I type this, since I’m lucky enough to have my full manuscript under consideration with multiple agents that would be a dream to work with. But even if I had no positive momentum to stand on, I know this for sure;
- Writers who get bitter, are not writers anyone wants to work with.
- Writers who feel entitlement to special treatment, are not writers anyone wants to work with.
- Writers who throw tantrums, blame, and crippling insecurity around are not writers anyone wants to work with.
As a fellow querying author, the only advice I can give is this:
Be gracious. Be patient.
There are plenty of people who will encourage you to read more books on craft, find a writing group, find beta readers, hire an editor, hire an agent to critique your query materials, join publisher’s marketplace, pay for the pro querytracker subscription, have an author brand and website, etc, etc. But these are all academic things. They won’t help you keep your sanity, and they won’t help you forge the endurance required for this journey.
So be kind to yourselves fellow devotees of the pen and page, because at least one of your comrades is cheering you on from her firelit parlor on a dreary Halloween.
Hauntingly—SMH
P.S.
I should update that I have, in fact, received my author copies of a face full of flowers which is a true delight to behold in my hands. It’s a small victory, but there really is no comparison to holding your own printed words on real pages. Satisfying, transcendent, and of course slightly mortifying.
I’m also a terrible salesperson. Copies are still available via Bottlecap Press here, but if you are a local and want a signed author copy (or just want me to mail one) do contact me over on the contact page or on my socials.
