Writers can be a nervous, paranoid, worrying lot. There's fear of rejection. There's fear of copy editing errors in your stories. There's fear of screwing up a query letter, or a cover letter, or worse: Getting an editor or publisher or agent's name wrong in such a letter. Then there's anxiety over whether your story will be liked by anyone anywhere.
Today was my day to be paranoid. I sent off an e-mail query letter for my novel "City of Rogues" to agent Russ Galen, one of the top agents for fantasy authors. I read over the letter at least a dozen times, looking for mistakes and doing minor rewriting. But then, after sending the e-mail, I noticed I left out a word at the end of a sentence. Sigh.
And then I noticed I sent it from a personal e-mail address, not what I consider my "professional writing" e-mail address. Double sigh.
Well, you only get one chance at a first impression. Hopefully, Mr. Galen won't notice my mistake (though I bet he will), and I hope he will consider me as a potential client.
Okay, I'll go away now and cry like a little girl in a corner.
2 comments:
Oddly, to my experience little girls don't cry any more or differently than little boys. And neither bother to head off to a corner... it's more fun to wail right out in the open.
You know, I'm thinking that maybe you need to make the Kobalos threat more immediate to Kron. I mean, sure he wants to avenge Wyck and Randall's in immediate danger... but Kron, personally, has no particular reason to drop everything and head for Kobalos. He could wait a week and accomplish a lot in Bond.
He's been focused on vengeance for years, and his opponent has been weakened now. Belgad isn't expecting an assault now. And if Kron suddenly vanishes, it will look to the populace in general that Belgad won... undoing all of Kron's efforts so far to undermine Belgad's public image.
Maybe a beastie makes a snatch for Randall and carries off Wyck instead. Or maybe Kron is somehow marked as a target; the bad guys will be after him, too. Or whatever.
The more I mull over it, the more it bothers me that Kron's willing to walk away from a fight when he doesn't really need to.
Oh, and here's a tissue. Dry your eyes and remember drippy noses never impress agents. ct
Yeah, the whole Kron rushing off to Kobalos thing has bothered me too. It's one of the reasons I picked a child, Wyck, to be the one to suffer from the war demons. I was originally thinking that would be enough to resolve Kron to want to deal with Verkain. But you're right ... Kron has Belgad right there. At the least, he should tell Randall they have to wait a few days while Kron finishes up some business.
I've had a few different ideas on how to solve this problem, and I'd like to hear your and Steve's opinions. The potential solutions are:
1.) Kron confronts Belgad and defeats Belgad, thinking that he's leaving Belgad for dead. Of course, Belgad isn't dead. There's some minor problems with this, including some minor rewriting in book 2, but my main concern is about the character of Belgad: I don't WANT him to be defeated. At this point, I'm thinking of the Kron vs. Belgad fight as the old question "What happens when an unstoppable object runs into an unmovable object?" To my way of thinking, having Belgad defeated by Kron this early in the game would weaken Belgad as a character. I could be wrong. And maybe there could be a feaux confrontation, where Kron leaves things in flames, thinking Belgad is going to die, but Belgad escapes somehow.
2.) I could have a war demon carry off Wyck. But why? The demons and Verkain have no use for Wyck, and it's not in the nature of the demons to take hostages or prisoners unless Verkain orders them to.
As for Kron being marked as a target ... he has been, in a way. Belgad is after him. Fortisquo is after him. Verkain, while not specifically after Kron at this point, is against anyone who is trying to help Randall.
Oh well, I'll get back to working on book 1 at some point. I'm busy with book 3 right now, and Kron's about to get a really big surprise. I picture lots of carnage.
Post a Comment