Querying

OK, so I am satisfied with the manuscript and it is under 90,000 words. Whew! That only took about 18 months of editing. But I think that I can safely say I cut a lot of fat out of it. That will happen when you have to cut 1 out of every 4 words in your manuscript.

Now I must query. I have longed for this day, but now that it is here, I have discovered that it is terrifying. There are so few words in a query, it seems really easy to screw up. If you have an awkward sentence in your draft, it sucks, but it is also a passing thing. When you have 5,000 non-awkward sentences to go with it, it doesn’t seem like such a disaster. This is not so in a one-page letter. In a one-page letter, a single awkward sentence can really kill the mood.

I WILL BE JUDGED. And probably not fairly. But then, life is not fair, and I probably have won the lottery already in the game of chance, what with not being born in a 3rd world country, having looks AND brains, and all that.

The thing I most fear is learning that these several years of figuring out how to write a novel have been a waste of time. A FAILURE. Not that being a playwright was scoring me the big bucks, but at least some theaters let me in the door and I got produced. And I suppose if I can’t get an agent, I could always self-publish. But then I also have to self-promote. And I already have a full-time job.

At least I have gotten an education in How To Write A Novel. Note to self: Novels are a completely different texture than plays. It’s like the difference between fishnet stockings and a wool blanket. There is all this FILLER in novels. Like people can’t just imagine the stage business and they need you to spell it out for them. “She gritted her teeth through her reply.” Of course she did! She’s angry! Didn’t you just read the dialog?

But the structure of the plot and the development of the characters is pretty similar. You just have more plot – and possibly more characters – in a novel. But not as much plot as I thought I was going to stuff into it. Turns out you have to spend words on “what the characters look like right now,” so it takes away from the words you can spend on “what the characters are doing.”

I’ve had several readers generously donate their time and opinions to my development process. And more than one expressed puzzlement over why I did not describe my main character’s appearance in detail in the first few pages. It’s odd to me, because as I tried to get into my main character’s head, I didn’t see how she would know what she looked like, since it was her POV. Are people really that self-conscious? OK, teenaged girls, yes. But my main character is a teenaged girl in a medieval world with no full-length mirrors. No photographs. No printing presses. I like to think she would not be as self-conscious as girls today. My hope is that she would not. And my hope is to represent that honestly in my novel as a real way that a girl could be, if she weren’t instagramming herself daily. But there I go getting all personal-is-political.