All is Translation, and All of Us Lost in it

So if I ever snap one day and decide I want to ruin my future in publishing forever, I know just the query letter to send to one of my rejectors:

Dear [Agent],

You may remember me from my query letter regarding my 75,000-word YA urban fantasy novel Grandmaster Draw, to which you replied with a form rejection. Let it be known that I bear you no ill will for that. Actually, I'm grateful. Had you not shown me that pursuing the life of a YA fantasy writer was foolish, I might have never realized my true calling.

So let me ask you this, [Agent]. Have you ever fallen in love with your worst enemy?

Joanie Sunflower is a small town girl with big dreams. Ever since she was a young lass, she longed to run her fingers across the raised letters of her name on a hardcover book. She toiled on her debut manuscript for many years, and what's more, she even found the perfect literary agent to represent her! Could life have been more perfect?

When suddenly! The agent she so carefully selected sent her a form rejection. OMG. Joanie was a mild-mannered girl, but an unstoppable rage rose up within her. How dare he! He clearly didn't understand genius when he saw it! Joanie resolved to hate the agent forever and ever and ever.

Little did Joanie know that she would run into that same agent later that night at the grocery store! They lived in the same town and she didn't even know it! Joanie was furious at her bad luck, but at the same time, intrigued. She didn't know that her would-be agent was quite so... alluring.

Joanie finds herself caught between her resolve and her feelings. How can the agent who crushed her dreams be so kind, so gentle? How can she find the courage to tell him who she really is? COULD THIS BE RABU-RABU?!?!

He's Just Not That Into Your Query is a 250,000-word romance manuscript in the rich tradition of Danielle Steel, Stephenie Meyer, and random shoujo mangaka. Incidentally, my cell number is 904-534-4171 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              904-534-4171      end_of_the_skype_highlighting. Call me, lover.

Kisses,
Becky

... that was basically a bingo card of everything you shouldn't put in a query ever. (Though after revising my own query 10,000 times, it was sort of awesomely fun.)

Yoshhh. I'mma do some prompt-writing tonight.

I haven't heard anything from the agent I queried yet, which is probably a good sign, actually. From what I've read on her blog, her assistant does an elimination round of sorts before passing the queries on. She posted some statistics to give poor saps like me an idea: three weeks' worth of queries was a little more than 2,600 e-mails. Of those, the assistant sent on 56, and the agent chose 15 of those to request sample pages from. And that's only sample pages, so she'll choose very few of those to request full manuscripts from, and may not even offer to represent any at all.

Gulp. So yeah, hopefully the fact that I haven't heard anything is because I've survived the whittling down thus far.

After a week of feeling like I might explode if I saw "No new messages" (or worse yet, got an e-mail that wasn't it) one more time, I finally wasn't glued to the Send/Receive button all day. It helped that it's the weekend, but still. In general it just turned out to be the worst time ever to send off the query, since I had a week off and completed the work I had to do pretty early into it. There was a lot of time in the apartment alone that I devoted to driving myself insane!

I imagine it'll be better once I get that response. It's just because it's the first time that it's so nervewracking. It'll still be nervewracking later on, but at least I'll get used to it!

I'm so unfocused lately, though. Blahhhh. I need to start writing something else - maybe I can still sneak in a short piece for imaginarybeasts!

By the way, I'll be taking Grandmaster Draw offline on March 1st, so if you still want to read the rough draft, you have a little time. ♥