Summertime. It seems so innocent, full of relaxing days brimming with chilled lemonade and frolicking children. Summertime is for kicking back poolside, grilling burgers and brats, and imbibing mojitos with fresh mint from the garden. Children play outdoors from dawn to dusk, happy to be free of education’s four walls and florescent lighting.
Somewhere, my children missed the message and summer has been one long marathon of summer school, sports, scheduled events and blistering heat. (I’m so sick of air conditioning.) And the children, my beautiful children, have bickered and wrestled and yanked every nerve I have. Aren’t they supposed to get along? (You may guffaw loudly at my naiveté.)
Bottom line, I’m pooped. Surviving summer with two school-aged children requires stamina, and a determination to make peace between children, continue finding creative and cheap activities and new recipes for kid-friendly snacks. I persevere, but barely.
In the writing world, my stamina gets tested, too. Thankfully, the temperature is controlled and the mojitos are plenty, but my ongoing querying takes its toll. I’ve mentioned the patience requirement, and discussed the importance of not being a dick, but there is more.
Querying agents requires an unrelenting faith your writing is good enough, tempered by the expectation everyone will say no. (Thanks Brandi, for making this sentence better.) That’s it. For me, that means querying a few agents, getting responses, tweaking my query and manuscript accordingly, and then repeat. Each cycle I learn something new, like how to write a one-line pitch or how to grab my reader on the first page. But why keep trying? If my writing was good, shouldn’t agents clamor for it?
Publishing is such a subjective business; you never know what will resonate with an agent, editor or reader. Think about the books you’ve read. If you read 10 books in a year (but I hope you read more), you probably enjoyed eight of them. Of those eight, how many did you love, and I mean really love, like you want to go back to the beginning after reading the last page? If you’re lucky, at least one of those books met that criterion, but most likely none of them did. That doesn’t mean you didn’t enjoy the books, or wouldn’t recommend them; but if you were an agent or editor, it does mean you wouldn’t represent them. Agents and editors must love, love, love a book because they will be reading it many, many times and will champion it to editors, marketing teams, book sellers and many more.
As a querying author, I have to keep searching for the one who will love, love, love my story, my voice, my style. And I have to believe my writing is good enough. But I also have to accept most agents won’t love it. It is a difficult balance of reality and persistence that requires stamina.
So, dear reader, with the temperatures cooling, the children heading back to school, my stamina renews. With that, I’m back to more regular blog posts too.
Get more of me on Twitter @aereichert.
*Photo was taken at Uncle Tom’s Trail in Yellowstone National Park. There were 500+ stairs, all going up.
