Querying The Damsel

Well, I did it: I just sent off query letters to four different agents, so cross your fingers for me! I'll keep you updated as I hear news, of course. Since many of you are in the same boat as I, looking for an agent or hoping to someday be published, I thought I might leave you a few tips on querying.

General Rules for Querying

1. Research First. Find out about the agent, what they represent, where their tastes lie, and if they are currently accepting queries. You can find an agent via a search engine like AgentQuery, or by querying the agents of works similar (but not too similar!) to yours.
2. Follow the Guidelines. Now, there's no hard and fast rule here and this goes hand in hand with the above rule, but please make sure you have read the guidelines specific to the agent you are querying. Some want specific fonts, some want only the query, some want sample pages; it all depends on the agent.
3. Keep it Professional. Publishing is a business, so treat it as such. Use formal block formatting in your query email or letter and treat the agent with respect. These agents are not your high school buddies, so please don't write to them as if they were.
4. Personalize Your Query. An agent can tell if you've written one query and sent it out to fifty people at once. Personalize your query to fit the agent, appeal to their tastes and add any information you feel is important that you've learned about them through your research.
5. Proofread Your Query. This may seem like a no-brainer, but do you really want to take that chance? Edit your query just as you would edit your novel to make sure it flows well, makes sense, and is free of those pesky typos. Additionally, have a friend/teacher/writing buddy read over your query as well.

Writing, Like Maths

Secret Agent Casye says maybe it will be a comfortable black hole. Oh God, I hope that's true.

So when you're coming up against a deadline and you know it's impossible at some point you're going to want to say "forget it, I'll just copy-paste the whole damn thing and leave it alone." Actually, you'll want this at many points. And that's nice, but then what's the point of edits at all? You know there are all kinds of mistakes throughout the novel and you could probably even pick out the chapters that need the most work and hope the others are clean, but they won't be, not completely. That copy-paste thing, though, there's something to be said about that.

When working with a very complex equation in maths you can stare at it until your eyes bleed, but the answer won't come to you by looking at the whole problem, you have to break it down into smaller, workable parts. Use the order of operations, PEMDAS, and figure out the parenthesis first, then the exponents and so on and so forth until finally, you have a small equation that you can answer easily. In mechanics you do the same thing when approaching a new machine that you don't understand: you pick a small part and understand that, then work your way into the part connected to it, until you understand the rest.

The same idea of breaking down a problem into workable parts can be applied to writing as well. I prefer to type out everything again by hand, to effectively rewrite the novel, but when there's no time for that, copy-pasting will have to do. So instead of copy-pasting the entire novel and trying to comb through for mistakes, I copy a small portion, just a few paragraphs at a time, and work through those. That way I don't get overwhelmed by the bigness of everything and get too distracted from the finer details. I tend to miss things when I have too much to look at, so I limit the scope a little by zooming in on a particular set of words and fix them up, then move on to the next part attached to it. Copy-pasting saves me time, but I still manage to work through it all.

With that, I'm off to finish up my 4th chapter of the day. Hopefully I can still manage to pull off seven. Luckily, I have the day off tomorrow.

Tip #1: Break down the problem into something you can work with.