Back on the horse

See how much you've missed? You really should check back here more often.

I just queried one of the most powerful agents in NYC. I have to say I'm a bit intimidated. The man has published books for Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Talk about delusions of grandeur.

Hey, can't hurt to try, right? Let's just see where this goes.

UPDATE:
The query letter worked. He's interested in seeing my work. Going to send out the first 40 pages. Here we go. If you listen real close, you'll hear the wheat seperating from the chaff.

Denied.

Yes, unfortunately it's true.

The odds are against you when you aspire to being a novelist. It's a highly competitive, subjective environment. Without agent representation, your odds are even less of being successful.

For these reasons, you need to expect some degree of failure. Nevertheless, it's never fun to hear you need to try again.

I got some positive feedback from my agent contact for 'Stay of Extinction', but it needs 'extensive work'. I'm not sure what that means, other than it will require much more effort to polish than my prospective agent could spend.

Where to from here? Well, back to the drawing board. Time to fix the typos, tie up the loose ends, and iron out the inconsistencies. Then we start the query process again.

Am I bummed? Majorly. Will that make me quit? Absolutely not. Like baseball, it's a long season.
===========================
The email I received:

<snip>
At any rate, I finished Stay of Extinction. I thought about it quite a bit - and though I really enjoyed it, I don't know if it's something that I feel I can accept at this point. I would love to work with you on it, but I feel it needs extensive work, which is not something I have time to do right now. What I would recommend, is that you look for other representation, and keep up correspondence with me in the meantime - if you'd like - and let me know how it's going. If I should have a break in my schedule, I'd be happy to work on it with you as I think you're a wonderful writer and the idea is sound.
</snip>

Any day now.

I'm expecting a message any day from my prospective agent contact. The last time I heard from her (yes, I now think it might be a her), she said she was away and was nearly finished. I was told I'd hear something by midweek, but that was a week and a half ago. Oh well, can't rush these things.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. You could argue that if it was such a burning hot, compelling story that I would have heard something the second the last page was read. Or, you could argue that literary agents are extremely overloaded reading every wannabe-novelists' latest masterpiece. I'm not going to do either. You just can't overanalyze anything. Let's just hope for the best.