The Demon Query

When you begin to query agents, it’s much like starting your own seedlings.  Some seeds sprout quickly, like kale (four days!) and some are slow and can take two weeks or more, like onions and parsley. Some are finicky and require perfect conditions, like peppers. 

I worry about my seeds almost as much as I worry about my query letter. I check them daily. There's so much to worry about. Did I use the right medium? It there enough light? Heat? Water? There are mistakes, like dropping a flat of newly planted basil seeds upside down on the floor. Will they ever recover and find their way up to the light?  When the fragile shoots first break the surface, you feel a joyous delirium. Your time and effort has been rewarded. To see the spindly stalks grow and develop their first set of true leaves is like developing your manuscript to a publishable level.

You don’t think you’re every ready to query. You wonder if you’ve done enough agent research. Does your hook hook? Will they like the premise or hate it?  Is your protagonist unlikeable? Your finger hovers over the send button.You pull it back and breathe. How could anyone not like him? Your finger finds the send button. You do it.

Then there is the glaring error you discover after you’ve sent out your first round of queries. You played with your first essential five pages, because you can't leave them alone. You fooled around with the first page and changed a phrase. Then changed it back because it was really, really stupid. But you forgot to save the correction. You sent the really, really stupid first page. You go to bed, happy, not knowing how stupid you are.

You awake and drink coffee and go to your other job, knowing you'll soon be a full time writer. You come home and open your documents, check email and drink something. You open up your sent folder and browse your amazing query and your agent-grabbing first pages and you see what you’ve done. The all-time most stupid phrase is right there on page one. You lean over your screen like a surgeon over the operating table. You can't believe what you see. Now what? Should you send a quick apology and explanation to the dream agent? Should you leave it alone and think they won’t notice the all-time most stupid phrase on a first page ever? 

You send the follow-up email. You kick yourself and go to bed. In the morning you soak parsley seeds in warm water. You turn on the computer and you wait.

Taking the tone of the company you keep

We passed three bars before we found one
you could be seen in.
You threw darts that wouldn’t stick
and I looked for songs on the jukebox
that wouldn’t make you want to leave.
Everyone wants to leave the country to turn fifty.
After the train pulled out
I fluffed pillows into the shape of you.


If you write a flash in 55 words (no more and no less) vist the G-Man (Mr-Knowitall, himself) and let him know. If not, visit him anyway and read some others.

What are you doing today? I'm watching for my first robin, planting seeds and query pondering.

TGIF and all that jazz.

Here's to blogging! (raises coffee cup)

Seeds

I started my tomato, pepper and melon seeds last week, days before our April snowstorm, howling winds and six inches of snow. We’d erected a little 6 X 8 greenhouse with a tubular frame on the south side of the house, and I had all my flats inside. On a sunny day, even with cool temperatures, the inside of that tiny greenhouse was hot! And I thought it could hold its own at night with normal April lows. But what to do with such a forecast as this? And lows in the twenties? We were scrambling for solutions.

We hung a troublelight inside with a hundred watt bulb, which by itself will throw off an amazing amount of heat. But I feared that wasn’t enough. Then my husband dug out a little ceramic heater we weren’t using anymore, plugged it into the troublelight, and turned it on medium. We waited for the storm.

The next morning I looked out the bedroom window with trepidation to see if my greenhouse was still there. The plastic sides were dripping with condensation and the only snow on it was a wet layer across the center arch. I went outside, unzipped the door, and ducked inside to check the temperature. It was an OK fifty-five degrees. Not bad, considering the winds were hard out of the north and visibility was nil. Everything else was covered with snow, including the white pine sapling I’d planted the day before.

We have been keeping the heater and light on around the clock, waiting for the temperature outside to return to normal. Yesterday, the sun came back out and the greenhouse got up to ninety degrees. Yikes! We are new at this. We opened the little window for a cooling effect.

And then, the miracle—a tiny green spike unfolded from the dirt, a Brandywine tomato.

This morning the greenhouse is alive with a host of fragile green plants and the sun is shining.