Hello world! I got myself a new website! Why? Because, it turns out, getting my awesome debut novel published is going to take longer that I expected. Which means I’m not bringing in a paycheck. Because folks, while Wix is a very cool and easy to use, it’s kind of pricey at $168 a year when you don’t have a published novel to sell.
A few interesting things have happened in the past few months since I published my last blog post: 1. Obnoxious emails that appear to be sent from my own email address, the one I use to query literary agents, began filling up my spam folder.
I did a DuckDuckGo search for the words “when is a final draft finished novel” (I try to avoid Google) and found, at the top of the search results, a class offered by the Iowa Summer Writing Festival titled The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel. In other words, the answer to this innocuous question is valuable enough to be turned into a commodity that can be exchanged in the free market for money, like pork bellies.
When I began querying literary agents this past spring, I believed they would fall in love with my awesome first chapter and my amazing writing (go ahead, laugh). They did not. After thirteen rejections, three no-replies, and an overpriced online Writers Digest course on what literary agents look for in a query, I think I know why.
In the September Pub Rants blog post from Nelson Literary Agency, “9 Story Openings to Avoid, Part 4,” they posed a fun challenge to craft a brief opening scene from these six lines of dialogue…