Did I Send the Pages?

Last Sunday, late in the evening, I finally stopped tinkering with the first 30 pages of my manuscript and sent them to the literary assistant, Anita Mumm, at Nelson Literary Agency. Anita said at our meeting at the writers’ conference that it could take up to two months to hear back, and I’m okay with that. I'm trying to decide what a literary assistant is - I suppose she's the keeper of the circular file, culling the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I'm curious about when the agent will actually step into the process.

People are encouraging me to submit my query letter to whatever agents I can locate that represent memoir. How do I do that? I'll go online, of course. I learned from the conference just how necessary it is to approach only agents that deal with my genre. To do otherwise is a waste of time - theirs and mine. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Something I learned while getting the first 30 pages ready is that I want another opportunity to go back over the rest of the book. Editing those pages helped me see places that could use some work - so I'm going to take this opportunity to do that, and send out the query letter.  I've let enough time pass now since looking at the manuscript that it will be fresh for me - and I think that'll be good.

I'll be back.

So What Happened?

"How did the meeting go? You haven't posted anything on the blog yet about it. Did she ask to see more? What did she say? I'm really excited to know." Hillary Houston, an incredibly talented young adult novelist in my Wordsmith Writers Group, sent me this email yesterday, and she wasn't the only one who wanted to know.

Hillary's right - I haven't blogged about my pitch session with Anita Mumm, the agent from the Nelson Literary Agency. My friend Sandy and I went to Castle Rock High School for the writers workshop hosted by the Douglas County Library last Saturday. It was very good, with instructors who covered things such as topic choice, speaker preparation and more. My only complaint was that they didn't repeat any of the offerings, and there were four session times throughout the day, one of which we missed because of our agent appointments. But overall it was worth every penny.

My appointment was scheduled for 11:30, and at 11:30 sharp the library volunteer opened the door of the classroom and I walked through it, finding Anita sitting at a student desk and holding her hand out to shake mine. I'd queried her a couple weeks before and received a return email saying that she found my book intriguing, so I was a bit surprised when she had no recollection of it. She said something about not having read through my query completely, and would I just go ahead and give her my genre and a synopsis. She said she gets 100 queries a day.

We had all of eight minutes and so I was relieved that I'd completed my synopsis the night before and could go through the four parts of my book in pretty concise detail. We had about 30 seconds left when I finished.

Get on with it, you say. Okay, well, the reason I haven't updated my blog yet is that I've been busy getting the 30 pages that Anita requested ready to send. :o)

I have only another week before they have to be in, with the original query letter included, and I'm feeling a bit in crisis mode because suddenly my manuscript doesn't feel as good to me as it used to. My daughter Chloe gave me an idea of a different sort of opening, and I love the idea, so I'm going to try putting it together. Perhaps I'll post it here and see what everyone thinks.

Thank you for your support - it carries me.