Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Stuck Between Grovelling and Smarmy

"We like the plot Miss Austen, but all this effing and blinding will have to go."

What have I been doing?

I'm glad you asked.

I thought to find an Irish literary agent. Brave, impudent perhaps, of me. As it's challenging - not so much the finding of one but the abject, begging tone one wants to keep as far away as possible from the request missive.

Along with that, the d and f on my keyboard decided to go on strike, I may have overused them. H'm. Desperation. Failure. FFFS.

I started my hunt in Cork, the city of my birth and the one that keeps yanking me back by the scruff of the neck every year, sometimes twice in the same year. I found one. Whether she feels she's found me is yet to be seen.

But I spent untold hours polishing up my biography, smoothing my various synopses into full disclosure of my works and oh, that was hard. You're not allowed more than 300 words to summarize individual pieces. And then the cover letter: wheedles, cajoles and despair omitted. Pleasant, light, unconcerned (but not too detached),grammatical, succinct.

I did say this was the year I was going to get really, really serious, didn't I?

Well, I am.


6 comments:

  1. I did not know you used those effing and blinding wurds! Tut, tut, tut! ;) Good luck with a publisher!

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  2. GM:
    The Effing and Blinding are the best bits :) If Jane dropped hers I might have to consider dropping mine :)
    Sex sells, they say.
    XO
    WWW

    ReplyDelete
  3. Best of luck!

    These days they probably beg you to INCLUDE plenty of effing and blinding, not to mention sex, violence and drug abuse.

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  4. why can’t I be like you!!!
    Lazy, unfocused, dithering, that’s me. You’re great. What do you take for it?

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  5. I'd much rather write an entire novel than a synopsis. Querying agents can be as much of a crapshoot as querying publishers. But a great agent? That's heaven! I hope you find a great agent.

    ReplyDelete

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