How you doing? Sometime before the pandemic, I told myself that once I finish writing my second novel I get to rewatch Dexter, as a treat.
At some point, when the novel was in its infancy, I had a hankering to see Michael C. Hall collect blood specimens and eat medianoches but I made a promise to myself that I would wait until the novel was done. You know, as motivation. Binge-watching TV shows on streaming sites is what I like to refer to as “research” when I’m writing (let me know if you can relate) but I know that it’s not always the most productive use of my time.
The novel is a 65k word thing that I’ve been working on for six years. Six years! Six freaking years of my life I’ve spent tossing and turning at night thinking about plot points and character motivations and how much to show and what to scrap. I almost never wanted to finish it, in the way that I never want a good book or a good movie or a good show to end. Have you ever gotten to the end of a book and just decided not to read the last few pages? I’ve done that many times. And when it’s your own creation, your own little world that you’ve built and tinkered with and made beautiful, it’s really hard to leave. I just wanted to keep on living in this project and make it as perfect as I possibly could.
Last week I finished it. Hooray for me, right? I couldn’t believe it, I still can’t believe it, but I feel like it’s as done as it’s ever going to be. I might still go back and tweak a few things, but it’s primed and ready for other people’s eyeballs. To celebrate, I scrolled through Netflix only to find that Dexter is no longer streaming there. Guess I’m gonna have to ask my husband to download it for me from his file sharing site.
Without talking too much about it, I'm trying to find a literary agent. It’s so genius of me to embark on this quest right when everyone and their cousin is wrapping their Nanowrimo project and shotgunning their largely unedited PDFs to already inundated agents’ inboxes, but what can you do? And no offense to anyone who partook in the November month long novel writing marathon. If you were able to make it to the finish line with something you’re proud of, then you should be proud. The overflowing inbox comment is something I’ve gleaned from reading blog posts by agents. April may be the cruelest month according to Eliot, but December is the worst time of the year if you’re trying to get representation.
I’ll probably just query up to 20 agents and wait a while. A friend of mine who knows what many agents are looking for in a query, having been an agent herself, is going to help me polish up my letter and sample pages in January, so I’m not in a huge rush right now. I just figured I’d give it a go myself in the meanwhile. You know, for funsies.
Some part of me feels superstitious, like it's not a good thing to talk about stuff like this publicly because I might jinx myself. Have you ever felt that way? Like, you're just starting out, trying to do something that you've never done before, and you're excited about it so you want to talk about it and share what you're thinking and what you've done so far, but you're afraid to because it might not happen and then anyone who's heard you talk about this thing will ask you questions later and then you'll either be disappointed in yourself for not succeeding in the thing you were so happily bragging about before, or you'll have to lie. It’s such a predicament.
Earlier this week I finished watching Six Feet Under. It's a weird show but I enjoyed its soap opera melodrama and unlikable characters (the only characters I really liked were David and Keith). I don't know why it took me so long to finally watch it. Related to this post, one of the characters was trying to get pregnant and her husband kept telling everyone about the pregnancy way too early, placing this awful pressure on his wife who had already miscarried once. Common knowledge tells us to wait until the first trimester has passed before sharing the news, but the husband, who was my least favorite character and the only person on the show who I actively hated, was not the kind of guy to consider how other people feel if he’s already feeling one way.
Anyway! I’ll stop talking about it for now. If you’d like to wish me luck in my search or offer me any tips and tricks when it comes to querying, I’d greatly appreciate it. It’s one thing to write the damn book, it’s a whole other goliath task to get it out into the world and actually seen and read by people. Submitting and querying is definitely a job unto itself. Self publishing has its merits, but I’ve never gone the agent route and I do believe this book is good enough to put the work in to get it the attention it deserves. And if things don’t go the way I’d like, then let’s just pretend I never wrote this post.