Hunkering Down

I actually looked at the calendar yesterday, and it scared me. CAPAU is less than a month away. If I want to get my query letters out to my dream agents before I go to CAPAU then I have about three weeks to polish the crud out of The Will of Night Rain. In addition to the Fifty Page Dash Readership Questionnaire, I've decided that I am also going to go back through the book and do yet another round of editing.

It's been a couple weeks since my last round and I have fresh eyes. Plus, with all the errors LaTex is tossing into the PDF, I'm sure I can find some errors to fix. I've gotten through about forty pages since yesterday and I've already corrected about thirty type-os or little things I think could sound better. I'm kind of proud of the fact that I'm finding all of these things, that way the story will be the best it can be. I also did a little more research on different agents. I've added about four to the wishlist.

For the time being, I'm looking for bigger, well established firms with a good client base, lots of connections and plenty of professionalism and skill working with all sorts of rights. If I get my wish and become a New York Times Bestseller, then I will need an agent who can handle that and I might as well do it right the first time. My book is also a little more controversial than some others, so I'm thinking a weightier agency might sell it better. But, who knows, maybe the little agents will be willing to take more risks, we'll see... I'm also going for agents who are only looking for a query letter at first. I had enough trouble as it was writing the query letter and I'll probably die of subluxations if I attempt a synopsis for such a complicated story. My issue is that I just think all the characters and story lines are so important that I can never boil it down to just a few lines. :)

So, happy times. All I can do is cross my fingers that at least two other readers finish the book in the next three weeks (which is a very do-able miracle, folks) so I can at least get some feed back before sending the book out. If not, at least I will have gone through and edited my little heart out.