Agent #17′s website says she responds within a month. But she didn’t. So I sent a follow up query. She didn’t respond to that either.
Something tells me she’s not interested.
Still, I thought about sending yet another follow up query, just in case she somehow didn’t get the first two, but then I thought that would just be really, really annoying and lump me into the category of “Writer Without a Clue; Therefore to Be Mocked as well as Rejected.”
I’ve been rejected, plenty of times. But I’d rather not be mocked.
So I kept my follow up query to my follow up query to myself.
Which means it’s the end of the line, folks. Agent #17 was the last agent I queried about my novel before deciding that a) I would do another round of revisions before sending out another query and b) now is not the time for me to be trying to find an agent anyway.
I started this agent query process just over a year ago. When I began, I honestly thought I’d have found an agent by now. I was so naive–despite the fact that I’d been reading agent blogs and knew the odds were against me. But for some reason I thought I’d beat those odds. I figured if I behaved professionally and presented a polished project, how hard could it be?
Hmm. Let me think about that for a second. Here’s the answer, braniac: hard. Very, very hard.
Now, I’m probably still naive, but at least next time I go to start this process up again, I’ll know to expect it to take several dozen queries and probably several dozen months, too.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep practicing my craft and revising my novel. Eventually, something will give. Someday.
I am a reader (I feel about books the way some people feel about chocolate: yum), a writer (I've written a book, even: The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year), and a mother (of four). So that's what I blog about: reading, writing, and raising my kids.
My dear, I just spoke with my mother this morning and she made a connection at a Writer’s Conference last week who has a long standing self-publishing-like company and I think that’s what she’s going to end up doing. Maybe you can talk to her about it, as you have time.