The Undiscovered Country

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

If anyone knows where that line came from, it only proves how old you are.

Truthfully (as if I lie to my own blog), I am a bit surprised. For the last several months, I’ve felt God pulling me to research publishers and agents and get my query letter written.

I fought him a bit, like I always do. Part of it was lack of confidence. I haven’t written anything in a while (legal descriptions for my job not included), and I feel woefully out of practice.

Nevertheless, I finally gave in to God’s urgings and spent a few days researching.

In a word: Ugh. My novel is not in a genre largely accepted by CBA or ABA publishers. That’s the challenge I accepted when writing a Christian Science Fiction book; I knew it would be a hard sell from the beginning.

Still, I found one agent and one publisher possibility. Not a lot, but it’s better than nothing. I admit to teeth-gritting-until-I-got-a-headache frustration when researching publishers/agents and so many said “no science fiction.”

It’s enough to make a person throw up the hands and go Indie.

I have thought long and hard about the possibility. After all, I did publish “A Reason to Hope” through Amazon. Truth is, I simply don’t want to spend so much money and time doing it all myself.

The next step was to tackle the query letter — my one true writing fear. How does one boil a book down to a single page and make it sound interesting? After all, it took me almost five years just to come up with a title that I thought sounded good.

Because work was slow today, and it being a Friday, I decided to go home early and attempt writing a query letter. Less than an hour later, it was done, and to be quite honest, I like how it turned out.

Part of it was I let go. I shut out the internal editor and those horrific voices pounding at the back of my head telling me what a talentless fraud I am.

A little prayer helped, too.

That’s the awesome thing about God. Sometimes it takes but a small step toward him and his goal for us, and he smooths out the trail ahead.

A little praise is in order.

The work is not done, though. Not only does the agent I’m submitting to first require a query letter and synopsis, but a chapter-by-chapter outline. That shouldn’t take but a few days. Once it’s written I will set it aside for a while. A fresh eye always results in finding sometimes glaring mistakes.

Then comes the most difficult part: sending it off.

Once that’s done, it’s out of my hands and success or failure depends how well I sell my book through the . . .

Don’t you hate it when you forget the absolute perfect word? I just did that!

Dang it.

Anyway, to get back on track . . .

It’s the simple act of placing 26 letters in the right order that will either pique their interest and ask for more or they will send a terse email saying, “Thanks but no thanks.”

But one cannot succeed without first taking risks.