Why hello there. It's been a long time, hasn't it?
I have a few reasons for ignoring my blog and I've decided to present them in chronological order. The first is school. The last quarter of school was very busy in that my professors decided it was a good time to hand out essays like they were candy. Trust me- they were not candy.
After I got home, I went straight into the 'relaxing' time of summer vacation. But even that only lasted a week because my brother's high school graduation led to a lot of family obligations. I had a lot of fun at the graduation and at his party. It's a little surreal to think that my little brother is done with high school and will be joining me here in August.
Then I moved into my first apartment and immediately went into job-searching mode. Which did not go as planned because I only got a job offer last week. But it was definitely worth the wait because this is the job I wanted most when I was applying everywhere under the sun. But it made for a stressful month.
BUT during that month I started working on my query letter. For those of you who don't know, the query letter is what you send to agents in the hopes that they will want to read part or all of your book. It generally includes a hook and a few paragraphs outlining the main characters and conflict in the book.
This query letter might be the piece I have struggled with the most. I'm not exaggerating. It was hard to condense 102,000 words worth of story into less than 400 words. I had to decide what was important enough to include and what was actually most relevant to the story. Then I had to work on the phrasing, again and again and again and then again just for good measure. This morning I sent it to my dad, who is merciless with his red pen, and hopefully I'll be able to send it out to a few agents before the weekend.
In addition to the query letter, I gave the book to a few people as beta readers. (These are the people who read a draft and give notes about plot/tone/character/setting etc.) Before I did this, I imagined it would be really hard to get feedback because most of it was going to be criticism. But so far, it hasn't been that bad. I've found all the feedback helpful and I also am not required to change everything suggested. I am still the writer so I still get to decide if something really needs to be changed. I am listening to a quite a bit of the advice I'm getting but not all of it.
Thanks to everyone who read this whole post. I appreciate it. Sorry it wasn't super funny. To reward you, I'm going to tell you the name of the sequel to Black & Gold. I'm only 30 pages in but it's going pretty well after a rocky start. Without further ado, the sequel will be called Crown & Claw.
