I'm going to be in Chicago next week, Sun 1/6 through Sat evening 1/12.  I'm already planning to meet up with a couple of fellow LOTR fans on the Wednesday evening, 1/9.  If anyone else out there wants to join us, I'd love to meet you.

I was going to post about seeing the new Hobbit movie last night, but given today's tragedy in Connecticut I think it's better to wait.

My heart goes out to every person who lost a loved one -- a child, a parent, a spouse, a friend -- and I can only pray that you can find some healing in the love and support of those around you.

G-d willing, one day we as a nation will come together and put an end to this continual cycle of senseless, horrific gun violence.  Before another child dies.

In less than three hours I'll be at the Hobbit Premiere!  My delight is only slightly marred by the fact that if I lived in New York I'd have seen it a week ago.  But then I'd have to be a New Yorker, and live in New York City, so never mind.  They might get the movie first, but the Pacific Northwest is where the real Elves are.

Oh, I cannot WAIT to go back to Middle-earth.  I just hope I can finish this Avengers fic I started before the muses sweep me back to Mirkwood.

Wee!

So I went to two conferences back-to-back this week.  The first one was for work.  It was in North Carolina, I flew there on Sunday (while fasting -- it was Tisha B'Av), stayed for four days, attended a couple of board meetings, met with a lot of vendors selling expensive equipment, and tried to stay awake during the clinical physics sessions.  The second was here in Portland.  I flew home late Thursday night, checked into the Sheraton hotel near the airport, and I've spent the last three days hobnobbing with agents, editors, and other aspiring and professional writers.

So I had an agent read the partial manuscript, and she loves it and wants to read the whole thing.  Yay!  The problem is, she says the word count is too long.  She wants me to cut 50,000 words or else split the novel into two books.

This is a problem.  I can't think of a good place to split it -- everything in the book works together toward the ending.  There are a couple of chapters which I could conceivably cut, but they serve so well to establish Malachi's character, and they introduce the police detective, who plays a small but not insignificant role in several other scenes.  If I cut him out, we lose Rena's only real ally in the book.

The alternative, of course, is to say no to this agent and keep going along the path toward self-publishing.  There are arguments for and against that, mostly having to do with the prestige of being a "real" author vetted by a publishing company.  The profit share is far less, and the work of promoting the book still rests pretty much with the author.

Sigh.  What to do?

And, as an aside, I do realize that I am INCREDIBLY lucky to have gotten even this far with an agent, even though there is every possibility that even if I do cut it down she might read the complete manuscript and decide that it isn't the project for her after all.  I wish every writer out there were blessed with problems like this.

This is too awesome not to share.

President Obama supports gay marriage.

It's a good day.

So as of today I've sent out four queries and had two rejections.  The trick, I think, is to just keep sending queries so that I always have one in the queue, one "could be yes" to offset the "definitely no."

FYI, if anyone out there is querying agents, there's a fantastic resource to help you know what works and what doesn't.  Check out Query Shark for some really excellent examples of how to revise your query letter.

Here's the one I'm using now -- you can see it's improved a lot from my first draft.  I've also written a synopsis, but I don't know why agents want one.  It's boring.  I don't want to read it, and it's MY book.  I can't imagine why anyone else would want to.  I'm concentrating on agents who'll look at a query letter and first chapters of the book for now.

( Dear Agent . . .Collapse )

I'm about to send my first ever query letter to my first ever literary agent.  Here's the draft (minus the agent specific info that I used in my opening).  What do you think?  Does it make you want to read more?

( Dear Agent . . .Collapse )

So I've been reading a lot of 'Sherlock' fic set post Reichenbach, and seeing a lot of theories about the show, and to date I haven't seen anyone else advance my own theory, and it's driving me nuts.  To me it seems perfectly obvious, but no one else seems to think so.  So, for what it's worth, here's my theory.


( MAJOR SPOILERSCollapse )