Catching Up

Well, THAT was a longer break than I anticipated from my blog.

I wish I could blame NaNo, but alas, I have no claim to that excuse.

The truth is, October is just super-hectic for me. I have my older son's birthday, my husband's birthday, my brother's birthday, Halloween, school Halloween parties, other birthday parties, and this year I got the unpleasant surprise of Hurricane Sandy. Compared to all that, NaNo almost seems like it would be a vacation.

Thankfully, we didn't lose power because of the hurricane, but I used the forced downtime (husband working from home because of the lack of public transportation to his office, older kid at home from school closure) to catch up on editing one of my critique partner's manuscripts and on another writing project.

I think the time away from "Bloodsisters" was good for both me and for my query letter and manuscript. I haven't spent this much time away from the story in over a year, and it was clearly long overdue. Tonight I caught the whiff of a way to really tighten up the query letter and make it shine, and once I got going I found myself on a roll. The result: what I hope is a can't-resist query letter. And, I've come up with new opening lines to the story itself, which I hope will also help in my quest for an agent. The current count as of today is: ten rejections, twelve still floating around out there, and a handful of un-queried agents on my Query Tracker list.

For the next few weeks at least -- maybe for the rest of 2012 -- I plan to focus on my critique partner's ms and other writing projects. Of course, I'll still be torturing myself by reading Query Shark and other query how-tos...just in case I get another whiff of inspiration.