I am now formatting my supposedly ‘finished’ manuscript.
You know all the double spacing, indenting, Times New Roman, Victorian ankle-covering weirdness I talked about earlier?
While doing that this afternoon, I suddenly developed a bad case of what-if-itis.
What if that scene I pulled out to edit got put back in incorrectly?
What if I didn’t accept changes?
What if I accidentally deleted the best scene I EVER wrote?
What if I ended a sentence on a preposition?
DO I NEED TO START ALL OVER AGAIN?
…did I just misspell preposition?
I finished…I think (foreshadowing).
OK! On to the querying process.
Holy crap…
Last week I thought I was ahead of the game. I joined Query Tracker, found all the middle-grade agents currently accepting submissions (fifty-five to be exact) and followed them on Instagram.
Then I culled that list to agents who have responded to submissions in the last year (fifteen there).
Then I looked at the websites for those fifteen, found out what they were looking for, and culled it down again to five that I think I’d start with.
THEN I sent it all off to Tiffiny because we had a meeting yesterday about querying, feeling very smug that clearly we wouldn’t have much to talk about because I was so very smart and efficient (wait, how do you spell efficient?).
Oh, Melissa, you big dummy.
There is also something called Manuscript Wishlist
And Publishers Marketplace.
And spreadsheets.
And oh yeah, remember that synopsis that you so conveniently compartmentalized back into some dark corner of your frazzled mind?
Cover your ankles it still be lurking too…
[Featured image by Yosuke Ota on Unsplash]
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