Shannon Phillips

I opened up my novel-submission notes today, and realized with chagrin that it’s been two months since I did anything on that front. I was moving house and all, but a lot of it’s on me: I’ve been meaning to do another round of queries for a long time, but apparently I prioritize almost anything else—including blogging, scrubbing the toilet, and performing daily maintenance on my son’s wooden railways—over writing, or marketing my writing. So it always just seems like I never have the time for it. Well, of course I don’t, if it’s literally my last priority!

The following is jargon-y. A quick gloss: a “query” is the standard pitch that agents like to see. Some agents request that the query be accompanied by the first five pages, while some want the query to stand alone. Agents who are interested will request a “partial,” typically the first fifty pages. Agents who are still interested after seeing the partial will request a “full,” i.e. the full manuscript.

I noted earlier that my query seemed to be working well, but my opening pages were not. The submission stats for my first round of queries look like this: 35 queries sent > 6 requests for partials > 0 requests for fulls > 0 offers of representation. ALL of the six requests for partials were generated from queries that had no opening pages attached, and none of them led to further requests. This indicates, like I said, that the query letter is good (a one-sixth response rate is completely acceptable in this industry) but that the opening of my novel is weak. Critiques from the people kind enough to read early drafts of the book confirmed this for me: the beginning chapters were too slow.

I also blogged about the trouble I was having cutting material from those first few chapters, even after I knew it had to be done. Well, it was painful, but I eventually managed to cut ten pages out of the first sixty, which I think tightens up the opening considerably. (Incidentally, I also changed the working title of the book, from Avalon 2010 to The Millennial Sword. The first title is out because there’s no way this book would come out this year, and plus, it ensures that the novel would be dated as soon as it was released. I’m not purely happy with the second title either, but I couldn’t think of anything else that better conveys the concept of a modern-day girl who ends up wielding Excalibur. Suggestions welcome!)

So today I sent out five more queries featuring the new, improved opening pages. I’ve already gotten back one request for a partial, which is truly heartening: I’m no longer losing the agents’ interest by page five! Yay me!

On a less-good note, Robin made it really hard to carve out the time to review the rewritten pages and send out the new queries. He and I struggled a lot today over the issue of my attention not being firmly directed at all moments towards himself. He is, in fact, as I type this, attempting to clamber between me and the keyboard. Also I have to go make dinner. I feel good about making some progress towards marketing my novel—but not good about how very difficult it was finding the time to do so.

My father-in-law sent me an issue of the new Urban Farm magazine, and I can honestly say that I haven’t been this excited about a magazine since I first subscribed to Dragon in seventh grade.

(It came wrapped in brown paper, maybe because of the Clyde Caldwell covers: I didn’t even know enough to realize that the brown-paper-wrapping was a sign that something shameful might be inside. I haunted the mailbox every month waiting for the new issue to come. When I first started writing short stories, Dragon was the only market I submitted to. The first stories were really bad; some of them were actually Dragonlance fanfic. But I kept writing them and sending them in. Then-editor Wolfgang Baur replied with form rejections at first…followed by encouraging, personalized rejections…followed by actual letters with suggestions for revisions…and then at last in my senior year of high school he actually bought one of my stories and it ran in the magazine. It was one of the high points of my life, and Wolfgang Baur—with his willingness to help a naïve teenage girl churning out the dragon fanfic mature into a real writer—remains one of my models for what a great editor can be.)

Anyway! Urban Farm! The issue Dave sent me has articles about backyard chickens, various composting techniques, self-sufficiency (for the really committed), and some basic stuff like community gardening and CSA boxes. I immediately looked for a subscription card, but they’re so new that they aren’t yet offering subscriptions. I’m following them on Twitter, which I guess is the next best thing! I want my backyard chickens so bad.

So, I recently completed one of my long-held goals—to finish a novel-length project. Actually as originally phrased the goal was “to use my time off work to write a novel,” but, surprise, it turns out that childcare, cooking, and housekeeping do not actually constitute “time off work.” Anyhoo! A couple years later than planned, I actually did manage to finish my first novel.

I pushed it on everybody I could reach, and when a few of them actually read the thing, I used their comments to do a second draft. Now I’ve fixed everything that’s easily fixable, and I’m left with structural weaknesses that I don’t know how to fix—the main one being that, okay, I had this idea where I wanted to show the heroine kind of gradually pulling aside the veil of mundane life to reveal this fantastic world lurking just beneath the surface. It sounds cool when I put it like that, but another way of putting it is “the action is slow to start.”

The first big fight scene is on page 61, which may well be too late for a story that ends up as a swashbuckling tale of adventure. I’ve tried to put in enough conflict, foreshadowing, and Intimations of Weirdness to keep the reader hooked through the early chapters, but I just don’t know if it’s enough. The problem is that what’s going on in place of the sword-fights during those first 61 pages is stuff that needs to happen anyway: important characters being introduced, my heroine’s personality being established, and a rhythm of mundane life getting set up so that it can be blown to bits on page 61. Also, during the rest of the book the heroine is forced to balance the requirements of her ordinary life (making the rent, getting along in the office) with her extracurricular duties as Magickal-Mystical Guardian of the City, and I think this provides a source of extra tension and humor. So I just don’t know how to compress the first 61 pages.

Maybe I should tell you what the book is about? Here’s the pitch:

Viveka Janssen isn’t a dragonslayer. She’s a practical Midwestern girl brought to San Francisco by the prospect of an entry-level PR job, and her greatest ambitions involve finding an apartment and making a good impression at work. But Viv’s sensible nature will be shaken when she comes into possession of the legendary sword Excalibur, and must suddenly learn a new role as the modern-day Lady of the Lake. As she peels back the layers that separate her ordinary life from the world of fairy tales, she finds herself thrust into a shadow war between human civilization and the forces of wild magic.

Soon, as Viv struggles to understand the powers of the sword, the plans of her enemies, and the intricacies of office politics, she also finds herself romantically involved with a crusading reporter…who may himself be more than he seems. And come Monday morning, Viv still has to make it to work on time.

If anybody who I haven’t already importuned to critique the thing would be willing to take a look at it and give me feedback, just let me know. (Also, anyone who has a first draft but would like the second, let me know that too.) I’m especially eager to get feedback about whether or not the opening chapters are boring, and any suggestions for ratcheting up the tension.

In the meantime, I’m doing exactly what I probably shouldn’t: throwing my hands in the air and calling it done because I just don’t know how to work on it any more. Instead, I’m tossing it at agents and seeing if any part of it will stick.

The agent search is a weird thing. It’s possible to submit to editors directly, without an agent, but editors prefer working with agents because they act as gatekeepers (weeding out most of the worst drek) and often as a first-pass editor. Also, agents do a lot for writers besides just submitting the work and handling the contract details, and they almost always pay for themselves. I’d like an agent if I could get one.

The funny thing about submitting to agents is that they almost never want to see what you’ve written—at least, not right away. What they want to see is a one-page query letter describing what you’ve written. (My query is built around the pitch I excerpted above.) I guess most would-be writers are just so bad that it’s obvious from a few paragraphs? Anyway, if the agents like a query, they’ll ask for what’s called a “partial”—the first 30 to 50 pages. If they like the partial, they’ll ask for the full. Then they may or may not offer to represent you.

So, my dithering over the first 61 pages really ought to be dithering over the first 30 to 50, because that’s the range of a “partial.” This is why so many contemporary fantasy novels open with a fight scene or a dead body; you have 30 pages to hook your agent. Which is, to be honest, perfectly fair, because frankly you only have one page to hook your reader.

I do have conflict in my opening pages. It’s just not sword-fighting conflict. It’s the conflict of a young woman navigating a new city, trying to find an apartment and not be late for her first day of work. Oh and meanwhile this crazy lady hands her a big sword and tells her she’s supposed to be the Lady of the Lake. I like that set-up, but I recognize that pulling it off is going to require some extremely engaging writing, and I just can’t tell whether or not mine is doing the job.

In the past couple weeks I’ve submitted queries to fifteen agents. Four of them have sent back form rejections (“Thank you for thinking of us, but we do not feel that this project is right for us at this time”). Three of them have asked for partials, and the rest I haven’t heard back from yet. These are actually pretty great statistics. I found a couple of agents that keep stats on the queries they receive: one got 327 queries in a week, and requested partials for 4; the other got 208 queries in a week, and requested partials for 1. So I’m definitely beating those odds.

What worries me is that, of the four who sent form rejections, three of them had asked to see the first 5-10 pages along with the query letter. The other one, and the three who requested partials, had asked to see the query only. So I’m afraid it’s entirely possible that my query letter is strong but my opening pages are weak.

Still, getting those requests for partials has been kind of thrilling. Getting a request for a full would be extremely thrilling, but I’m not holding my breath: most agents ask for 4 to 6 weeks to review submitted material. So, I have a lot of time to obsess over those first 61 pages.

And, oh god, the house deal: it’s still dragging on but I can’t bear to talk about it. So there’s that.