This is the 300th post on this blog! I've come a long way. Crazy to think I've been doing this for almost a year. I guess that means I go back to college soon. Yikes!
We critiqued a couple more manuscripts this morning. I found it interesting how my group showered the praise on one of the women. She wrote about a Chinese boy who went diving for crabs and things and ended up facing a shark, and killing it in the process. I mean, it was interesting, I guess, but it was slow and full of punctuation errors and things. Historical isn't my genre. Plus, the main character holds his breath for like eight to ten minutes while fighting a shark.
I don't know- I just thought it was interesting how everyone was telling her this is the kind of book that would be up for a Newbery award. It was... humbling.
Last night, I worked on my query letter for The Worth of Ink. As part of the conference, everyone in my morning workshop was assigned to meet with an agent at some point during the week. Jorja even put some make-up on me this morning.
We were to submit two pages of our writing along with our query letter. I was nervous, since my first two pages weren't my strongest. Mom pointed out that my note never said they had to be the first two pages, so I sent 12 and 13, along with the proper page number to be sure my agent got it.
Lo and behold, the printer chopped off the upper half of the heading and the agent didn't realize he wasn't reading pages 1 and 2, so when he told me how little sense of place I had and I mentioned what I'd done, he told me I could ignore most of the comments he'd written. Well...
Anyway, I only met with him for like five minutes or so. When I prompted him, he offered me a comment about how to improve my query letter, though I wish we would have focused on that more. He was in a rush because his last meeting had gone over and he wanted to get back on schedule. At least I did get to hear what he had to say, even though his comments weren't optimistic.
During our one-on-one chat, she asked me what my characters looked like, since I had described Gavin as having some feathers and Ethel as being a creature called a "fauner" (which is more or less a human, but in a world where that term doesn't exist). I showed her a drawing I had done of them, as well as the one Linzie drew for me. Hillary was very impressed, and I passed Linzie's contact information along to her, since Linzie takes commissions. She loves it when authors approach her asking if she'll help them design their characters a reference, so it would be great if things worked out for those two!
