I often forget how long I’ve been writing. The truth is, the answer actually varies. I have memories in elementary school of drawing comic strip stories of my favorite game characters. I spent years (and several rotating members) in a ‘band’ during high school in which the only thing that ever got accomplished was the piles of potential songs I wrote. A few years later, I had a short obsession with the website poetry.com and spent a pretty penny buying the books my poems were published in– yeah, they got me.
Sometime in 2009, a novel-writing bug bit me and held on. Ever since then I’ve started but not completed countless stories, some I’ve scrapped and others I’m still holding onto. If you’ve read my previous blogs, you’ll know that I have self-published four memoirs as gifts for my family and I did actually complete writing one ENTIRE NOVEL! I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve re-read and edited that novel. Next, I had a few beta readers look over it for me and used their feedback for polishing.
Now is the next step, assuming I’m taking my writing seriously, which I was– last time I checked… ask again next week 😉 Time to PITCH AGENTS! That literally is the next step in the process. That’s it. Gotta do it to move forward. But it feels like a giant leap rather than a step. I always imagine a chasm maybe half the size of the Grand Canyon sitting between me and the agents I’m pitching. Nothing baby about that step!
I’ve already spent years prepping myself to receive a thousand ‘no’s and as of this moment already received my first two without much pain thanks to my prepping. I keep fighting the fear of “it’s not ready” as I continue to research which agents feel like a good match for me. Sometimes the silence seems like an eternity, waiting paitiently for either a responce or the given time to lapse so I can nudge.
This step is not just “pitching agents” it’s researching them, following them, crafting a new query letter to match the new agent, documenting, waiting, checking emails, repeat! That’s a lot of steps mixed together in this next step. But be it baby steps or giant steps, I’m all in, doing my best to leap across the chasm.
Laura Stephens 