Before my husband was my husband, he used to have this little saying that went something like, “women are like sharks. They’re always moving forward.”
Whatever. It was him being nervous-guy about not wanting to get sucked into commitment. Turns out, he couldn’t stomach fighting the good fight and settled into domestic bliss with nary a squawk. But the phrase stuck with me, because in my case, it’s true. I’d change the word “women” to “writers,” though, and this article by Erin Bowman at The Crowe’s Nest blog lays it out perfectly:
“When you are querying, you just want an agent. When you get an agent, you just want a book deal. Once you have the book deal, you want your editorial letter. You’re anxious to move into revisions, and line edits, and copy edits, and cover art, and ARCs, and marketing, and tours, and reviews, and seeing your book on a store shelf. And then you want to sell the next novel, and the next, and repeat the process all over again.”
I am querying, and all I want is an agent. Among the rejections, requests from agents to read my book are starting to roll in at an alarming rate. My feelings on this range from giddy excitement to looming dread. If I’m soundly rejected, it means my book is flawed, fatally so. If I sign with an agent, I level up into a professional world that is currently foreign to me. I suppose in order for a writer to become an author, she has to want that next thing more than anything. Otherwise, no one would ever, ever write a query letter. And forget about a one-page synopsis. Just the words “one-page synopsis” makes me throw up in my mouth a little. But we write the query, and we write the synopsis, because like a shark, writers are always moving forward.