#amquerying

Querying is a bit like having abdominal surgery in slow-motion.

Without anesthesia.

Sending your story – your precious baby – out into the world to agents who may love it or hate it, or may love it and already have a similar author on their list, or who love it but think it’s not what the market is looking for right now… You can see where I’m going with this.

Agents receive SO MANY submissions (seriously – just take a gander at querytracker.com – it’s more intimidating than Tindr and I haven’t dated in 20 years.) There’s rarely time for a personalized reply, which means you’ll probably never know what an agent loved or hated about your manuscript.

The point is, querying can get you down. There may be months between submissions and responses and, even when you get a request for a partial or full manuscript, chances are pretty good you’ll still be a pass.

I’ve come to terms with all of these realities fairly quickly because Life Is Too Short and, frankly, too much navel gazing threatens to send me into a despair spiral involving wine-and-chocolate binges and NO, I will not be providing photographic evidence of this.

My personal version of “Pics or it didn’t happen” is “If there are no photos, you can never prove it happened”.

I don’t think anyone who creates art feels no need for external validation that what we create is beautiful to someone besides ourselves but, despite the struggles of agent-hunting, I still write because I can’t NOT write.

Writing is, in and of itself, one of my greatest pleasures. There’s a sublime satisfaction in putting the right word in precisely the right place to make a sentence sing. The right words dance across the tongue, caress the lips, and seduce the senses.

With that in mind, I’ll be sharing a few bits of my short-form writing. I participate (with sad inconsistency of late) in the #VSS365 project on The Twitter, wherein a word of the day is used in a single tweet to tell a Very Short Story (and you’re welcome; I know wondering about the hashtag was making you twitchy.)

I’ll also share the odd snippet of poetry and, now and again, a brief glimpse of whatever I’m working on at the moment.

Find me on Twitter @MRKistlerWrites if you need a cheerleader or a good swift kick in the nethers to keep you going. Wherever you are in the process of “Writing As A Vocation”, the real secret is: don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. If writing brings you joy, keep going, get better, write more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Then check your email again, because one of these days the right agent will swipe right. (That’s how that works, right? I’m not actually on Tindr. Spousal Unit frowns on that sort of shenanigans and frankly he’s all the man I can handle.)