My Novel

Status Update

I’m ready to start sending out queries to agents, asking them to represent my novel again. I’ve read that to become proficient at something, you have to spend 10,000 hours working on it. That’s about four years, working full time. I’ve spent three and a half years writing at least eight hours a day, often more, and reading about the publishing industry and the craft of writing. I pray it pays off.

The most frustrating part of the novel for me has been the first chapter. It took a while to get the ending I think works, but I’m still second-guessing myself on the beginning. Most agents only want to see the first five, sometimes ten, pages of your manuscript, which they may read if your query letter interests them. If you don’t hook them in those few pages, they will often not bother to answer let alone ask for the rest of the manuscript. I have faith in the abilities God gave me and am willing to work hard, so we’ll see what his plans are.

Books I’m Reading

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett came in at 973 pages, but the only boring part he should have trimmed was the endless description of how to build cathedrals in the 1100’s. A few descriptive details having to do with how the characters felt would have sufficed. The characters held my interest throughout. The only other complaint I had was that the villains got their due only after they became old and too feeble to cause any more harm—anticlimactic.

Even more interesting because it wasn’t deliberate, I next read Heather Graham’s Come the Morning, which was set in the same time period and talked about the same historical people, though they were more important characters and more integral to the story in Follett’s novel. The romantic conflict wasn’t particularly plausible but the tension in the ending pages kept me turning them.

In Donald Maass’s book, The Breakout Novelist, he recommended his client, Anne Perry. She writes historical mysteries. I read Seven Dials, which is part of a prolific series. The story stands alone by itself, though I thought the characters weren’t as fully developed as I’d have liked, probably because they have been in previous stories. Set in Victorian England, the historical elements were interesting, and I like her writing style.