This Year, I'll Tell Ya

Err, or maybe not. We all know what 2020 has been like so I'm not going to go there. However...ugh! It was the beginning of the new Roaring Twenties. It was supposed to be a good year. Only it has been so tiring, so frustrating, so...so...

Anywhooie!

Back in May I attempted fate and sent out my query letter to seven agents. Five rejections and two CNR's was the result. I know it wasn't very many to judge by what my failure could have been. Maybe wrong timing, maybe it wasn't the query letter but the sample pages that made them go, not for me. Who knows? Agents don't usually tell you why they reject, if they even respond. I have been wanting and meaning to rewrite the query letter but my desire just hasn't been there, especially after going back to work at the end of May, and work for the past few months had been chaotic to say the least. Things are simmering down though, and now I'm starting to think about that query again.

This time of the year should hopefully garner some requests. We're now in my favorite season, Autumn, and in a little over a month my favorite holiday is coming, Halloween (or Samhain for the more traditional). My novel is a vampire story set in my small Michigan hometown in 1923, and I hope agents are getting into the mood for the spooky stories to come rolling in. SO, that means I need to crack my knuckles (no no no, that will hurt, I can't do that) and get to work rewriting this query letter. Maybe the one I have will work, maybe it won't, but the one I have focuses on Jennie and I thought to write the new one from Josef's perspective, my anti-hero.

He is, in my opinion, the far more interesting character of the three, and though when I set out to write this book years back to have it focus on Jennie and her fight to keep Josef away from her best friend, Millie, the book's focus turned more and more toward him, sort of. The book switches chapters between the three aforementioned characters pretty evenly, but most of the chapters, whether he's the point-of-view character or not, Josef is generally the main focus. Mostly, but not always. Not only that, but he's bisexual and agents these days are looking pretty hard for stories with LGBTQ characters, and his sexuality does come into play with the subplots of the story. I have to write my query so it points that out.

With October quickly approaching and with people getting in the mood to harness the spirits of the dark times, and if I want to take advantage of this mood, I need to start getting serious about writing this new query letter.

Here are a couple of pictures I took September 23 of Lake One, one of the settings in my novel and its namesake.

The hill above Lake One, the location of my fictional farmhouse where Josef and his vampire family resided. I actually placed it further left but the tree is blocking the view of that area, and where I stood to take this photo there's a fence separating the cemetery from the neighbor's property, and I wasn't about to trespass to take the photo (they have dogs). The building in the photo is new as of this year. There was nothing but empty field before.

There were most likely fewer trees during the time of my novel, but this is the shore/beach where the boathouse and several scenes in my novel take place. The hill where my fictional farmhouse that Josef and his vampire family resided is out of view in this photo to the left.