My first novel, Beautiful, is waiting for a final blessing from my editor. I don’t expect any significant changes at this point. The next thing for me to do, of course, is to find an agent. Ideally, I’d like someone who will sell a publisher on the idea of Beautiful. Of course! And who will work with me on marketing; I do what I can, and the agent does what he or she can. For sure! But most important, for me, is that I find an agent who is excited to work with me for the rest of my career which, God willing, will be another twenty years at least.

Aahhh, finding an agent! That means writing the best query letter I can. But what do agents want? What are they looking for? How can I avoid inadvertently turning them off? I researched query letters on the internet, but as Abraham Lincoln famously did not say, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

So, the last week of April, I attended (is that the correct verb for a webinar?) a Writers Digest webinar on writing query letters. The instructor, Maria Vicente, is an agent with P.S. Literary Agency. From what I can see online, it would be indeed a coup for a debut author to work with PSLA. The webinar was about 90 minutes long, with a bit over an hour being Maria’s presentation. The remainder was Q&A. Any questions that weren’t answered live were answered later as a supplemental download. The best part, from my perspective, was the opportunity for Maria to review my query letter.

I was actually pretty proud of the query letter I submitted although, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I was pretty proud of my writing ability in high school and it was a shock when, in Oberlin College, I learned how much more I had to learn. So it will be interesting to see what Maria thinks of my query.

Anyway, I’m chomping at the bit to start submitting query letters. This is where authors compete to see who overcame the most “no’s.” The conversation goes like this:

Author 1: “I had 192 rejections before I found someone who would read and accept my manuscript.”

Author 2: “Ha, that’s nothing. I had so many rejections, I need to write the number in scientific notation.”

I really do understand why many authors nowadays say, “This is stupid. I’ll just publish my manuscript my own damn self.” I won’t say I’ll never come to that conclusion myself. All I can tell you is that we need to be honest with ourselves and follow our heart. My dream is for my novels to be published through the traditional pathway and to see my work on bookstore shelves. That said, I wish the “traditional pathway” would move faster.

First, a quick follow-up from last week: my wife removed the staples from my scalp, I have no headache, and the radiologist read my CT scan as normal. So all is good, though I have a healthy new respect for gravity.

This past week I’ve been plastering in my living room. We have an older house (older from an American perspective, anyway, where the country itself has only been around for 240-some years). There was water damage around the chimney; the water had leaked through the brick and damaged the plaster. Once we were sure the source of water had been fixed, I removed the affected plaster, leaving large, ugly holes in my living room wall. I replastered the holes, sanded, and now I’m repainting. Very domestic!

Plastering leaves one a lot of time to think. It occurred to me that in some ways plastering is like writing. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’m the kind of writer who creates characters, puts them in a situation, and then documents what these characters — who are real in my mind — do and say. I do not outline before I write. Imagine doing this for an 80,000-word novel such as Beautiful. There are bound to be plot holes…quite a few, as it turned out for my debut novel. Some are obvious; some are subtle. Each one must be found (thank goodness for beta readers) and plastered over so that it’s no longer a hole. When I’m done, the plot…or the wall…is seamless and complete, and looks as though it were always that way.

The other similarity between writing and plastering, of course, is that in both cases the process is incredibly messy. It takes faith, which is an action verb, to continue forward through the mess, believing that the result will look beautiful.

This morning is the first real test of my commitment to writing weekly posts. Around midnight last night, I was sitting in my kitchen snacking on a soy yogurt. This is not, for most people, a particularly dangerous activity. Apparently, I fell asleep and fell off the chair. Using my catlike reflexes, I…hit the floor and busted open my head. I remember sitting in the chair, and then I remember seeing an unholy quantity of blood.

My intrepid wife and I spend the next couple of hours in the local ER. It was a strange experience, confirming to me that I do not like being on the other end of the doctor-patient relationship. The quick-thinking and compassionate physician on duty last night ordered an ECG and a CT scan of my head, but did not do, as best I remember, even a cursory neurological exam or look in my eyes. As a bonus, probably because he was worried about my self-esteem, he told me I have the brain of a seventy-year-old. I’m 58.

So yeah. My day can only get better.