It's funny how things can work out; sometimes all your hard work is suddenly rendered nearly meaningless by the sudden appearance of an outside factor. Take, for instance, my independent study this year: Working to Land an Agent. Course description? Research, query, and try to land a literary agent for my novel. It took several weeks into the semester before my adviser took me down this road: I started in January with working on an anthology of short stories -- which I may take on next year, but we'll see. But what happened was something that began actually last semester, and is still ongoing but nearing a (successful?) conclusion.
Some of you may have heard most of this story before, but let me recap: my college has a student/alumni connect program which brings seeking students in contact with alumni who have worked in their particular field of interest. Going even beyond just similar majors, they will try to find an alumnus who has actual experience -- for me, that meant someone who had been published or is being published. For me, that meant a man semi-retired in the Florida Keys named Kevin.
After introductions and brief life-goals -- whether sought of previously lived -- Kevin agreed to take a look at my manuscript, and he enjoyed it. He made some editorial corrections, I found a ton more -- and he mentioned me to a friend of his, agent Joshua Bilmes of JABberwocky Literary Agency. By then I had conveyed my plan to Kevin of taking Winter Break and working on what started out as 17 revision items (and ended somewhere around 23 - 25). Kevin conveyed this to Josh and asked if Josh would mind taking a look at the manuscript once I was done with it. Josh said sure.
That was a good day unto itself. But the story's not over.
So I revised and sent it back to Kevin, who read the entire thing again, and loved it again. Since, by then, I was already working on query packages for the agents I researched for my class, Kevin and I agreed it would be good to approach Josh with a full query and synopsis along with the novel. Meanwhile, I was still plugging away with the independent study.
Well folks, the query and synopsis were completed early last week, and Kevin emailed Josh by Wednesday. Josh was still willing to look at it, so I sent him the synopsis (he didn't require the query; that had in many ways been taken care of) and the first 3 chapters of the novel. I am currently waiting to hear back.
Now, there are many facets to my novel I would not have solidified in my mind if it were not for my independent study, and I wouldn't have even begun research on queries and synopses. So it was not entirely wasted. And Josh may still pass on the novel, which returns me to my list of 36 agents to try. But it is rather exciting ^_^
See you Friday.
Very cool, Daniel.
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