Querying etiquette?

So today I attended a writing seminar, or at least part of it... namely the section on "getting your work out to other people", and naturally a part of that was talking about agents.

A question came up about sending to multiple agents, and the response was in no uncertain terms, NO.  We were told that sending to multiple agents was a huge faux pas, not to be done, a mark of unprofessionalism, etc., etc.

Now, this didn't sound right to me, but I held my tongue.

So I put it out here: unless an agent asks for exclusivity, they don't expect it, right?   A query isn't a commitment, it's... just a query.  You can send them out to five or ten or a hundred agents at once (smartly, of course... no "Dear Insert Agent Name Here"), and it's not a big deal.

Or am I wrong?  I'm perfectly willing to admit I could be.  I'd love some insight here.

Querying in the summertime?

Is July typically a month in which agents take vacation?

I just send out another round of queries last week, and, oddly, I haven't heard any responses yet.  I mean, many agents take several weeks to respond, of course, that's normal.  But typically, in any batch of ten or so, there are a couple who turn it around in 48 hours, though usually with a rejection.

Not that I'm in a big hurry to get rejections, mind you.

Of the queries I have out there, there are three who are currently closed to new queries; a planned, temporary closure from July to September in all three cases.  I find this fascinating.  Is summer the unusually heavy time for querying?  Or is it that three months of closure is necessary to be able to take a mere two weeks of vacation?

Worldbuilding and organic writing

One of my biggest problems is not the worldbuilding, but then taking that worldbuilding and weaving that into a story organically.  The old draft of Crown of Druthal was filled with worldbuild infodumps.  I thought I could get away with some of it by having a main character who is a historian-- it's at least a passable cheat to have him reading about this stuff.  But it still feels like an infodump.

I think this ties into my big problem with prologues in general.  They tend to be (though not always) a rather unartful dump of worldbuild info, sometimes giving away the whole story in the process.  I recently watched the beginning of the pilot of a (failed) genre show that was astoundingly inartful:  several minutes of prologue, mostly done with voiceover narration, rushing through several plot points, and then saying, "Our story begins seven years later".

For Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary, I've been working on having the worldbuilding feel more natural, organic and integrated.  Finding that right balance of showing Maradaine as a living, breathing, working city that is part of a larger culture, a larger nation, while not having that larger world outside intrude too much.

Because there always is that temptation, with all the worldbuilding I've done, to just throw a little more in.

I'm curious, for those who read sci-fi and fantasy, what marks that line between, "That's an interesting bit of knowledge about the world, making it and the characters seem fuller and richer" and "This is a pointless diversion that distracts from my enjoyment of the book"?

 

I honestly think the hardest part of any novel is the part from 20,000 to 40,000 words.

I've often said that novel-writing is like running a marathon.  The latter is something I've never done, of course, but I imagine that running a marathon is a process of pushing through the pain, forcing yourself forward with the knowledge that there IS an end, and while you can't really see it yet, it's real and you can get to it if you just don't stop.

20,000 to 40,000 words is about that.

20,000-30,000 is a swamp, usually.  It's just murk and mess to slog your way through.  And there's stuff in the water that you can't see, and just maybe, maybe, you're a little lost.

For 30,000-40,000, though, it's out of the swamp and it's just a long, hard trek uphill with a steep incline.   Here it's less about confusion or uncertainty-- really once you pass 30K you pretty much are past the point of no return and you will most likely actually finish... and for this it's just work and pushing through the weariness.

Also, I find that once I crack 40K, once I get over that incline, and it's a coast downhill to the conclusion.

Querying what you don't believe in

Found today on Twitter, from @Ginger_Clark with the #pubtip hashtag:

People, don't start your query disparaging science fiction to me. I will have to cut you for it. #pubtip


I find this fascinating.  I mean, I get that some people will write a novel out of cynicism; writing in a genre out of a belief that it's what sells, rather than the genre being a passion that drives the writer.  I don't do that, but I get it, that belief that if you want to sell, you have to write what's selling.  But to not only take that to the point of believing, "What sells is this genre crap, so I wrote genre crap"-- i.e., not really believing in your work, but to actually ADMIT that as a selling point to an agent who states outright that they ENJOY that genre?  Now that's just dumb.  And if you're going to be cynical AND dumb, I can't see you going far in this world.

An empty space

I wish I had a camera with me, as I'm in my local bookstore right now.  Right now, as I walked through the sci-fi/fantasy section, I noticed an empty space on the shelf.  It's a spot on the shelf I always glance at, and today there actually was a gap right there.

The space was between John Marco and Juliet Marillier.

It's the space I intend to be in.

I'm taking this as a sign.

Querying strategy...

There's all sorts of advice out there about querying, but one thing I wonder that I don't see much talking about: when is the best time during the week to send queries?

I have an idea that it might be Tuesday or Wednesday.  The way I see it, agents probably get a ton of queries over the weekend, and thus Monday morning they have a heavily laden inbox.  By Thursday or Friday they've probably built up a backlog of things to do that they have to before the weekend, and thus would have to spend less time on queries.  Tuesday and Wednesday gives one the best opportunity to not be lost in the shuffle.

Of course, it may just be that it's just a constant barrage of queries, and no day is any better than any other.  But it's a theory.