A Query Game

After much revisioning and query drafting and perhaps too little synopsis revising, today I officially launched my search for an agent.  There’s a giant spreadsheet with stats tracking and everything, because I’m incapable of doing anything more complicated than pouring a bowl of cereal without a spreadsheet.  The two rejections that came within the first ten hours notwithstanding, I am cockily confident that I will, at any moment[1], have a passel of people begging to represent me.  I mean, come on, space pirates and sentient computers I put there just to fuck with people; I’ve basically made literary candy.  Also, I have ego problems.

Anywho, since, unlike with short story submissions, I’ll probably never hear anything back on the majority of the queries I send, I thought I’d turn this into a bit of a public game.  Otherwise there won’t be enough input into the feedback loop to keep it running and on target.  And so I hereby introduce you to Query-go-round 2012.  Here’s how it works.

This is an Anaea vs everybody betting against her game.  Anybody who wants to play picks a date for 1) My first partial request 2) My first full request and 3) My first offer of representation.  Whoever is closest on each of these gets a prize with ties going to the optimist.  In other words, if two people were both off by a week, the person who guessed earlier wins.  Because they’re cooler.  Prizes can range from me taking you out to dinner, baking you a pie, or traumatizing you in fiction.  You can name a desired prize when you place your bet, and I’ll let you know whether or not it’s acceptable.

But wait, there’s more.

Excluding the two queries I’ve already heard back on, I currently have eight queries out.  I should have a minimum of five out at any given time.  If I fall under five for more than 48 hours (in case I get a slew of responses all at once while I’m crunched) I take a hit.   For every third hit I accrue, everybody still playing gets to give me a penalty.  They have to agree on the penalty, and I’ll use a poll to determine it.  Past penalties I’ve paid for losing similar bets involved buying people ice cream, cookbooks, porn, and permitting Nick to read something I wrote out loud.  (Table.  Hiding.  Under.)

And that’s not all!

Come March 1 2013, if I’ve been shut out (i.e. no requests for anything), everybody playing gets a prize.  Again, we’ll negotiate what when the time comes.  I’ll also serialize the novel here so the world can see what a terrible wrong it’s done me[2].  This is not a promise to leave the novel here into perpetuity or whatnot as I’d like to sell the thing, but it will all appear here.  And then I’ll join the hordes of unwashed self-publishing masses full of angst and self-aggrandizement.  We all lose win!

In summary, opportunities to persecute me and prizes for betting on long odds.  What’s not to love?

Who’s in?

1. For values of any moment that include “Six months from now” and “Never.”
2. That high pitched whining is my tiny, tiny fiddle

P.S. Sorry to the RSS readers for the wordpress spasm.  For a minute there it was posting instead of saving to the drafts folder.  Not sure what was up with that.