Why a first draft is like a poorly planned paint job

This post has automagically uploaded today while I'm off chatting up mystery writers at the Left Coast Crime mystery convention in Santa Fe, NM.

At the Stiletto Gang today, I talk about first drafts that do not behave. I hope your manuscripts are not as disobedient as my WIP.

That's "work in progress" for those of you with dirty minds.

Behave yourselves while I'm gone. Write lots of words, use your spellchecker, and don't answer the door for anyone.

How fast can you reject me?

This e-mail came today from my writer friend who is querying agents:

I've sent a handful of queries out into the great void. Yesterday I got a response from an agent in New York dated at 2:56pm to a query I'd emailed at 3:35pm. Which means that, due to the vagaries of the internet, my query was, technically, rejected even before I submitted it!

Ouch. And yes. This is exactly how much querying sucks.

I recall sitting down with a list of e-queries I planned to send one afternoon. Of course, I was spending inordinate amounts of time personalizing each one with small nuances to suit each particular agent. I sent one off, and before I had the next one crafted, a rejection from the first agent popped right up into my Inbox. Total time? Maybe three minutes.

I think these quickies are more palatable than Rejection by Omission, though. There were quite a few queries I sent that never received a response of any kind. So we're kind of comparing the "rip off the Band-Aid fast" rejection against the "I know you're bleeding, but I'm just going to let that gusher go forever until you give up and die" rejection scenario.

How do you take your pain? Got any good rejection stories you're willing to share?

Surprising rejection quotes

A nice, short article at Boxing the Octopus about keeping rejection in perspective.