Thoughts on #millionqueries
Today I live-tweeted my slushpile. The live-tweeting got picked up by Choire Sicha of The Awl, and then by Thought Catalog. Over the course of the day I got 400+ new followers. I read about 90 queries during #millionqueries, and made five requests of partial manuscripts. I was briefly put in Twitter jail.
I have a few thoughts about this:
1. This started as bit of a frustration-vent; I wanted to get through a big chunk of my unread queries, and had seen someone do a #tenqueries livetweet earlier in the week. I started out with just #tenqueries. Once I was done, though, I realized that seven out of the ten didn’t include the first five pages that the DMLA specifies in its submission guidelines, so there hadn’t been much variety to what I had tweeted. I was also, at this point, a little irritated with constantly having to tell people to submit the five pages our guidelines call for. So I decided to keep going.
I do think that as an exercise in letting people know the kinds of issues agents face, this was useful, in that it gave some people on twitter a bit more insight into what an agent’s work day is like, and what our email inboxes actually consist of. People were able to ask me questions to clarify what I was saying or what I rep.
2. I avoided giving specific information about the queries I was reading beyond genre and some basic reasons for rejecting something. Some people, especially once this got picked up, found this lack of detail unspecific and unhelpful—looking back, I’m not sure I could have done better. To be more detailed I’d need to give excerpts, or more detailed plot descriptions, or even bits of funny lines from the query letters themselves—while this is hilarious on slushpilehell, it’s less funny when a literary agent does it in public. Several people pointed me towards the #queryfail kerfuffle in 2009, before I became an agent, in which several literary agents similarly live-tweeted their slush pile reading, only with much more snarky commentary.
3. Some of the the pushback wasn’t even about the queries themselves, but being more specific about my reasoning for rejecting something. Yes, “boring” is a bit vague. So is “didn’t pull me in.” This is such a personal business—sometimes I tagged as “detailed pass” works that I could see had potential but weren’t genres or premises I was interested in repping. Sometimes even though the writing was OK it literally didn’t pull me in- I got bored after one paragraph, one page, one sentence. And even though I wasn’t actually rejecting anything in real time—more on that later—sometimes, the answer was just “this person can’t write.”
4. The “not following submission guidelines” thing. On our website, we ask for the first five pages, a one to two page synopsis, all pasted into the body of an email with a query letter. So many of the queries I receive don’t follow these guidelines—they omit the first five pages, they include the entire MS as attachments, they just send me a link to their amazon page where they have self pubbed their book. So I decide on the basis of what they send me. I used to send first five pages requests as a matter of course, but that’s turned into a ton of work. Now I read the query letter or synopsis, and if the premise is good, or if the author has credentials, I reply to the email asking for the first five pages. Someone asked why I do that for some and not for others–basically, I don’t want to waste someone’s time by requesting something I know I’m not going to be into.
5. I keep circling back to the idea of “having time.” When it comes right down to it, I don’t have time to request five pages from every author who doesn’t follow our guidelines, or to write detailed rejections of each of the 500+ queries I’ve received since November (oldest query in my inbox.) I read for my boss, I have nine clients. I handle administrative stuff around the office. In other words, my job as an agent is not to hold someone’s hand and teach them the ways of the world. All those minutes spent writing “Your main character is a bad pastiche of Jack Reacher” would add up. The last author I signed sent me a query and didn’t follow submission guidelines. She didn’t include a synopsis or the first five pages. Her query letter was well-written, however, and made her book sound exciting. She had an original premise, and though she had interest from other agents, she had seen my profile via Writer’s Digest, had checked out my twitter and my blog, and thought that I might be a good fit for her book. Since she had other interest (and since I knew I was interested in the premise) I decided to skip asking for the first five, and asked for the first fifty. I signed her up in January.
6. Around mid-afternoon the #millionqueries hashtag got picked up by The Awl and Thought Catalog. Choire Sicha framed it as an educational, if sort of horrifying experiment, and I think Thought Catalog thought the same? Both sites framed it a bit as “Go watch this asshole be mean to writers on the internet,” which I understand, because at it’s heart this is a really boring exercise. Reading queries is boring. The bad writing all blurs together until every sixteen year old misunderstood teen girl who one day wakes up from a dream, goes to the mirror and describes her hair, and is then kidnapped by a knight/elf/fairy/vampire only to learn that she is a princess/princess self/chosen vampire starts to bleed into the next. But when I find something that captivates my attention—with a cool premise or a good opening line, good writing or interest from editors / other agents—I take notice. Those things stand out. I requested five partials today. Sometimes—not necessarily with these—I request partial manuscripts knowing I will probably eventually say no, but I can see that there is something about an author’s writing that makes me want to see more, because I want to give them more feedback or see where they take the book. I like to be surprised.
After all this, I’m not sure when I’ll do #millionqueries again. I didn’t actually do much rejecting today—any rejections I sent today were for things that I don’t rep, such as nonfiction or middle-grade fiction—so I still have about 160 rejections to send. (I had been reading queries for hours before I started live-tweeting them.) Sending the rejections as I read the queries felt inappropriate, and any details I gave to the author I wanted to remain private. I’m really glad, however, that I got a chance to connect with people, as cheesy as that sounds—I know that this business can seem harsh and unforgiving, that agents can seem aloof or disconnected, and I’m glad if I got to dispel any of that even a little, even if for only a few. I hope that I get a query from someone who was watching #millionqueries today—or even someone who wasn’t. I hope that query surprises me and makes me keep reading. I hope it makes me impatiently refresh my inbox to see if the requested pages have come in. Because at the end of the day I don’t do this for the buckets of cash (lol) or the retweets or the notices in the Awl- although, keep those last coming, thankyouverymuch—I love to read, I love stories, I love to find them sitting quietly and waiting to be found.
P.S. Twitter Jail is a frustrating and hilarious situation wherein I was not allowed to tweet because I had exceeded my daily limit- 1000 tweets in less than 24 hours. I had to wait an hour to start again, and in that time I did some hunting for my coworker Amy Boggs to find a contract. In a giant, unsorted box of other contracts. Livetweeting was much more fun.
And when I say “stacks of books” I mean…
STACKS
OF
BOOKS
More January Reads
The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara Tuchman & All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
As a consequence of reading The Guns of August at an impressionable age I have long been a) fascinated by the First World War and b) determined to make my way through historian Barbara Tuchman’s oeuvre. (All except for that one she wrote about the middle ages. Couldn’t get into it.) After seeing the War / Photography exhibit in Houston I got back into the military history vein and read The Zimmermann Telegram, her short and pithy account of how the United States came to enter the Great War on the side of the Allies. (My client Mark Tiedemann recommended this one, which I had UNACCOUNTABLY not heard of in my previous reading.) As a Texan I’m fascinated with how Germany played on U.S. fears of an invasion from Mexico with the Zimmermann plot. Basically, by sending a coded missive (over the United States’ own diplomatic telegraph cables, can you believe it?*) dangling the possibility of reclaiming Texas if Mexico would enter the war on the side of Germany, they hoped to keep the United States out of the war by making them fight it on their own doorstep. Tuchman is a sensitive writer with a wide view of what was happening in the world at the time, not just in the narrow view of England-France-Germany-United States. I loved her accounts of the mild-mannered British codebreakers dutifully scooping up German diplomatic codes from submerged vessels and confiscated luggage; her clear-eyed portrait of Wilson as a man with “long-distance wisdom” more interested in being right than being practical; her portrait of the German political machine in all it’s ambitious, hide-bound glory. It’s a riveting read, if you’re into that kind of thing, and I highly recommend it. Here she is talking about a “secret” meeting of German and Mexican officials:
“The one thing Rintelen and Huerta did not find in New York was a decent privacy… several varieties of secret service agents began to converge on them, tripping over one another as they sniffed in and out of New York Hotels on the scent of the conspirators.”
On the spectre of Pancho Villa in the American consciousness:
“Ten, twenty, unnumbered times Villa was reported dead, captured, run to earth, beheaded, hung by his own men, caught by Carranzistas, until it seemed as if his face grinned out at the scorched Americans out of every cactus, only to vanish like the Cheshire Cat.”
Far from being flippant, the realities of warfare are never far from the page:
“The whole war had been like that, regiments of lives spent like water, half a million at Verdun alone… now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Allied side, already ruined and overrun.”
“Into the Moloch of the Somme they had poured thousands upon thousands of lives, while for three months under the autumn rains, forgotten in the planning, General Haig shouted “Attack!” to men mired in mud and shattered by exploding shells.”
As for All Quiet on the Western Front, I had somehow escaped reading it in high school. Or maybe I was assigned it and didn’t read it? Or read the cliff’s notes? Either way I genuinely cried a few times reading it—sorry, morning commuters! This portrait of disillusionment in wartime feels like it could have been written in any of the wars that came after the Great one—
“The days, the weeks, the years out there shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us: –against whom, against whom?”
The terrible banalities of war are never far from Paul’s mind as with his school friends turned comrades he forages and fights and runs and shits and watches them fall, one by one, until he’s the only one left.
“At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood—or that it is best to strike a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.”
Checkmate, My Lord & A Lady’s Secret Weapon by Tracey Delvlyn
For a nice change in pace, I read my client Tracey Devlyn’s two next books in her Nexus series of Regency suspense. I may be biased (Yes, I am completely biased! Hey, I’m ALLOWED) but I think these are some of the best period romances out there today—her heroines are as nuanced as her heroes, all fighting the villainous perfidy of Napoleon’s agents as well as their own dark pasts. Checkmate, My Lord comes out in February and A Lady’s Secret Weapon comes out in November. Do yourself a favor and order them now.
Writing Movies for Fun and Profit by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant
The further I get into my agenting career I find myself looking for new and different ways of looking at story and writing, and this book came up several times on a few podcasts I love (specifically Making it with Riki Lindhome and the Nerdist), so I bought it for my kindle. Lennon and Ben Garant are more concerned with the nuts and bolts of moviemaking (they don’t actually get around to talking about how to write a screenplay until the last third of the book) but they do a really great in-depth look at formula, why it works, why we as audiences connect with it and why studios keep looking for it in films. Maybe not the most applicable book to my work life but definitely a fun read and who knows, maybe in the future it will come in handy.
I Funny by James Patterson (with Chris Grabenstein)
Full disclosure, the coauthor on this James Patterson middle-grade is a family friend. I don’t tend to read middle-grade (and I definitely don’t represent it, DON’T GET ANY IDEAS, AUTHORS, I SERIOUSLY DON’T REP MIDDLE GRADE) but it was a sweet and heartwarming story about a boy who, after losing his parents and sister (and use of his legs) in a car accident turns to comedy as a coping mechanism. The illustrations are fun, too. Chris Grabenstein, the coauthor, also writes the John Ceepak series of mysteries which are also great reads.
On Literature by Umberto Eco
I think I bought this when the Borders down in the Financial district was closing two years ago, and hadn’t read it yet. I tend to enjoy Eco’s metas on his own writing—his Postscript to The Name of the Rose is almost as much fun as reading The Name of the Rose and yes, I am a giant dork, thankyouverymuch but On Literature was a bit of a slog. I should have maybe taken a look at the table of contents – I hadn’t read most of the stuff he discusses, but there are some interesting sections, particularly on the vision of America in Fascist Italy, as well as a look into his writing process. I think in the future I’ll just read more of his fiction. (Note to self: acquire The Prague Cemetary. Further note to self: Belay previous note until you have read the massive pile of books you have not yet read yet still somehow own.)
That’s it for weeks 2-3 of 2013 in reading! Currently I’m making my way through volume 1 of James (now Jan) Morris’ Pax Brittanica trilogy. Focuses on the Victorian era from the point of view of the colonies, and the various ways the British were hopelessly naïve and racist in their dealings with the peoples they ruled.
*Barbara Tuchman, master of the History Burn: “House… with the President’s consent, committed the American government to the irregular, not to say simple-minded arrangement of transmitting a belligerent’s message in a code not known to itself.”
This Year’s Reading (so far)
Back Story by David Mitchell
Unsurprising that David Mitchell (the comedian) is a good writer. Using the bouts of walking he undertook to help his bad back as a structure for this memoir is a good idea. Geography supports chronology nicely and place ties to memory in a real and quite moving way. When I got to the end bit, where he meets his now-wife, I genuinely teared up:
“There’s a down side to all this—and I don’t mean not being able to drink beer in the bath or scratch my balls during dinner, because she insists on both. Neither do I mean the fact that we won’t be living in Kilburn, although I’ll miss it. But Harlesden it has to be—she insists.
The down side is the fear. The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope you do, for your sake.”
p. 322, Back Story
My pal Alli from college, who knows me better than any human alive, gave me this for Christmas after attempting to give it to me for my birthday. (That copy somehow went awry. Dear person who ended up with this: I hope you enjoy the read.) David Mitchell (the comedian) is one of my very favorite comedians, one half of That Mitchell & Webb Look and Peep Show. Here he is, as the leader of a shadowy organization realizing the limitations of Evilspeak-
Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell
George Orwell is one pithy dude. After this little collection (one of those little Penguin productions with a truly awesome cover) I think I’m going to seek out more of his journalism/nonfiction. These pieces are charming in their unstinting and surprisingly, occasionally affectionate portraits of the lives (and incidental reading habits of the midcentury British public.)
The Hard Bounce by Todd Robinson
Überviolent crime fiction isn’t usually my thing but Thuglit founder Todd Robinson turns what, in anyone else’s hands, would be a fairly standard plot and imbues it with heart and purpose. A hulking bouncer with a heart of gold in Robinson’s capable hands is by turns loyal, violent, and mournful in the pursuit of a missing girl in Boston. I devoured it in one setting. (Full disclosure: he’s represented by my agency, though not by me.)
Girls In White Dresses by Jennifer Close
Jennifer Close’s debut novel-in-stories follows the twenties years in the life of a group of college friends—twenties as in their twenties, not the 1920s. I read my sister’s copy, which might have been a mistake, because I kept wanting to underline passages and write “I know girl, I know” in the margins. From marriages to careers to pregnancies to that annoying girl in your college class who somehow has it better than you do, almost everything hit uncomfortably close for me. All my twentysomething friends should expect copies of this book at their birthdays this year.
How To Think More About Sex by Alain de Botton
I read this book because of the New York Times review and found it occasionally funny but mostly kind of facile—maybe because it clearly isn’t aimed at me. “Facile” might be a bit strong, because de Botton is clearly an intelligent guy and is an engaging writer—but how else to describe the suggestion that we as a society substitute the erotic admiration of Boticelli Madonnas for hardcore pornography, or treat the assertion that finding intelligence AND physical attractiveness is something radical that no one has ever considered before? No, this book isn’t for me because it almost exclusively focuses on sex in monogamous relationships, married or not. And though I wasn’t looking for it I couldn’t exactly find any mention of application of his theories to non-heterosexual couples, so not sure how universal this tract is. After I finished I remembered where I had heard his name before—the actor Tom Hiddleston follows him on twitter, and since I follow Tom Hiddleston, sometimes his RTs would show up in my feed. I am not immune to the power of a celebrity plug, people! I followed de Botton after reading the NYT review- he’s very earnest, I’ll give him that. Not sure if this is convincing me to seek out his other works.
From this week (but not this year):
The City and the City by China Mieville
Oh my GOD I loved this book. SO MUCH. Read it on the plane back from Houston with the help of some in-flight pinot grigio. So engaging, so clever, at every turn doing something I didn’t expect. The intricacies of life in the two cities, the fear of Breach, the magic of unseeing something that is right in front of you.
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Barry
This is a very clever book- the jacket copy describes it as “if Wes Anderson wrote Kafka,” and I’m not sure how far off the mark that is. Maybe I should read some Kafka to make sure. The Manual of Detection really is my kind of read in a lot of ways, and perhaps reading this and The City and the City back to back was a mistake, because they both have a kind of alienating, paranoid feel—this one about a man, Charles Unwin, who works as a clerk in a massive, labyrinthine detective agency, who is accidentally promoted and must investigate his predecessor’s death. Barry is an engaging writer and I dogeared a lot of the pages in this one before lending it to my sister, who tells me she was enjoying it before she accidentally left it in the seatback pocket on her flight. (Jetblue, let me know if this turns up!)
Home where my thoughts are escaping
I leave Houston on Sunday to return to NYC, and it feels like the time has gone by quite quickly. I spent most of the first week here reading obsessively and hanging with my parents, and spent most of the second week hanging with my parents and drinking with friends from high school / middle school and reading less than the first week. I also went to the gym a lot with my sister, which was nice in a kind of “Oh, right, those things that move my limbs are called muscles and if I work them they’ll move my limbs better” way. My dog has spent the entire period of my visit either on the couch or hunting for food in the kitchen. Come to think of it, I’ve been doing much the same thing.
Today I went with my parents, sister, and my uncle and aunt (well, technically my dad’s cousin and his wife but WHATEVER I do what I want) to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to see their War|Photography exhibit, which was moving and intense and visceral and … overwhelming? and also somehow oddly organized and disorienting MUCH LIKE WAR ITSELF, come to think of it. It was a very broad exhibit and had several very cool civil-war era (and earlier) daguerrotypes, that one had to hold a black card against in order to see it in the light. The photographs from WWI were very cool, as well, and the entire thing was pretty much heartbreaking.
Afterwards we got dinner at a place in Houston that wasn’t there the last time I was here and I drank like three of these EXTREMELY tasty St. Germain-and-Prosecco-based cocktails and then came home, where my dad and sister and I watched the end of Holes and two episodes of Pride & Prejudice and now I’m in my kitchen with my mom, typing while she learns lines.
All in all, 2012 was good. A little rough, a little good, a lot busy, a lot feeling very lucky. I hope for much of the same for 2013, for myself and for all my fives of readers out there.
Addendum to previous post
Since I got back to Houston I have carried through with my promise to spend a lot of time reading:
Shades of Milk & Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Black Tower by P.D. James
A Mind to Murder by P.D. James
The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James
As I said before, I don’t actually engage much with Goodreads’ social features- I follow a few people’s updates but don’t pay attention to them, and I never write reviews of the books I’ve read on the site itself. But Goodreads’ stats feature has kept me extremely competitive with myself- can I read more books this year than last year? For improvements, I’d love to see Goodreads do a map of your reading over time, not just by year. (Obviously if this already exists, someone needs to let me know.) Over half the books I read this year I read in the last three months, when I started making a conscious effort to read more in an effort to be more engaged with my queries. (How can you recognize good stuff in the inbox if you don’t read good stuff outside of it, is my theory.)
So, yeah. I highly recommend Goodreads or something like it (LibraryThing is the other I can think of- any other suggestions?) if you want to read more and want to be more competitive with yourself about it. And if you think 53 books in a year is good, there are others who have put me to shame- Pam van Hycklama read 100 published books this year, and Roxane Gay’s (epic!) end-of-year list had 136 books on it AND THAT WAS LIKE TWO WEEKS AGO.
My goal for next year, I think, isn’t necessarily going to read more, but to write more about what I’ve read–what I liked, what I didn’t like, what made me incandescent with rage, what made me cry a lot. I tend to be pretty passive in my Internet presence- retweeting/reblogging is so EASY, y’all- and should really do more with this space right here.
Anyone else have reading goals for 2013, now that the world hasn’t ended?
Edited to add: Wow, that is a lot of P.D. James in a short period of time.
