AH.
Hey! At least I’m further along than my sister, because I have a finished costume and a maybe decent query letter?
(She’s texting me pics because she’s working on her costume right now.)
(And it’s maybe decent because I had five people look at it and two said it was really good, two said it was good, and one said it was terrible. Which pretty much sums up my frustration with query letters in general.)
I’m meeting with a developmental editor once we get down to the conference hotel this evening, which should be interesting, but is also somewhat terrifying. Developmental editing is not one of the services I offer, because I don’t feel comfortable working directly with the core of people’s stories, but I’m hoping it will be helpful in terms of some of the issues I’ve been having with the current draft of Book One.
Anyway, said developmental editor has a copy of the infamous chapter one and we will be going over it, and then, depending on the amount of work needed and whether or not it’s doable, I may spend tonight/early tomorrow editing before my Read and Critique session tomorrow afternoon (Carol Berg! Ah!). If it’s a big job, though, I think I’ll just use the R&C as an opportunity to garner more knowledgeable feedback and then fix it next week sometime.
So I kind of feel like that madness is more or less out of my hands for now.
I may poke at the query and see if I can add in a little more detail without being too wordy (another thing I hate about queries), but I’m taking 3.5/5 as pretty decent no matter what. I researched the editor I’m meeting with yesterday so I could add in some personalization and he seems like a cool guy, lots of things in common, and he was the editor for Pierce Brown’s Red Rising trilogy which I’ve talked about here previously and enjoyed. So I’m feeling okay query-wise. We’ll see how that goes. That happens at some time on Saturday, but apparently I don’t get to know when until I get my info packet tomorrow morning.
So, basically, here’s the plan:
- Poke query but don’t worry if it’s not working
- Finish packing (remember things like notebooks, schedule, business cards)
- Print out copy of chapter one for editing purposes
- Print out query copies
- Dinner
- Drive down
- Developmental editor
And then it’s on to the madness of the weekend. I’ll see you guys on Tuesday to let you know how it went. If anyone’s going to PPWC, keep an eye out for me! I’ll be the tall blonde (and I will have tree pants on Saturday. Just FYI).
