Wait, that's something else.
Yeah.
Anyway, a rhetorical question:
What do you do when Apollo decides to smite you with a debilitating rhinovirus, when you're quarantined at home with a dog and two cats who, upon deciding that you're no fun in your current condition, resort to bothering each other for entertainment, when the sight of your towering to-be-read stack fills you with despair (and irrational jealousy-- more on that later) instead of eager anticipation, when you've no campus Tea Partiers to savage with your wicked badger canines and have instead two papers to write and three more Latin declensions to memorize before midterms, when you're so spaced out on cough drops that you've completely lost the plot of Fringe and can't figure out how it is that David Tennant suddenly looks like a much younger guy who wears a cool bowtie?
You can wander about in a Snuggie searching in vain for a head of lettuce to burn as a propitiatory sacrifice to Apollo.
Or create a blog, naturally.
But enough with the ridiculously long sentences, right?
I suppose that, this being an intro post, I should be doing some actual introducing. Unfortunately, all I'm able to reveal about myself is that I'm an ultra-liberal vegan badger who's currently battling to achieve an iron-clad GPA to impress the grad school admissions people, has a penchant for making up crap and writing it down ("crap" used facetiously; it ain't crap, damnit) and hails from a U.S. state where "damn" is pronounced "dah-yum".
That's the last stupidly long sentence. I swear.
Basically, I wrote a book and I want to get it published. That's one of the two reasons that I want to keep my identity as secret as possible; I want to be free to give honest opinions (specifically in regards to querying/publishing/agent experiences/book reviews/what have you) without said opinions coming back to b-... uh, haunt me.
The other is that I'm a comic book geek. Enough said.
So, as you probably gathered from the title, I've spent the last five months in query hell, and am sentenced to several more, judging by the enormous list of the yet-to-be-queried. I'm not going to lie: it's been very, very rough. I have no idea how my experience compares to other people's, since most of the opinions I've read have been aggressively, if not hysterically chipper (WHAT HO, ANOTHER REJECTION DOTH ARRIVE IN MY INBOX, BRINGING THE TOTAL TO FIFTEEN PASSES ON MY FULL MANUSCRIPT! OH, WELL! MY RESOLVE IS IRONCLAD AND MY SOUL UNCONQUERABLE! INVICTUS AND SUCHLIKE! I SAY, BARTENDER, SLIDE THE BOTTLE THIS WAY, THERE'S A GOOD LAD!)
In my case, here's the unvarnished truth, in calendar form:
APRIL
- first volley of queries
MAY
JUNE
- 3 full requests!
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
- hypomanic episode resulting in a sudden enthusiasm for knitting and overtraining resulting in runner's knee
OCTOBER
- suicidal depression
- admitted under warrant to psychiatric hospital
- unnerved by patients in intake ward, judged "high-functioning" and moved to "high-functioning" ward
- provided with Wellbutrin, Seroquel, and doubled dose of Lamictal
- becomes friends with interesting people in ward, including a PhD candidate who can explain the biological basis of her schizophrenia in fascinating detail, and a retired high school teacher who was her union rep and marched with Martin Luther King
- happens to watch an episode of House featuring a suicidal writer, of all things
- discharged with prescriptions and ordered to avoid stress
- subsequently disregards no-stress mandate
In other words:
Come on, how the hell am I supposed to lead a stress-free existence with college, queries, sequel plotting, among other things?
Yeah. So that's my query hell experience, so far. I guess I could describe this blog as one way of alleviating some of the writing-related angst and everything that comes with the onset of a potentially deadly mood disorder. I've never had a blog before (and was on Facebook for only a week before I got bored and left) so I'll be learning as I go. I'll probably spend time reviewing books and films, musing on current events, and ranting impotently about agents who claim to be extraordinarily busy yet still find time to tweet about, in their own words, spending two full days doing nothing but watching Mad Men and who seem more interested in counting the days until Halloween than actually reading the full that she requested two weeks' exclusivity on and four weeks later still hasn't...
Yes, I'm bitter, angry, and often hurt and depressed. So what? I'm hu-... uh, badger, I mean, and I can't react to everything with the pre-programmed Stepford grin and Pollyanna quote that seem to be the "appropriate" response to the trials of query hell. I do as well as I can on most things, and in life in general, and I hope to continue doing as well as I possibly can while figuring out this blogging business.
So, that's my intro.
Allons-y.
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