Psychedelia Gothique

While sending out query letters to agents, one thing you are expected to supply is a list of books that are similar to the book you are pitching. With The Human Template , this seemed impossible. One thing my early readers consistently told me was that they had never read anything like my book before. I’m a longtime believer in the adage “There’s nothing new under the Sun,” so I didn’t buy into this notion right away. Yet, it didn’t really help me to come up with any real comparisons. When I first started sending queries, my response was usually to mention a couple of   influences - rather than similar books. One of my favourite genre-books ever is The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick. I consider it to have the best opening of any sff book I have ever read and one of my clear goals is to be as good a writer as Michael Swanwick. Rereading his Vacuum Flowers while I was working on my diptych, I was briefly pumped to feel that my book is both stylistically similar ...

It took about a month for me to really appreciate this observation: “Crafting queries that jump out of slushpiles is not a challenge to be taken lightly. ” My original query clearly didn’t catch anyone’s attention. I thought my second one was killer, but it’s apparently no more compelling than the first one. If I was being rejected at the “Partial request” or “full request” stage, I might blame the story – but getting sorted out at the pitch stage is more likely a test of one’s pitch writing skills than one’s novel writing skills. But wait! As a former radio and ad agency copywriter, I spent fifteen years of my life selling things in thirty seconds or less. I should be all over this challenge! When I first started this process, I thought that my challenge was to take my complicated concept and reduce it to a paragraph so that the pitchee (that’s a more fun and versatile word than agent or publisher) could figure out the plot from my description. But I suspect I...

Immediately after finishing the last draft of the novel, I started questioning myself. Is there something wrong with the opening? I convinced myself that there was. After all, I was pretty confident in my actual query letter and the only thing other than that that I’ve sent to all five agents is the opening five pages. I decided immediately that they suck and started replotting the entire first 150 pages of the novel to fix it. This is bullshit, as reflexive as falling in love with the first person you meet after a breakup. Because in point of fact, even if they do suck, it’s too early to tell from the agent’s reactions. Their lack of response could be due to all sort of things – but three weeks in, is far too early to tell. I should not be assuming anything at all yet. Now that I have fixed all of the trouble spots I earmarked as I was approaching the end of the last draft, I need to wait, and reflect, and judge what's there on its own merits. And it certainly wouldn'...