Sick

Just in time to return to work for what is promising to be four really punishing weeks between now and Christmas....

Head like a jackhammer.

Nose like a geyser.

Sinuses under serious pressure.

Throat like the Atacama Desert.

It has been nine months since I was last sick, but here am. Nothing to do but drink this:

and eat this (turkey soup, actually, not chicken):


And take this (no, I'm not making meth at home):

And try to get enough of this so that going to work doesn't kill me:

Lt. says: "Being sick fucking sucks!"

Six Things I Am Thankful For

I like Thanksgiving a lot, conceptually if not always in practice. What I mean is: I could give or take the turkey and cranberry sauce, the busy airports and weird family get-togethers (which I usually skip, and this year is no different), the whole pilgrims thing, the inevitable football game and sale days, and the Friday some people get off from work and others don't.

But I really, really like the idea of a secular holiday devoted to gratitude, especially here in the USA, where so many of us have so much and - day-to-day - there seems to be this sense of entitlement among many. It's just nice, occasionally, to reflect a little bit and appreciate the great things we have, even if those things are a bit different for everyone.


So here are six things I am thankful for this year:

1. My health. I always thought this one was a throw-away when I was younger, but as I get a little older, I'm beginning to realize how important it is, and how it shouldn't be taken for granted. Part of your health is, of course, up to you, but much is just due to the vagaries of chance and genetics. Well, I'm still a pretty healthy guy, and I'm glad for it.

2. My wife. No other person on earth - and this includes my parents, my friends, and all my teachers - has helped me grow as much and in such good ways as she has. Looking around as I go about living my life makes me realize more and more how remarkable what we have is, and then I realize how much dumb luck went into us getting together and staying together (of course there was some effort on both of our parts, too). So whenever I think I'm not a lucky person, I think of this. And I'm grateful for it.

3. Our country. I honestly don't know if I believe the mantra I heard so many times growing up, that the U.S. is the "best country in the world." (I'm sure, if nothing else, that depends on who you ask.) We have definitely got problems, and there are always threats (both internal and external), but we have it really good here overall when you compare us to so many other people. That doesn't mean we can be complacent, or that justice is served in every single case. But we are, indeed, a democracy, and ultimately the will of the people is done: for better or worse.

4. The state of literature. We can bemoan the publishing industry all want, and bemoan (rightly) all the crap that gets published. But the truth is there is plenty of good stuff that also gets published - more than any person could ever hope to read. I keep picking up new books and finding ones I enjoy, and it's hard to imagine that ever stopping.


5. My community. I've lived in my building for 5 1/2 years now, which is the longest I've lived anywhere save the house where I grew up. I love our gym, I love having Rock Creek Park so nearby, I love our little shopping center, I love our front courtyard. The place ain't perfect but it's pretty darned good, and I'm grateful we live here.

6. All of you. Thank you for reading, for commenting, for keeping me company as I continue to muddle through living and working and writing and trying to figure it all out.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving....

300...And A Rough Analysis Of Query Response Times

That's right: this is my 300th post. Happy 300th post to Skullcrusher Mountain and the sometimes-me sometimes-alter-ego that is Lt. Cccyxx!

tonight, we dine at burger king!

I sent out the final two queries of my 30-query November query extravaganza last night. So far I have received one partial request, 10 rejections, and 3 form acknowledgments. I'm excited about the partial, and really excited about getting back to my WIP for the next couple of months!

Anyhow, I have been curious, as I send queries out into the ether, about both the likelihood of a response and the timing of any responses I might get. We know some agents guarantee a response but most say no response = no (even though sometimes they respond anyway) and yet others simply leave it cloudy.

Not including two partial and one full requests (one partial request came the same day as the query while the other took four days [including a weekend], and the full request happened at a conference), I've received 35 rejections to my queries (I can't put a precise number on the response rate because some are still pending, but it's very roughly 50%). That's a small but decent sample, and I thought you might be interested in seeing its distribution.


You should hopefully be able to click on the chart above for a bigger view. But basically what it shows is that most rejections come in within a couple of days of sending the query. It looks like there's a slight uptick between one and two weeks, but that's not entirely real (it's just that things tend to slow down toward the end of the first week). Check this out:


This really tells the story (no pun intended). I received 40% of the rejections I was going to get within two days of querying. By three days it was nearly 60%. By two weeks the total was more than 80%. By a month it was more than 90%. Think about that for a moment.

What this means is that - regardless of what agents say on their websites with this 6-8 weeks stuff - the conscientious ones (the ones who'll take the trouble to send you a rejection, at least) are looking at their queries pretty quickly.

Now you might say it only takes one exception, and honestly who cares about rejection times? What we really want to know is how long requests for partials and fulls take. But I think, actually, that rejection times are a good proxy for request times, because they show you how long agents are taking to look at and evaluate the query.

What am I going to do with this information? Nothing, really, but it's interesting to know.

The Lt.'s Interview With A Famous Literary Agent...aka Lt. gets pwned.

Your intrepid blogger interviews a famous literary agent. Shocking revelations and juicy insider tidbits about the publishing industry fall from her lips like manna from heaven in the clip below. Enjoy!

>

Sgt. Shopper!

Before I start today's post, let me put in a plug for my post this coming Wednesday: I managed to secure an interview with a big-time literary agent, and will be posting the interview right here. Trust me, you do not want to miss it!

In other news, I successfully finished my 8-day detox and am generally feeling a bit better. I had some trouble getting to sleep a couple of the nights, but when I did finally get to sleep, my sleep was better. My neck/shoulder seems to have settled down and relaxed pretty much back to normal. I didn't manage to avoid Diet Coke completely, but I only had 3 cans for the whole week.

I really wanted a drink a couple of nights this week - that was really the only tough part of the detox - but I held out. So then on Saturday, when the detox ended, I drank trashy American beer out of cold 16 oz. cans.

I've also been making these simple but delicious fruit smoothies: take 12 ice cubes, one banana, about six strawberries, 1 cup of orange juice, and 1 cup of grapefruit juice, and blend. There is a whole day's worth of fruit in there.

My wife and I were at the supermarket last night when we noticed this older middle-aged woman wearing camouflage blouse and pants. This is D.C., and it is certainly not unusual to see military personnel in uniform. But looking closer, this woman's pants were not exactly the bulky military style, and the black leather boots on her feet were definitely not army issue. She was wearing a little jacket and was with her husband, who was most definitely not military.

"clean-up in Aisle 10, maggots!"

I do not know why she was dressed that way, but after passing her twice in the supermarket aisles my wife and I dubbed her "Sgt. Shopper." I wanted to snap her a salute when we walked past her again. Of course, just not laughing was already a considerable achievement.

oooh, put me in the stockade.

I am in the process of executing my query plan. You might remember that I sent out 10 and then decided to send another 20 before Thanksgiving. So far I've sent 6 of those 20, with another 8 ready to go in my e-mail drafts (I often work on queries on the weekend, but lately have been trying to send them during the workweek...no, I doubt it makes a difference, but what the hey?).

Anyway, so I've sent out 16 so far and have received 5 rejections. No positive responses yet. I continue to tweak the query letter and think that the very latest version does a better job showing how the protagonist is squeezed on all sides. I am also realizing how indispensable querytracker.net is as a resource.

And that is all. Don't forget to come back Wednesday for my interview!

Why Do All My Friday Posts Suck?

If you are one of my 21 followers, or the few other readers I have, you might be asking why it is that the Lt. seems to be phoning it in on Fridays lately (if he even posts at all). It is a fair question.

Basically it has to do with the timing of when I write my posts.

(As a brief and pedantic aside, each blog entry is called a "post" or a "blog post," not a "blog". The blog - short for web log, of course - is the whole damned thing. Thus, it is incorrect to say I have a new blog up when you mean I have a new blog post up or I have a new post up. I have a new blog up means you have started an entirely new blog. Lately I see a lot of people using "blog" as a synonym for "post," and that is annoying.)


Anyway, back to the topic at hand...Monday's post is usually written at my leisure over the weekend. Wednesday's post may be written Sunday, or Monday evening. But then the week hits. Tuesday is a gym night. Wednesday and Thursday have been popular evenings lately for either staying late at work or having some event afterward. So then Friday rolls around and I got nothin', or else I post a wacky stream-of-consciousness at my desk at 8:30 that morning.

Also, I am frequently cooked by Friday. When I moved to D.C. and started my first position, which was on the Hill, I was thrilled to learn that I would have most, if not all, weekends off. I knew I'd be facing long hours during the week, but that didn't dissuade me at all. I was used to pulling long hours seven days a week when I worked in a lab.

What I didn't bank on was the intensity of the workday - the constant meetings, putting out fires, juggling multiple priorities, dealing with a demanding boss - with real and immediate consequences for myself and for the constituents or groups I was working with. And as an introvert, those hours spent in meetings and on the phone would cumulatively take a toll. Each week was truly a marathon.

In subsequent positions (and I've had three since then) things only rarely rise to that level of frenzied activity (though every place has its crazy weeks that are equivalent - it's just that on the Hill this is constant, with the occasional exception for recess - or, in correct parlance, "district work" - periods). Also, the smarter and more empowered I feel in my job, the less I mind the intensity, because it's all more under my control. Yet I still feel, sometimes, that I'm on my last gasp as Friday rolls around. I tend to think of it as a day to be productive and catch up, but in reality I'm often too roasted to get much done even if it's quiet, which it frequently is not.

I've posted this before, but it's a classic!

Not this week, though! That's right: today's post was written nearly a week ago - again, at my leisure, over the weekend - as I contemplated my weak bloggy showing on Fridays lately.

Have a great weekend.

On Beneath The Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

One of the reasons I have questioned people's fixation on first pages and first chapters is because I have seen too many books - fiction and non-fiction - start off strong and then completely fizzle. (My review of this book, one of my most popular posts in terms of hits, btw, is a great example.)

Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze, which I would rank overall among the best fiction I've read thus far this year, has the opposite problem. The first section is slow, a little sloppy even, and I saw places where, as a writer, I thought she must have done some revision and rewriting that didn't fit in so seamlessly with the rest of the book. Indeed, I wondered how she got this book past agents.

(A little research indicates that I queried another agent at the same agency that represents this author earlier this year, but was rejected two days later on query alone by an assistant. Sigh. There's little similarity between my book and this one, anyway.)

Yet as the story took off, historical and personal events began to unfold, and the characters began to develop true depth, I became completely absorbed. The book wound up being exciting and very satisfying as a narrative.


The faults? Well, the slow start is the worst. The characters seem to spend the first 100 pages alternating scenes between their homes and the hospital.

This is literary fiction, but at times it's maybe a bit too literary. One of my pet peeves are scenes where characters are in pain and the language is both subdued and alludes to abstractions like moonlight and trees. Is that how you feel when you're in pain? Fortunately there's relatively little of this, but I just didn't find the comparison of dying to moonlight particularly apt.

Finally, a relatively minor quibble, the historical aspect of the narrative was an inconsistent mixing of the real and the imagined. The story takes place around the time when Emperor Haile Selassie, ruler of Ethiopia, is overthrown by the Communist Derg. Haile Selassie is a character, and indeed makes some cameos (direct cameos by major historical figures is another pet peeve, unless there's a really good reason for it). But the ruler of the Derg, Mengistu Mariam, does not appear in the book. Instead, there is a fictional alter ego called Major Guddo. I don't know why the author did things this way - perhaps there are good narrative reasons (Guddo is not just Mariam but somewhat of a composite, and maybe this is part of it - also, in a great example of injustice, Mariam is still alive and well in Zimbabwe) - but it strikes me as odd.

With these asides, however, let me reiterate how much I enjoyed the book. Each of the characters is drawn in just enough detail that we can appreciate them in all their complexity. And I mentioned before that the book is "satisfying as a narrative" and I mean that in a classic way: each character has a narrative arc that is well-done, even as the author manages not to beat the reader over the head with it. I was, it is true, a bit impatient at the beginning, but once the narrative picks up it really picks up and I could hardly put this book down.

I also liked that this is a book about big topics. For those readers unsatisfied because they feel books like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom draw life too small, Mengiste's book makes that connection between people's lives and big events. Her characters certainly resonate, although it is not fair to expect them (living in Addis Ababa in the 1970s) to resonate with contemporary American readers the way Franzen's do. I don't want to go too far down this road, because these two books are apples and oranges, but they both do show - in their own ways - that people are people.

This book is going to be a contender for the best novel I've read all year, and I strongly recommend it.

8-Day Detox and Querying Mini-Blitz

I ate and drank too much while I was on my work trip a few weeks ago. One of the nights I drank three different kinds of beer, two different kinds of wine, scotch, and Jack and Coke (and yeah, I had more than one of most of them). I've been eating too much rich food, drinking too much, and working too hard. Too many meals out, too much junk food at work.

The numbers on the scale have been creeping upward - just a little, but still - over those last few weeks. Even worse, as I mentioned, I fucked up my shoulder about a week ago after spending the morning in the conference room from hell. I've been going to the gym but only working with 1/2 to 2/3 my usual weight just to ensure I don't make it worse. And I've been experiencing a variety of other little aches and pains, especially in my joints: my elbows when I lift, my right ankle. (Though, oddly, my perennial jaw tension/gum issue has been better than I recall these past few weeks. Correlation?)

So I decided I need about a week of detox. That doesn't mean nothing but spring water and celery, but it does mean no booze at all until next Saturday. No Diet Coke either, if I can help it. More water. Good nights' sleeps...or, since I can't exactly control that all the time, at least being in bed to give myself those 8 or so hours. More fruit and vegetables and light meals, less heavy stuff. And more exposure to daylight, to the extent I can control that.

I've also been thinking about where I am with writing and with querying.

Various advice that I've been reading indicates that, after Thanksgiving, the querying season is over - for those of us who try to be strategic about these things and actually want our queries looked at (my response rate for queries sent last December, btw, was only 30%) - until at least mid-January.

So I was thinking of trying to get my queries out before then, and then just saying fuck it until February 1 or so, spending December and January focused on my WIP.

There's been some suggestion in the comments that maybe it's time for me to query bomb a la Travener style. That is, go to querytracker.net, identify all the agents who represent my genre ("literary fiction" btw) and then send them all basically the same letter. Travs has had tons of full and partial requests (to the Lt's one of each after nearly 60 queries, and remember that my full came from a conference pitch rather than a query) and I have to ask myself what it is I am waiting for.

I think this warrants a fuller discussion than I am prepared to have here, but my thinking works like this:

First, the genre "literary fiction" is different from a lot of other genres, being somewhat of a subject matter trash bin, characterized more by style than plot or anything else. I wish I could more particularly genre-ize my book (my WIP, by contrast, can be much more specifically genre-ized) but I can't.

What this means is that...you know that sentence in the query where you're supposed to basically kiss the ass of the agent and say why they and they alone are just the most perfect agent to represent your book evah!? Well, that sentence has been really tough for me to write because the lack of genre-ization means comparing the books they represented to mine usually fails.

I don't want to squander any connection - however tenuous - I may be able to find between an agent's interests and my books. Unfortunately, in 90% of cases, this winds up being "Because of your interest in representing literary fiction, I thought you might be interested in my book...." Which is weak but no matter how much research I do (and the Lt. has been accused of many things over the course of his life, but being a slacker when it comes to doing research has never been one of them - indeed, it is the Lt.'s mad research skillz that pays the billz) I just can't do better.

So I realize that what I have just done is undercut my own argument on why not to blitz. Except....

The only other reason I can think of to batch instead of blitzing is in the expectation I will learn something during the process. For a while I was hoping to actually learn from feedback from agents, but when even those who request the full manuscript have no feedback, that's pretty much a vain hope.

Despite this, I have learned, my friends. From you all, from blogs, from the writers conference I attended. If I'd sent out 150 queries with my very first query letter I'd be wanting to go back in time and slap myself for squandering my chances. I might also learn more about agents and books that would help me overcome the impediment to personalizing most of the queries that I mentioned above. I continue to hold out hope for such break-throughs.

So here's what I think I'm going to do. There are about three weeks between now and Thanksgiving. I will query one agent per day between now and then: that's 20 more queries, which means I'll have sent 30 queries in Thanksgiving. I will do as much research as I can. Trust me, I'm not a fool, querying agents who only want romance or YA. I know where to find agent interviews and if they say anything meaningful and relevant I'll stick it in the query. In those rare cases where I can say something about their books you bet your ass I will. But everyone else is going to get the generic literary fiction sentence.

Then, when Thanksgiving comes, I'll put aside querying and get back to writing until next year.

What do you all think?

Querying and the Election

(No connection between the two, except low expectations.)

I finally sent out a new batch of queries on Monday. This is my first systematic querying since March and the first query at all since July, when I sent one to an agent who promised at least a critique if I purchased one of her client's books. I purchased said book and sent my receipt in with my query. I have heard nothing back. (By the way, I also read said book and thought it was pretty awful...but 3.5 months later, who's the sucka? Yup, the Lt.)

So I sent out 10 queries in this round, which means that if Travener's twin Querybombs (TM) look like this:



then mine looks like this:


13 hours after sending, I received my first rejection. So one down and nine to go, I guess. The rest of November shall be devoted to finding at least another ten agents to query and my WIP. I also had a bit of a breakthrough on one of my amorphous ideas (that is, project #3, which will likely come after my WIP). That, at least, was cheering. Spending Saturday afternoon putting together query letters made me want to take that gun in the picture above, stick a real bullet in it, and put myself out of my misery.

As for the elections, I'm not terribly political but I do work in D.C. Here's what I think we can expect over the next two years: so much gridlock it makes the last two years look good. The House has turned quite R, and the House is very rules-based. So the House is going to do some crazy shit. The Senate, in contrast to the House, is consensus-based. It won't be able to do *anything* - if you thought they were bad before, just wait. Even worse, I predict the Senate and the House will work very poorly, if at all, together. So there won't be much landing on President Obama's desk, but at least he is there to smack it down if somehow something crazy makes it through.

The real battles may be fought over the budget. Depending on what they decide to do with the CR (continuing resolution = continues last year's budget for a certain time period because they were unable to pass new appropriations bills for FY2011) when they have their lame duck session, I cannot rule out the possibility of a government shut-down sometime next year. The Rs have talked about cutting spending back down to 2008 levels. Not only is this some really crazy shit, but it won't save us all that much money when you think about how much of our overall spending is non-defense discretionary.

Now, as for the longer-term outlook: I've been as frustrated with the Ds as anyone else, and I would much rather see things improve than see my party win, but think about it: if people can be so frustrated after two years, how will they feel two years from now when even less has gotten done except a constant stream of crazy from House of Representatives that instantly dies because the Senate (wisely) ignores it, not that they could get anything done anyway? In other words, not only is this not 1994, but it could actually be good for the Ds (at the Congressional and the Presidential level) in 2012.

OK, enough. We now return you to your regularly scheduled whining about how the Lt.'s writing career is going nowhere fast....

Hell Is A Hotel Conference Room...

...very similar to the one I spent Thursday morning in, in fact.

The room, first of all, does not really fit all the people in it. The tiny hotel chairs have been pushed right up touching one another, even though each of them is too small to actually hold a person. The rows are long and closely spaced, making it difficult to maneuver in or out. Even the back walls are lined with chairs, leaving nowhere to stand.

The crowded nature of the room means there's no place to put your bag, so your feet rest on it as best as you can.

All that body heat means the room is too warm. But, once you're seated, there isn't enough space to take off your jacket, much less hang it over your seat.

There are refreshments - glasses of tepid water and tepid coffee - but you can't actually reach them, and even if you could, you'd need to be as coordinated as a professional acrobat to get something back to your seat without spilling it all over yourself and/or others.


It probably goes without saying, but the subject matter is stultifyingly esoteric and boring, spoken in a jargon-laden code you can barely understand. The sound is bad, the speaker has annoying verbal tics, and the Powerpoint slides are tedious - with too much text in too small a font. You can't see them, anyway, since a tall guy in front of you is blocking one part of them and a pillar blocks the rest.

Someone sitting right behind you has a throaty cold you just know is contagious.

Someone else's phone keeps going off.

And you have to go to the bathroom.

Heaven, of course, is a concurrent session right next door.

In this room, where the temperature is about 15 degrees cooler, the chairs are spaced out so as to be occupied by actual adult human beings, and only about one of every three is taken, anyway.

There's an interesting and engaging panel having a dynamic conversation about stuff you care about.

The food is good, and the drinks come in cans and bottles you can take back to your seat. Indeed, there is even a table between each well-spaced row (and not those silly rounds, either, where half the crowd is facing away from the speaker) for you to put your stuff on and take notes or eat comfortably.

The Lt. was stuck in the hotel conference room from hell Thursday morning. He literally could not sit back in his seat because everyone was so packed. He wished for the spaciousness of an airplane middle seat. He did his best but left after an hour, kind of knowing he was in for it.

And the next morning, like clockwork, the muscles joining the right side of his neck to his shoulder seized up in response to having been clenched the previous day.

Stretches, alcoholic beverages, light exercise, ibuprofin, and several massages from kind Belimperia and he is starting to feel OK again here on Sunday night.

Lesson learned: look out for yourself first, worry about the conference second.