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Perks of joining: You get to put the nifty little badge on your blog (yes, this does indeed make you cool), sharing with others and being a part of a group is always fun, and I will put a link to your blog on my blog below under Members of GWA.
Today's guest blogger is Ishta Mercurio from Musings of a Restless Mind. Please visit her awesome blog and become a follower. I'll wait.
Back yet? Excellent. Now enjoy her post!
My biggest goober moment came right at the beginning of my career as a children's writer. I had never studied creative writing per se, but I had always been good at it (according to my English teachers in high school and college) and I DID major in Lit for a year in college before switching to Theatre and Dance. So when the burnout and desperation hit after 6 years of full-time, hard-core stay-at-home-mothering (meals and desserts cooked from scratch, house painted myself, the whole bit), I thought, "Why not?"
Seated in the living room, husband's trusty laptop balanced on my knees, I banged out a story that I had made up that night to get my then-5-year-old to sleep, and thought, "Yup. That should do it." And then I thought, "Actors have agents; I bet writers do, too." After about 5 minutes of research, I emailed my ten-minute-old manuscript, sans query, to one of the largest, most sought after agencies in the business. I think my form rejection arrived within about 45 minutes.
Doh.
A few months, about five books on writing, and several weeks on the SCBWI crit boards later, I realized what a mistake that first email had been. Not only had the email itself been completely inappropriate, but my manuscript was, in a word, awful. I made a whole catalogue of mistakes that night: thinking writing a picture book would be easy; thinking a first draft could ever be query-ready; thinking any draft that hadn't had objective eyes on it was fit for an agent's consumption; thinking that because I had never revised any of my school assignments, I could do the same thing with my professional work and get away with it.
Was it salvageable? Of course, and after almost two years of critique, marinating time, and revision, I think it's finally there. I will certainly never query again without a whole bunch of crit buddies telling me they think it's ready. Do I still query too early? Sometimes; but when the first form rejection rolls in, I at least know that it's a sign that I need to revisit my MS and see if there's anything I can do to make it better. Did I blow my chances with this agency? Only time, and a lot more writing, will tell. I can only hope their memories are shorter than mine.
Thanks for sharing, Ishta! This is such an extremely valuable story to hear. I'm so glad you were able to find a critique group to help you out.
Discussion: I have heard this mistake being done soooo many times. In fact, I might admit I did it once upon a time. So, my question is, has this happened to any of you? And about how long did it take you to realize you made a mistake? Me? It took about three submissions and a lot of head-burying-from-complete-humiliation before I could really see what I was doing wrong.
