I'm Gumby, Dammit!

I'm a writer.

I don't care what anyone says. I've written 12 full length novels, and I'm penning #13 as we speak. They've been read by thousands, albeit for free, via e-publishing. Sometimes I just have to remind myself of that.

Remind myself that I do have a talent.

You wanna be a writer? Writing, itself, is the easy part. You get to create entire worlds, invent people and places, thrust them into dramatic and interesting situations, and watch them come out the other side changed, and maybe even ready for a sequel.

Let's say you have a good grasp of your, grammar and punctuation aren’t foreign ideas to you. You have spare time, wherein you type out your tale (or use pen and paper, if you're lucky enough to manage that). And you have all the time in the world.

Once you're done, you'll edit it, make cuts and changes until it's shiny. Maybe you'll even share it with one or three people, to get their opinions and take on it.

Then the worm gets in your brain.

You wanna publish this sucker. You learn all there is to know about writing a query letter. You study and study until you can get a synopsis of your novel down in two pages. Then you start looking for an agent.

You have to start at the top, they all say it. So you check them out -- only the cream of the crop -- and find a handful who rep the genre you just identified yourself with.

After they reject you, you move down the ladder just a bit, and find another, albeit smaller handful of agents accepting queries from the likes of you, the unwashed and previously unpublished masses. (If someone tells you there are hundreds of good agents out there, don't buy it. When you narrow it down to your genre, then narrow those down to who's accepting queries, then narrow those down again to only the legitimate ones, you're in double digits).

By now you've learned just how hard this could be. You've seen slush piles, read horror stories of being passed over, forgotten, your manuscript returned with coffee stains and a rejection letter printed on the back of some dude's electric bill.

Good writing trumps all, they say. If you wrote a story worth publishing, it'll be published.

Actually, that's about half right, a quarter misleading, and a good quarter moldy Yak droppings.

You do need to write a stellar novel. That's absolutely paramount. But then you have to get that novel in front of just the right agent, at just the right time, and hope he/she reads it while you're still living. If the average slush pile fell over, people could be killed. I'm betting it would register on the Richter scale as at least a 2.0.

They say if you can spell and punctuate and have a grasp on the language, you're already in the top 10%. Trouble is, in order to get to your query, they have to read that other 90%, so that by the time they get to the top 10%, they've already drunk themselves silly and gouged out an eyeball with their lunch fork.

So let's say you hear back from your second wave, and get nothing. You move on to stage 3 - the even lesser known agents.

Now we're in dangerous territory. Now we're talking about agents who might be brand new in the business. Maybe so new they haven't made their first sale yet, but no red flags appear beside their names - they're not scams, just wet behind the ears.

Kinda like you, the new writer.

Here's where the pros tell you to run away, maybe not screaming, but doing a quick shuffle.

Why?

Because they're new. Because they haven't made a sale yet. Because while they might be legit, and perfectly well intentioned, they're not a proven winner. So back away, wait until they make that first, second, even tenth sale, then go ahead and give them a second glance.

Kinda reminds me of how you can't get published unless you've already been published.

I'm a writer. I love that part. I hate the rest. Loathe it. My brain starts to shut down in the same way it does when I think I should balance my checkbook. The same way it freezes up when people talk about interest rates and inflation. But it's all part of the business, so I have to deal with it. I have no choice, unless I wanna give up.

This process, as sucky as it is, does work. I get to see it happen all around me, all the time. Writers are landing agents left and right (in that slow motion, Bionic Man way). But after a while, you start to realize you're not the Bionic Man. You're not even Wonder Woman.

After a while, you realize you'd aspire to be Underdog.

That's why when you're hungry, and they've run out of steaks at the BBQ, that ground chuck starts looking mighty tempting.