A GOOD MORNING'S REWRITE AND AGENT MOLLY JAFFA

This morning I awoke to a productive morning of rewriting of Delinquent Lives, but after a time, I felt impelled to send off another agent query letter for another novel of mine, Angie's Choice. I resent the constant drain of writing time required to do all the "business" of becoming a published writer, so it's been awhile since I took the time to do that because Angie's Choice is ready for publication. In fact, once upon a time, Angie had an agent.

First I looked for potential agents. I used an October 2012 Writer's Digest. In that issue, several agents encouraged writers to send them work. They asked for it and I'll bet they were immediately overwhelmed by queries. I specifically looked for a female agent interested in women's writing since my heroine is a female. 

Next I went onto the websites of the agencies these agents work with to look for submission guidelines which I follow to a "T". Next, I brought up a master query letter for that specific novel, Angie's Choice, and worked it over to make it more exactly suited for the person I sensed on the other side of her written profile and comments, then, I copied and pasted the finalized letter into an email. Next I included ten pages of Angie's Choice (exactly as the agent requested).

Just to add reality to this post, I've included the name of the agent, Molly Jaffa...a nice name with a literary allusion in it. Think Molly Bloom!

The whole process took one hour and forty minutes of my valuable time. With a sigh of relief, I returned to rewriting Delinquent Lives after lunch with my lovely wife.