Yay! Or not. I don’t know whether to cheer or panic. I recently finished my second novel, The Consciousness of Life and Death. It’s a very long title, so let’s just shorten it to COLAD for now. I’m thrilled in one respect. The 700 or so cycles of read-throughs, edits, and rewrites (only a slight exaggeration) have passed. Unending gratitude to my inimitable beta readers – Laura Hunter, Patricia Shevlin Correll, and Carolyn Breckinridge – who shouldered much of the work. They are all such fine writers. I will always strive to meet the bar they have set.
Now, the one-minute-up/one-minute-down of finding a home for the novel is here. Shopping a book is tough. Mostly on the ego. I got in the weeds of QueryTracker and found that the positive response rate for agents is somewhere around 1%. That doesn’t mean acceptance. It means one out of a hundred or so needs to see a little more material to make up their minds. Let’s be generous and say 10% of those decide to take on the author. That means a novelist has a one-in-a-thousand chance of finding an agent. It’s a bruising process. To even think you can succeed, you gotta believe!
I believe in COLAD. The pitch is short, although maybe not so sweet. A family struggles to keep hope alive in a desolate world. Saori, their matriarch, lies buried in the rubble, but her secret can finally be told. It is the secret of what, or who, brought mankind to the brink. Was it Polly, the world’s first sentient android, that Saori helped so long ago? Or Polly’s creators – one desperate to save her son and the other desperate to keep his power?
While the characters’ journey lives on the pages, the novel’s journey has just started. Queries are going out. Finding an agent would be fantastic. Finding a publisher a dream. But COLAD will be told, one way or the other. My first novel, Inescapable, won the Silver Falchion Award for Best Southern Gothic at the 2024 Nashville International Writers Conference. Who knows what can happen this time?
Let’s begin.