News from the Underworld

It seems that, lately, a whole heck of a lot of agents are blogging. Miss Snark is a personal fave, as well as Nadia Cornier of Firebrand Literary. But I also enjoy reading Agent 007's thoughts, along with news from the Knight Agency. Reading their blogs gives you great insight to what agents are thinking, how they work, what their personality is like. Not to mention that they often make me spit my Diet Pepsi across the room.

There are a few new agent-bloggers this week. Agent Kate and the Zack Company have joined my list of blogs. Now, don't get me wrong, as of 50+ posts ago, I was very cynical about the whole idea of blogging, let alone reading other people's blogs. But I've learned quite a bit by reading them every day, so I'm glad I started.

I received another agent rejection yesterday, but she didn't tell me anything about The Roses of Carrion that I don't already know, due to the brilliant insight of Jackie Kessler (writer, editor, all around amazing goddess). But luckily, I've determined how to fix it. See, the book got its start as a sort of prequel to The Rapture Cafe. But in writing it, all I did was force needless backstory down my readers' throats. The real story doesn't begin until Rapture. Why I failed to see that before is quite beyond me. But I see the error of my ways now and that's the whole point.

The good news is that when I wrote back to thank her for her thoughts (and her time--which is a damn precious commodity to our agent friends), I mentioned that I'm hard at work on a YA about a fourteen year old vampire, titled Eighth Grade Bites. And just like that, the agent wrote back and requested that, when I'm ready to send him out into the world, I send her the first 30 pages (don't bother querying) and a reminder that she asked to see them. So what had been a horrible, why-am-I-doing-this day turned into a I've-got-something-with-Vlad day.

And I do. He's going to be known. (And if I'm lucky, he'll let me sit with him at lunch)