The Art of the Query: A Writing Update

Hi friends!

So many of you have kindly been asking about the status of our book project so we thought it was time for an official update. 

We ("we" being Layne and her friend Lindsay) began the "querying" process earlier this spring. This means we've emailed a few book agents and asked them to represent us and our book baby to publishers. Querying looks like this: We read dozens (hundreds?) of articles and sites about different agencies and then the different agents within each agency. We found a handful we believe would be a good fit for us and we emailed them a letter (and maybe some sample pages). Once we hit that "send" button, we wait. And wait. And keep waiting.

It is surprisingly harder than we anticipated. In the interval, we are continuing to edit and ask ourselves hard questions about our book. We thought it was 100% finished (at least on our end), but delving into yet another intensive edit has showed us a few more tweaks we needed to make. And by tweaks we mean.... So we've been tweaking and pulverizing our book like it's our day job. (Oh, it's not?)

We would both say this process has taught us so much - not only about the world of writing and literary agencies, but also about ourselves.

I came across this yesterday from In Propinquity and it helped me enormously: 

"What's your one piece of advice to an author newly querying agents?" Breathe, mostly. Don't obsess over what every long wait or "not for me" rejection means. You do need to be able to change what you're doing if it's not succeeding, but you'll be fine if you don't get signed immediately. Now that you're doing this, you're going to see success stories everywhere that are going to make you feel like the runt of the litter; you're going to see the offers that happened in a weekend followed by multiple agents jockeying to get this client, and you're going to feel like you'd be grateful to even get a partial request. The silence can be petrifying. So breathe. Keep sending out queries if you get rejections so you continue to have hope, keep good records, and keep your heart in your chest. You're allowed to flip out, but don't forget to breathe. Escape into writing or distractions or something else productive if you need to.”

So thanks for asking, we truly do appreciate your support and can't wait to give you a happy report!

Happy Thursday!

xo.

Taking the Garden to the Sun

Okay, people. We've promised to be honest and vulnerable with you here in this space regarding our endeavor to grow a garden this summer.

As you may or may not remember, we've already failed twice at the whole "pre-planting the seeds inside" idea.

So we moved to planting our next round of crops outside. (We did attempt a third set of seeds inside as well and so far they are green and happy, and hopefully we didn't jinx it by mentioning it on social media.)

We planted what we could at this time of year, according to the experts we've talked to. This means so far we have planted peas, carrots, onions, spinach and beans.

We are dreaming about the day we can create an entire meal from our garden. We may be miles from that dream, people, but it's there and fully alive in our hearts.

Happy Monday, peeps.

x.