I just left the post office, where I sent off four packages. Two were to fairly large magazines, and two were to literary agents. It was a pain in the ass figuring out all the different do’s and don’ts, and it ended up being much more time-consuming than I had imagined. What I thought would take a couple of days sucked up my whole week. I wish I had numbered the drafts of the letters for the agents, the number would be very high now. Cover letters accompanying my fiction were simpler, but I hope in the future to hone them to let my personality shine through a bit more. (Carefully crafted casualness.)

I didn’t include mention of my media empire in the letters, and now I’m thinking I should have. It could be an important asset when it comes to promoting my books. Or… something like that.

An anecdote you won’t give a rat’s ass about:

I spent several hours agonizing over a two-sentence description of Hunter for my brief description of The Monster Within. I had a longer version and one that came across as glib. After quite a bit of sweat I came up with a compromise that didn’t bother me too much. Then it was time to review the synopsis, and right there in the second paragraph was the exact sentence I was looking for. Should have known to look where I had already made a compact version of the story when trying to come up with a compact description.

I managed to avoid revealing the Big Plot Twist until the third sentence. There wasn’t much more I could do about that.

I’ll be getting one more short story out tomorrow, then I’m gonna take it easy for a while.

By the way, a special thanks to Jojo – not only is she a fine beer slave, she has been providing lots of valuable information and encouragement. She made things much easier for me this last week.

Sweet!

Thanks!