Selling My Soul (In a Good Way) is a weekly journal

about my efforts to get a debut novel published.

To use an inadequate analogy, my query letters seem like planes circling an airport while waiting for instructions to land.

I recall a New Years trip to visit my wife’s family in Wisconsin. Though brief, we had a good time and after a few days returned to the airport for the flight home to Fresno. We would land in Los Angeles, then catch a connecting flight of thirty of so minutes to the sadly named FAT (the abbreviation for the Fresno Air Terminal. Tsk-tsk). This was in January. Fresno was beneath a shroud of tule fog, with the sky we were flying through clear and safe while the ground below had a radar-confusing layer of sloppy winter moisture.

The pilot circled, waiting for a break.

And circled.

We returned to L.A.

The eventual bus trip to Fresno was not fun.

My queries are circling. Since July’s beginning, I’ve launched eight (8) and can’t help but think:

• Did they really reach the literary agent’s mailbox?
• Are they waiting, in a first-come-first-serve kind of way, for the other scores or hundreds of earlier queries to be reviewed?
• Have they already been rejected, but “silently” because the agent, or the agent’s assistant, or the agent’s assistant’s assistant glanced at my info and decided . . . Nope.

I have one thing in my favor.

Right now, FINDING JOHN MUIR takes place in two different time frames. One is 1981, and the other (in the prologue and epilogue) happens forty or so years later in the present. Though I’d prefer to keep the novel in 1981, I could probably move it up (or would that be down) into the later 1980s. There are two key things the story needs: a forty plus year difference between a “then” and now” and not having cell phone or GPS as available tools while my characters are tramping around Yosemite National Park.

With minimal revisions, I can change the story’s dates/times whenever the story gets published so that the “now” in the prologue/epilogue remains current.

But those queries keep circling!

Since last week’s Selling My Soul, I sent three more queries (#41, #42, #43). No rejections; only silence.

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“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
― Sylvia Plath