Orchard trip yesterday. It’s an annual thing. We go and pick up a few kitschy decorations for Halloween, two pies that we split with my parents, apple cider, apple cider donuts. Always begins in the best of spirts and ends with us exhausted. Taking kids under ten anywhere will do that to you eventually, as you’re repeatedly saying, don’t touch that, what did I say, come here, don’t wander off. The Orchard also had an arts festival so we figured it might be more crowded than usual, but it wasn’t. We usually go in October, and I guess everybody goes in October, so September is safer if you’re trying to avoid the crowds. Some years, the crowds are awful and you just want to leave almost as soon as you arrive. All in all, it wasn’t a bad weekend, but it went by too quickly. My wife took the kids to a rock climbing gym and they loved it so we signed them up for eight months of lessons. I hope they still like it at month six because it costs a pretty penny, but anything that gets them out of the house and active, I’m all for. Wear them down. Get them to sleep sooner.

Had a friend over Friday for some back deck porch sitting and drinking. Drank wine, gave her a small dram of the Nikka from the Barrel as a sample of what Japanese whisky can be even if she’s not a whiskey person. Our quarter cord of firewood was delivered Thursday night, and my wife and I stacked it, and I put the fire pit to use for the first time this season. My friend is also a writer, or, she has an MFA at least. She wrote a collection of essays, so that makes her a writer in my book, though she hasn’t put her efforts into the craft in a while, and when I joked about how I was excited that my writer friend was coming over (that’s right, writer friend, I have only one at the moment), she countered that she’s not really a writer. Well, I need some kind of community, so if a person can at least talk writing, they’re my writer friend. I’ve been querying agents for my memoir Both Cruel and Kind, and it’s a long and lonely process, mostly because most agents don’t send form rejections and simply have in their guidelines that if you don’t hear back within 4 weeks, they’re not interested, so it’s like sending your hopes and dreams into a black hole. I appreciate and respect what agents do, certainly. I respect that they get so many queries that they can’t respond to each individually, but I do wonder with some of the bigger agencies that practice this 4-weeks and then if you don’t hear back it’s void kind of thing: don’t they have interns who can send form rejections? I mean, just so we know they received the query at least?

Some of the problem that I worry about is that, although I’ve published widely in literary journals, I haven’t necessarily led an outwardly exceptional life, so my bio is mostly other places I’ve published. I hate social media so I haven’t bothered to build a following there, and rather than market myself, I’ve devoted myself to craft, which might have been a bad idea. I mean, from what I understand, these days, publishers are looking for someone with a built-in following who can market their own work to followers they already have. Back in the day, you could get that by blogging, but no one blogs anymore. I never bothered to blog at the time, mostly because I was worried about the way things people said years ago could be used against them later as the cultural goalposts shifted, so I didn’t want to have anything down in writing. No, I won’t rant about how you can’t say anything anymore, that’s not what I mean. I’m certainly not that guy who’s upset by making updates to the way we talk about issues. I mean more how if we’re now supposed to call the homeless the unhoused is someone going to ding me because a decade ago, before there was a new term, I used the older and now unacceptable one? Because I do feel like that happens, but I’ll also admit that might just be paranoia. Essentially, I’d worry about getting piled on because I missed out on one of the updates to the language and out of ignorance misspoke.

Then again, that’s overly optimistic because people only tend to do things like take screenshots of your faux pas out of context if you’re successful and so I’d have to become successful first, and it doesn’t look like that’s coming down the pipeline anytime soon, which I’m okay with, though I still do dream of achieving success with a writing career or I wouldn’t be sending out my work. Anyway, the path to how to get there isn’t exactly as clear as it seemed just a decade ago. Nowadays, writing a blog doesn’t seem to matter anymore and no one is reading, so I’ve taken up the practice. Facebook, though I was on it for a decade, always made me depressed, and I’m not sure people develop careers out of a Facebook following (see I’m using the wrong term here already, it’s Meta now, right? don’t get on me, I deactivated my account in 2017). I was also on Twitter for a little while and it felt like junk mail for famous people, so I kicked that habit like Peter Gabriel. And Instagram is…well, I’m still on it, but I don’t know how a middle-aged dad is going to use pictures of his kids to generate a following (especially with a private account), and…is the next one Tik Tok? Should I figure out how that works and try to gain myself some fans!? Yes, I’m joking, only maybe not. I have some ideas, but it’s too early to talk about them. Maybe I’m not dead yet as far as a social media presence is concerned. But I’d have to have some really solid idea to bring me back to a platform.

Then, because I spent my time writing four books without figuring out how I was going to get an agent, without sending a single query until all four books were finished, I’m wondering if I’m leading with the wrong book. I composed my memoir on social media, with the input of people who were present in the time of my life I’m discussing, and that was the hook, the thing that makes it unique to our age, and I figured that could be the selling point, but was I wrong. By the way, I should say at this point, that I understand you may have to end up querying between 50-100 agents before finding someone who will even request to read your manuscript, and I’ve only queried six so far, maybe seven, I don’t know, I’d have to check my spreadsheet. So I might be jumping the gun, but when you put in that much work, not only on the several drafts of the book but on your cover letter, synopsis and choosing the sample chapters, I’m already a bit spent before I even head out there. Couple that with the fact that I keep rethinking my query letter, trying to figure out if it would help if I market it by citing some kind of contemporary social issue like toxic masculinity, and it continues to be daunting.

On Friday, having started to write my children’s book, I decided to Google how long children’s books should be. I figure my book would be aimed at 10-13 year olds, which is middle age? And the standard word count is 40,000-50,000 words, which is cool because I think I can bring in this book at that. But I got this information from an agent’s blog and she was talking about how agents can sometimes pass on your work simply because your word count is too long, particularly for writers trying to publish their first book, as long word counts are a sign the writer didn’t do enough editing, and that disheartened me about the memoir, because it’s 110,000 words, and while that’s cut down from 150,000 words of the first draft, I think most people are looking for a first-time writer’s work to be between 80-90,000. Which I tried to get to in my numerous drafts, I really did. I think that’s actually the sweet spot, but after a year’s worth of editing and recording myself reading it and listening to playback and making cuts, 110,000 is the best I can do. So would it have been better to have led with one of the other books that are the correct length? Well, not to fret, I’m doing the prep work to get another query ready to start with one of them.

Anyway, enough about agent querying. I’ll keep pushing and see what happens. A lot of these places advise you to simply be polite and you’re already head and shoulders above other queries. Use the agents name so it doesn’t seem like a template. That’s another check. I know what professionalism looks like, and I think my materials are there, but I can’t help wondering if I can be doing it better. But that’s the only way to get where you’re going. Keep on pushing at it. Keep on sending it out until you realize it’s not going to happen. Six or seven queries is no reason to despair. I need to keep reminding myself of that. No reason to despair at all.

The point here, I guess, is that I need someone to talk to about it sometimes, to get my concerns and worries off my chest. And I can talk to other friends who aren’t writers and I can talk to my wife, but everyone knows that it helps to talk to someone who’s gone through it, who’s submitted their work and had it rejected, who has all the internal turmoil writers have about wondering if we’re good enough, if what we’ve just spent years on matters at all, if we’d just wasted our time. I’m pretty damn certain it’s not a waste of time regardless of what happens. After all, that’s part of the reason I wrote four books before bothering approaching an agent about any one of them. I took joy in the writing of them. I took joy in the editing of them. I took joy in coming back every day and looking over what I wrote to see how I could make it better, to see what I could do to make adjustments and get something resembling text I was happy with on the page, to hear the feedback of a few readers and make adjustments when they had good ideas. I feel to some extent like, if you’re going to stop writing because of the possibility what your writing might not get published, you have no business writing at all. And I can’t say that talking to my friend reassured me because there is no assurance here, and I know that well. But it made me feel a little less alone, and that was a small good thing. And it helped for the time being.