sarah eve kelly

For the past five months, I have had either a song or a line in my head, the song being “Why Don’t You Write Me” by Simon & Garfunkel, the line being “… and every day is like a year, a year whose days are long,” from Oscar Wilde’s staggering downer De Profundis. I tried to see the bright side of querying my novel, and on some days I succeeded: I was philosophical about Learning To Be Patient and Diverting Myself. After all, querying wasn’t the only thing in my life. I had a job, you know, and moving to Cambridge to think about, and an 80,000-word dissertation to avoid thinking about, and drinking and laundry and all the rest of it.

What I managed to think was this: why don’t you write me?

The process works like this. All you have to do to create the perfect query letter is make your eyes bleed. Then it’s done! (You only make your nose bleed writing the synopsis.) You send out a few queries, all ever-so-slightly personalised, and you sit and wait. In this phase, you don’t have to wait long. Rejections will usually come quickly, and requests for more material will also come quickly. Agents, when they have a moment to check their Query Bin, generally make educated and fast decisions about such things.

The rejections on my query never bothered me, and I’m telling the heathen truth when I say that. I considered it a reflection, at worst, on my query, and not on my meisterwerk. I can take it on the chin about my query: nobody was born to write one of those motherfuckers and the fact that I did it at all is good enough for me. But there were other agonies, both attendant on requests for material, believe it or not.

Agony #1: This is nowhere near good enough and I can’t stand to read it for comma splices again. My eyes are covered in gauze from the bleeding.

Agony #2: Now that I have made the titanic sacrifice of sending this cataclysmically inferior work off to the agent in question, why isn’t she reading it right now?

Agony #3: The world I believe in eats and sleeps in Eastern Standard Time, and here I am caged in GMT.

(This last really was bad. I would get to work at nine in the morning and wonder why agents weren’t reading, and writing to me, at what was four in the morning their time. It was sad.)

I was having a pretty typical experience until a week ago Monday. I had five full manuscripts out on submission: one for five months, one for four months, one for one month, one for two weeks, and one for three days. Everybody says wait two months; Miss Snark says wait at least 90 days before wondering whether you exist or not. I was trying, goddamnit. But about every twelve minutes, I would say to the Company at Large, “Hm, let’s see if I have an offer of representation,” or “I can feel it, I’m gonna hit Refresh, there’s gonna be an offer of representation.” This was only what I said out loud. Every twelve seconds I was silently begging, knocking on my monitor, and occasionally, the word “Why??” would ejuculate from me without my realising it.

So that’s what I did on Monday. Mike, his mother and I were taking a break from packing up the flat in Wimbledon Park, and because I had been scrubbing the kitchen all day, my computer was in there (I listen to old episodes of The West Wing whilst I scrub). “Well, break time,” said I. “Let’s go see about those competing offers of representation.” I wandered into the kitchen, got Diet Coke for Mrs C and myself, and popped open my email as I popped open the cans (I’m a deft cat).

And there it was.

Reader, it was from the woman who had received my manuscript three days before. Paraphrased, it said this: read over weekend; genius in a bucket in some places and sorta boring in others; let’s fix it; let’s get together and call ourselves an institute.

(See, I’m stuck now, completely unsure of what to say, because that’s how I felt at the time. I even tapped the computer to make sure the message didn’t go away. I had, after all, been dealing with solvents all day: my yearning could have manifested in a convincing hallucination. I was lost for words for about ten minutes.)

So, in short (haw), there you have it. Sarah is Represented. And not just by anybody. She can’t say who until the ink is dry, but in the meantime she’s fixing the boring bits, and by virtue of reading this you (yes, you) have to buy no less than seven copies of The Fidelity Trial when it comes out.

Seven.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. time capsule: querying
2. lashon hara
3. no service
4. in defence of writers
5. drawing a line for historical fiction