Submitting again

Last weekend I got the whim to send my novel, HempAmerika.com, out to agents again. I'd found one who seemed nice enough, was listed as accepting submissions, and had a clean, tasteful website. She wanted a cover letter and a sample chapter. So I pulled up the novel and took a look at the opening paragraph and said to myself, "Is this the best I can do? Really?" It was sluggish and torpid, and I could see why no one wanted to represent me. It was really kind of depressing, but you can't just be depressed and give up, because then where would you be?

So I thought I'd polish it up and send it back out. I'd gather all the skills and life experience I'd gained in the eighteen months since I'd last worked on my novel. Shouldn't take long. I'd just concentrate for a few minutes, come up with a few genius phrases, and make a sparkling jewel of that opening, something to rival The Great Gatsby, or, heck, Moby Dick, for opening paragraphs. Something that would be quoted for decades to come...

Three days later, I'd gotten something acceptable together. I'd added sentences and taken them out. I'd paged through thesauruses, had a few stiff drinks, neglected the dog. Then, finally, with something different anyway, I gave up again. Is it better? Oh, sure, why not.

I repeated this process with the cover letter. I took the two cover letters I'd used before. I decided to take the strongest parts of each and fuse them together, like you do with two bars of soap. I melded and sculpted, made verbs agree with subject, and parallelized dependent clauses. I split hairs over word meanings, and compared adjectives and if it was a close call, I flipped a mental quarter. If I was a genius, then the two choices were equally brilliant. If I were an idiot, same deal, so no need to stress. Finally, when all I was doing was fiddling with commas, I figured I was done.

I composed the email Tuesday morning, made a pdf of the opening chapter, and sent it off to the agent, then remembered I have a day job. So I fed the dog, boxed my lunch, put on a coat and headed out to the bus stop. I checked my Blackberry, and there it was: a rejection from the agent. Four days of work, and fifteen minutes to reject. I do not take it personally. I have since sent it to two other agents, who will most likely not even have the courtesy to send a rejection. Again, nothing personal.

Just for fun, here are the paragraphs:

Paragraph A:
It was in 1998, six months after I moved back to Minneapolis, that Great Uncle Nick passed away. His memorial service was held at a funeral parlor not far from my Uptown apartment, in a section of city encased in a fast-melting shell of ice, the glittering aftermath of a late-season storm. My parents insisted on driving me home, and then on coming up for a visit. They sat silently on their own discarded furniture as I handed them herbal tea from a supply they’d brought over themselves a few weeks earlier, and when I leaned against the kitchen door the silence continued.


Paragraph 1:
In the Spring of 1998, six months after I moved back to Minneapolis, Great Uncle Nick passed away. The night before his memorial service, a late-season storm encased the city in a shell of ice that by morning had transformed my neighborhood into a glimmering imitation of itself. Great gnarled oaks had been smoothed into enlarged approximations of oak trees, and entire buildings wore facades of ice that shimmered in the morning sun, blinding me as I slipped over the frozen sidewalks of Uptown to the funeral parlor where Nick was to be sent off to his final rest. Conditions were still treacherous when the service ended, so my parents insisted on driving me home, and then on coming up for a visit. They sat silently on my sofa, which had been in their basement a few months earlier, as I boiled up and handed out some herbal tea from a supply they’d brought over themselves as a housewarming gift, and when I leaned against the kitchen door the silence continued.