August 2019 – Rust Belt Girl

It’s submission season again.

For those of you who don’t go in for such self-flagellation, I’m talking about submitting to literary agents, entreating them to represent me and my book.

If you’re not an aspiring author, don’t back-arrow just yet–these lessons learned can be applied to many facets of our writing lives. (And, bloggers are writers, I say over and over and over.)

First, because everybody loves query results in hard-and-fast numbers, here you go: cycle one of querying, I submitted a total of 20 queries. Of those, I had:

1 request for a partial (first three chapters); and
1 request for the full manuscript (after the agent read the partial).

Not bad, really: some action from 10 percent. I feel confident I’ll do better next query cycle, beginning this fall, knowing what I now know…

I’m reblogging my interview with author and essayist Amy Jo Burns in honor of her latest published essay up right now at the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/25/the-silhouette-artist/

Amy Jo has said this essay took her 10 years to write, and I think the essay is better for its long gestation. But, wow, this is also a good lesson for us writers to stick with, or return to, those ideas that keep us up at night!

Essays not your thing? Writer, editor, and blogger at daily (w)rite, Damyanti, featured a really interesting guest post by Felix Cheong, a poet living in Singapore. In it, he talks about the process of writing poetry, and he goes back to old drafts a lot–calling himself a scavenger. He says: “Given the right time, they [old, discarded writing material] could be salvaged, given a makeover and presented as shiny and new.”

Here’s to reviving what we thought was lost. Here’s to sticking to a good idea for a good long while. And here’s to new inspiration.

Happy writing and reading, all!

~Rebecca

Rust Belt Girl

Bio Pic-1

Amy Jo Burns is the author of Cinderland, and her writing has appeared in Salon, Good Housekeeping, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Tin House’s Open Bar, Ploughshares Online, and in Roxane Gay’s anthology Not That Bad. Her novel Shiner is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

Amy Jo was gracious enough to answer a few questions from another Rust Belt girl–me–about her literary memoir, Cinderland, which I discussed in a previous post; about her Rust Belt upbringing; about juggling the responsibilities of writing and motherhood; and about her upcoming novel, Shiner, which I can’t wait to read!

Amy Jo–your memoir, Cinderland, is set in your hometown outside Pittsburgh. How did that particular post-industrial place inform your upbringing? Does your memoir’s title reflect the place in which you were raised, the abuse you suffered as a girl, both?

I chose the title Cinderland because it represents an inner fire that…

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Rust Belt Girl

Month: August 2019

Whoops! 8 Query Lessons…that made me a better writer

My interview with author Amy Jo Burns