I've been taking advantage of the long holiday weekend (and my kiddos' desire to just stay home, lie around and chill) to complete the final edits. The main edit is done, and now I'm finishing up the search and deletion/revision of filler words - really, very, that, etc.
The surprising thing is I've cut almost 150 words just with this final clean-up. Impressive. And depressing, for two reasons:
1) Why do I put all that fluff in there to begin with?
2) It brought my ms under 62,000 words. I liked being just over 62,000 words. It felt good. For some reason, 61,900-something just doesn't have the same zing.
I know. I'm weird.
I'm assuming I'll be done (are we ever really "done"?) today. I'll allow myself about five minutes to celebrate before I get to work on a redraft of my query letter. I got some amazing advice from a good friend and great writer ( http://purdyandwordy.com/my-books/ ) so I'll be diving back into that.
I have a short list ready for some initial queries. It'd been awhile since I was on Query Tracker, and I was overwhelmed at first. How did I research agents before? How did I narrow the list down? I remembered using Agent Query as well, but now did I reconcile between the two sites?
Eventually, it all came back to me, and out of an initial list of 17 agents who represent YA, I have seven to query and two to possibly query. And I just noticed as I was counting up how many agents I have listed that one of them requires a synopsis. Sigh.
I mentioned in a tweet that new story ideas have been popping up in my head the last few weeks. It's exciting and overwhelming. Starting again with a blank page and crafting a new story? Whew. But I've done it twice so far. And I love it.
