Drawing Boards

I got another rejection:

Please know that I appreciate and respect the time, effort and imagination
you have put into your manuscript. I wish that time would permit me to respond
in a more personal manner, but the volume of submissions I receive does not
allow me to do so.

Nice folks.

The two responses I got so quickly were from query letters only; the agents that wanted pages as well are taking longer to go through their slush piles.

I went to query some more, but discovered that I had mistakenly deleted my synopsis from my hard drive, and I didn't keep a hard copy. So I have to start over. This might be fateful, because I suspect my synopsis was lacking; I treated it as a business document, assuming the reader just wants to know what happens in the book. Apparently I'm supposed to add zest, verve, emotion, and a distinct voice that matches (but not too much!) the voice of the novel. For pete's sake. I had no idea when I started that all this stuff would be way, way harder than writing the book.

Since it's possible my synopsis sucked, I'm starting to wonder if my novel sucks, too. So I signed up for Critique Circle, though I haven't critiqued anything yet, and you have to critique other people before you can offer your own stuff. I like the idea of anonymous online critiquing - it takes some of the sting out of it. Baby steps.

So the selling is on hold for now, while I go back and make sure my stuff isn't garbage. As long as I'm writing a synopsis anyway I decided to enter my local chapter contest. These things make money for the chapters, and you know, your chapter is your peeps, so you have to come out, but holy crap, the rules made my eyes bleed - who comes up with these things? Is all this analretentive stuff about spacing and fonts created to weed out morons? Or did everyone really just not get enough of school?

In order to rest my mind, I did my taxes and was finished in about 45 minutes. The contest, though - that's gonna take time.

Abby