Rodney Dodig

The past week has been fraught with adventures in my writing life. I finally have a query letter with the first few pages of book one off to five agents. These five say they will have evaluated my letter and the pages from my book in anywhere from two to eight weeks. That is, the ones who said they would answer at all. Most said, “If you haven’t heard from us by (fill in the # of weeks) it means we’re not interested at this time.” I understand the time requirement. After all, if you are receiving hundreds of e-mails weekly with query letters and pages from books attached, it takes time to give them thought. I can’t understand why

1. They couldn’t at least send out an automated response saying they received your query.

Or

1. They couldn’t send out an automated response saying they weren’t interested.

If you don’t hear anything, you can only wonder if they ever received your query in the first place. Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles, I wonder how they would feel if they were in the writer’s position.

I’ve finally found a great example of a good query letter and plan to edit mine before sending it to more agents. I’ve gone through the Writer’s Market listings and selected another four. I’ll keep going until I get to fifty or so and then reevaluate my course of action. I will go to self publishing if I have to.

I’m progressing well on the second book. I’m a little puzzled about how much of book one I need to reference in this one. Especially as it concerns character development. I’ve read a few books done in series by authors and have noticed that the reader is almost expected to know about the main characters already. The books I read were all well into the series and I’m thinking that I need to get books one and two in a couple of series to see how these successful authors dealt with it. Book 2 (untitled at this point) finds my intrepid detective assigned to a antinarcotics unit in the jungles of Peru. They are trying to find the source of cocaine to one of the major dealers in Lima. They want to break up his organization.  The book will also touch on child soldiers and slavery somewhat but merely as a subplot to the main story. I’ve almost completed chapter 8 and hope to get started on chapter 9 today.

My adventures at the dentist continue. On Monday, his drill broke again. This time I was able to figure out what the problem was. The old crowns were not what he was dealing with. I had large fillings put in my back teeth when I was in the Navy. It’s anybody’s guess as to what kind of metal they were using at the time. One of my old Navy buddies commented on Facebook that it was probably an alien alloy with a microchip in the center. The CIA wanted to keep track of my comings and goings. LOL Anyway, Friday I showed up for another appointment and he had a new “super strong” drill and he managed to finish the job. Now, I have two more appointment. The first will measure the crowns to make sure they fit. Then, the crowns go back to the lab for the porcelain covering. Lastly, I go back in to have them permanently glued in. Finished! I am hoping that we will be completely finished by Friday of next week. Twenty six crowns with four bridges in one and a half months, not too shabby as far as I’m concerned.

I’m thinking of starting a column, “My weekly coffees with Expats.” I met Larry again yesterday (Friday) and had another lively discussion of things going on in our lives. Larry is working on building a webpage for himself, writing his weekly column for LiP, trying to find time to begin work on his new book and deal with all the stuff a man married to a Peruvian woman needs to deal with. We always wander from topic to topic without rhyme or reason. This meeting was no different. At one point he noticed an older woman wandering down the sidewalk in the park across the street. She had a large piece of cardboard with something written on it and would stop occasionally to read from it like she was preaching to the world. “I’ll bet she’s got an interesting story,” was Larry’s comment and I knew I would be seeing an essay on her one of these days in LiP. Considering the number of coffees I have with friends who are non-Peruvian, I might be able to create an interesting weekly column for out topics of discussion. What do you think?

Have a great weekend everyone!

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 10:26 am and is filed under Living in Lima, Peru. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.