STARTING YOUR WRITING CAREER

Starting your writing career.

That's something all of us want to know more about. Here is a link to an article by agent Michael Larsen on that very topic in the latest GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS : http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/default.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/blog/default,month.2010-1.aspx.

And TJ was right when she wrote me in the last post in that my query was long according to what conventional wisdom advises. I have taken that thought into consideration, and based upon another article from GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS, I sent off a "wiser" query. Here it is :

Dear {First Name of Agent -- I think it is warmer to address an agent by the first name} :

After your April 5th interview on GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS, I am sure you are swamped by queries. You stated you were interested not only in urban fantasy but in lesbian characters that had more to share than the angst of coming out. In my urban fantasy, Lady Lovelace, Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron {and author of the first computer language a 100 years before the computer's invention,} is a major player. As is Margaret Fuller, the first woman foreign correspondent. The year is 2005, and they should be long dead. But they are not.

And they have been lovers for a 150 years. How? It is explained in the 90,000 word urban fantasy, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. Neither one is the central character. But they are his anchors to sanity.

In a world where reality is but a walking dream, nightmare is only a shadow away. A legendary jazz club owner decides he has lost enough : his humanity, his family, his beloved wife. He will not lose his city -- not to politicians, not to predators in the shadows, nor to his life-long enemy returning for a final revenge. His tale is set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

I have finished FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE as well as the first three chapters of its sequel, NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE. As you requested in AGENT QUERY, I am sending the first five pages of my novel in the body of this email :


"Our nation is prepared, as never before, to deal
quickly and capably with the consequences of
disasters and domestic incidents.”
--FEMA chief Michael D. Brown - March 09, 2005
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans August 29, 2005


CHAPTER ONE

It rained lies and death today.

I stood knee-deep in water outside my French Quarter jazz club, Meilori’s. My soul stretched tight across my chest. Everything I saw and heard in the shadows spoke to me ... in threats. The sudden, short explosion of an unseen gun. A quick, sharp scream in the distance. And the blue spurt of a lighted match at the far end of the street. My city bled slowly in the ripples of the flooded streets.

I leaned back against the door to my club as if for reassurance that something solid still remained to me. That it had survived Katrina was a mixed blessing. It was all that was left to me of my wife. Staying here was both penance and purgatory. Meilori’s was the kind of place in which almost anything was likely to happen and in which almost everything had. Inside, the fifty-one survivors of Katrina that I could house were huddled in shivering, too quiet clusters. Words have no meaning when a city dies. Nothing much does.

{Then follows the remaining 5 pages, but I wanted to be kind to your punished eyes.}

************
To get a better idea of my writing voice -- and if you care to challenge the murky blog waters -- you may want to check out my blog, WRITING IN THE CROSSHAIRS, http://www.rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/.

If not, I understand. Some of those blogs are truly scary.

{Of course, I was not referring to any of the blogs I follow here.}

I would tell you mine isn't. But I would sound too much like Richard Nixon claiming he wasn't a crook.

I am a former high school teacher, family counselor, and now a blood courier. The last a result of being evacuated from Lake Charles due to Hurricane Rita and having to support myself any way I could. I found I liked the job and the people with whom I worked.

Thank you for taking the time to read my query. I would be happy to send you sample chapters or the full manuscript. I hope that you find some gem in the flood of submissions that pour your way. May your New Year hold only happy surprises with some relief for punished eyes and swamped workloads.

Roland D. Yeomans M.A.

{Say a prayer for this query, will you, friends? I'll say more than one for yours. I just added this new query to show how a short query would look. Subtract the requested 5 pages, and it is fairly short.}

Here is a lovely rendition of a prayer that means a great deal to me :