One-sided conversations with Erin

I have this wonderful friend named Erin whom I met in high school. We had a teacher who used to seat the cheerleaders in the front of the classroom and he'd prop his leg up on one of the cheerleader's desks and say, "Let's talk like real people." It was gross and Erin and I used to talk about it at lunch.

Correction. We used to GAG about it at lunch.

Anyway...

Erin is still one of my very best friends. She's beautiful and funny and she reads the things that I write. She currently has access to my novel Running Through the Words (I hope she likes it!) and so I sometimes send her texts about the life of an aspiring writer. Today I sent her a text that offered reflections on our book club's selection last month, our book club's selection this month, and all the books in general.

Here's what I don't get: Why don't I have an agent???

Do you know how hard it is to take a 178,000-word manuscript and condense it to a 300-word query letter that will essentially summarize your novel while at the same time piquing the interest of an agent so that s/he requests pages? The task is next to impossible. I've read statistics that suggest having a request for a full manuscript (I have, to date, gotten a request for maybe seven full manuscripts) is one in six thousand. SIX THOUSAND.

The odds of getting representation WITHIN that 6,000 is apparently less than 1%, so the question that comes to mind--"Why do I try?"--seems pretty logical. Why do I continue to try?

The answer: Because I want people to read what I write. Because the characters in my head are so real to me that I want to share them with the world. Because people like my dear friend Erin send me random comments like, "I love the bond/friendship between Bas and Bert!" And those words, all nine of them, keep me going.

Thank you, Erin. And thank you to all the folks who continue to buy my self-published novels and read this blog. I appreciate it more than you will ever know.