I’m getting really close to finishing.

Tomorrow marks 21 months since I sat down and wrote the first words of my novel, and it is almost ready for agent queries. I have 59 agents on my list, and crafting a unique letter for each one of them feels almost as daunting as writing the novel itself!

But I’m beyond excited.

I have believed in this story from Day One, and I am ready to start sharing it. I might be rejected a hundred times or more, but I’m not worried about that. Amy March said in Little Women, “You don’t need scores of suitors. You only need one, if he’s the right one.” I don’t know why this story came to me when it did, but it did, and I have felt the burden of writing it for the past nearly two years.

Thanks to COVID-19 and being furloughed from my job for 12 weeks, I had a lot of extra time not only to polish my novel, but also to prepare my initial list of agents, read a few novels, and select comp titles…a really complicated process of finding other novels that are similar in genre, structure, and length…oh, and they also have to be commercially successful and written by authors who are in a similar stage of their career as I am. As you can see, it was a very time-consuming task! But I love looking at books, talking about books, and recommending books almost as much as I love reading and writing them, so it really wasn’t a bummer to spend a ton of time on Goodreads and Amazon.

My goal was to begin querying agents by January 2021, but with that gift of extra time, I’ll be querying in August 2020 instead. So here I am, about to buckle up for this next leg of the journey…wish me luck!