what i be doing with my time

These days I'm spending my spare time researching agents who represent romance, listing them all in my Scrivener program file, rating them by how interested I am in them, writing little notes about who they rep/their philosophy/their success etc., and also listing them according to whether they accept e-solicitations, and whether they want just a query, or query & outline, or query, outline and chapters. (I brushed up on Scrivener's many features before I started, to help me out.)

I've got 23 so far. I lurv Scrivener--SO useful. Don't know how I ever wrote a school paper without it.





And I lurv this website of agent listings--the best I've found so far.

http://www.agentquery.com

You can sort out just the AAR agents, who are almost-definitely legit. After that, the only ones I find *suspect* are those who don't list the works/authors they rep! (Just one so far, and sure enough she's seen as a bit suspect by Preditors and Editors.)

I also sort out the ones who rep romance, and then--if they have a web site--I research more about them, the sorts of things they rep, the personalities of the agents. Man... this is so much better than The Olden Days. Not to mention there are SO many agents and editors with blogs, there's a never ending flow of advice and you can get answers to any question imaginable (and things I'd never heard satisfactorally addressed before, despite all the writing books I've read.)

As I research I'm also noting and buying authors who look popular, but also interesting to me (or similar to me), to get a better feel for the market. Right now I'm reading a romance where the hero is a dragon. (It's not as creative as it could be, but it's cute.) Working in a large format bookstore for 11 years has already given me a good impression of every genre out there, but because I read in every genre (mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, literary, historical, teen, romance, a smattering of horror and of course non-fiction... I only haven't read westerns, and the only High Fantasy I've read is Tolkien) I'm a generalist rather than a specialist. I've got to increase my romance reading.

It took my years to pick a genre to write in, but I finally decided romance is actually the broadest. As long as you have a love story in there, you can write sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, historical, contemporary, funny or serious. And having a romance as a common denominator is easier than having futuristic science, or dragons, or magic, or a murder as the common denominator. It's the only factor that isn't really genre-specific, since most humans experience a romantic relationship of some kind.

So I'm enjoying myself. Here's my fave author photo so far:


Plus I get to listen to tons of music while I work. Weee! "Light it up everybody light it up!"