Inspirational Advice and Perspective from Kevin Hearne

I read through Hearne's interview with ThriveWire.com (thrivewire.com/stories/heir-to-the-jedi-author-kevin-hearne-recounts-his-long-journey-to-success) and found a few nuggets of widsom and inspiration. Kevin Hearne is the author of a series of urban fantasy novel, The Iron Druid Chronicles.

• 6 years to write his first novel, while working day jobs, but it was never published
• The next novel took 3 years to write

“I wrote better and faster the next time, because once you complete a novel you know what it takes to do it again. There’s a confidence there that didn’t exist before,” he says. “It’s not a profession of instant success. Authors who are perceived as instant successes often work a very long time before getting to the market.”

After an unsuccessful round of query letters, he revised and edits and finally got an agent. His first novel, Hounded, was finally published after 19 years of work!

Lots of good stuff in Kevin's words. There's a lot of hard work before that success, so don't give up. Keep at it and you'll get there. It's about developing that confidence and the writing skills.

Agent Hunt - Update #2

It's closing in on 3 weeks since I sent out the first wave of query letters for my novel Spirit Quest. I've received another rejection over the past week. It was a form letter response.

I'm trying to focus on other projects. It's proving rather difficult. Each time I hit a milestone, it seems that the next goal is quite far off. Looking back, when I completed my first draft, I had no idea how much work would be involved in the second and third drafts. Now that I'm on my last pass (recovering comments from a few Alpha readers), I have to avoid having my doubts creep in and stall the momentum I've built up so far. I'm not sure what I expected in terms of the first wave. But, coming off the high of having written the book, I felt like it was going well. I still have 6 outstanding responses, so I'll remain positive and patient.

Reading about how many rejections to expect, I came across the following which made me smile: "Don't give up until you've queried 80 agents or more".

And here's another great article on the query letter process and revision:
johngilstrap.com/essayqueryletter.html

An update on my agent hunt

I sent out 8 agent query letters on January 9th. I received on rejection and submitted to another agent, who in turn, rejected me as well. Both of these rejections were based just on the query letter. So I'm remaining positive for the other 7 query letters as they all include chapter samples. I can console myself in that the two rejections had nothing to do with my actual writing.

I'm resisting the temptation to spend any time tweaking the query letter. I compare my novel, Spirit Quest, to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files and Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles. They're both urban fantasy series that are very similar, although I feel that my story and hopefully series will be a bit more rural fantasy.

At first I had compared my story to F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack as my protagonist would be going around and helping people with his spirit magic. Although we both wrote our stories in the 3rd person point-of-view, Spirit Quest, is also a kind of coming of age novel. That 3rd person point-of-view was important, especially with my strong supporting cast. Tara could easily be the story's co-protagonist, but I'm saving that for the sequel.