It's been a month since I sent out my first queries for the novel. And of the original six queries I sent, I've so far had one rejection (yay, first agent rejection!) and a whole lot of silence.
This is not a complaint, I hasten to add. For one thing, the agents I queried were pretty much unanimous in claiming a 6 - 8 week response time on queries, and we haven't even reached that milestone yet. For another thing, last week was Frankfurt Book Fair which will not only have impacted the reading of the slush pile while it was on, but the weeks before it will have been filled with prep work and now they'll be filled with follow-up. My query won't be getting read and rejected until the dust from all of that has settled. So we wait, and we have a little freakout every time the email notification appears on our phone, and we find other things to do in the meantime.
I responded to that one rejection by sending out another query to another agent somewhere else. I also sent another one out today, just because I'd had a microscopic chat with the guy on Twitter the other day and I wanted to query him before I lost the tweets and couldn't remember who he was any more. I've also finally gone back to sending out my short stories and acquiring more rejections for those too. The Rejection Collection is coming along beautifully these days.
And it's only a week until NaNoWriMo! I have pages upon pages of worldbuilding, and character notes, and story beats, and with luck by the end of November I'll have another first draft that's worth polishing up into something more. That's assuming we haven't all perished in a nuclear war by then, of course...
