i'll wait for you where saturday's a memory

The query letter revision must not have been a complete fluke -- I got another request for fifty pages this morning from one of the agents whom I queried on Tuesday! Now granted, some of it is likely timing, and some of it is likely that the agents I queried are more actively seeking clients (I read the blog of one of the agents who sent me a form rejection in December, and she said that she only took on two new clients all of last year!). But I'm glad to see that I can at least write a query letter.

Now I just have to hope that the book itself holds up. And really, this phase is scary; if I failed to ever get my book in front of someone, then I could blame my querying skills. But now, if no one takes it, the book itself is either boring, poorly written, or unmarketable. So I'm going to go down the path of assuming that someone will pick it up someday, rather than self-doubting -- there's plenty of time for me to be proven wrong, but as evidenced by the fact that I procrastinated for six weeks on rewriting my query letter when it turns out I had a good query letter within me, I can't let my fear get in the way of making progress towards my goal.

So that's the news on the book front. On the work front, today was a brutal slog (starting with an eight a.m. that I was a few minutes late for because of a five-car pileup on the freeway out of the city -- but I cleared the scene early enough that it didn't hold me back too much, and I got to see a car on fire, which was exciting), but I made it out by 5:30 and only did an hour of work when I got home. I also played some mafia today and kind of hope I die tonight, if only so that I can get some stuff done tomorrow, but we'll see what happens.

On the home front, I actually watched television tonight! After I was done working and had eaten the last remnants of my beef bourguignon (I froze the rest a couple of days ago), I realized that I didn't want to look at agent profiles, send query letters, read romance blogs, work on my research database, or keep brainstorming Madeleine and Ferguson's story. Instead, I watched two new episodes of "Scrubs" -- it moved to ABC from NBC to complete its last season, and the episodes that I watched tonight were great. One even made me cry with the (admittedly cheap and obvious) juxtaposition of a death scene with Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark". I haven't watched television (other than part of that Nostradamus thing on the History Channel last week) since I got back from Iowa, and it was a nice break. I need to either catch up on stuff or delete it, since my tivo is filling up -- but the book remains the priority.

I'm going to bed now. The knowledge that I can get up tomorrow and take the bus down to the bay tomorrow is incredibly nice. If the weather is still good, I'll likely try to leave a little early and walk around the Ferry Building or something else down there -- I'm looking forward to relaxing this weekend. And also, of course, working on the story for Book #2 -- I really want to start writing no later than the first week of February. Goodnight!