Confidence

I had a conversation with the mother of a basketball team member the other day and she said something that stuck with me. I commented on the fact that the basketball team seemed to play better at the beginning of the season. She agreed and said that must mean the problem was in the players' heads rather than with their skills. By this, I'm assuming that she means the boys' confidence level.
Of course, it's hard to feel confident when the coach jerks you out of the game at the first mistake and screams at you, but that is a different blog post.
The confidence thing got me thinking about places where lack of self-assurance could be dogging me.
"What?" I can hear my husband asking, "when do you ever think you're wrong?" But being right and being confident are different things.
I began to wonder whether confidence affects my writing: not just my novel writing, but the letters that I send to agents asking them to sell my novels.
Do my query letters crawl into agents' offices begging for a scrap of attention? Should they instead stride in, throw back their shoulders and proclaim: "This is your lucky day!"
Writing is a lonely endeavor. No one looks at my work daily and suggests these parts are good, these parts need work. And then when a writer begins to send out work, the rejections hover, waiting to fall like dominoes in a line.
If a writer feels sure of herself at the beginning, those dominoes slowly collapsing, beat down the writer's self-assurance, til she looks up, holding out her manuscript and says "Please, sir, may I have another?" and the agent she dared to ask smacks that stack of pages out of her hand.
A friend at work, the very pessimitic, literary writer Jeff, admits that he feels like his friends in publishing are doing him a big favor when they read his work. He knows that the young turks who earn huge advances brim with confidence as they present their manuscripts, which may be no better and no worse than his own.
We need to act like we are doing those agents a favor when we permit them to look at our novels.
Of course, I've only added more of a burden to myself. Now I need to scour my query letter so that it not only sells my book, but sells myself as well.
It's either that or go to a hypnotist who can convince me to believe in myself more.
Wouldn't it be easier to just send the agents to the hypnotist and have the hypnotists persuade them that I'm the next Dan Brown or Barbara Kingsolver?
Maybe a hypnotizing query letter. I'd better work on that.
Photo from: http://www.hypnotizeyourselfhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/spiral4.jpg

Finished Again

A new quarter starts next week, so I am scrambling to put the finishing touches on my novel.
Yesterday, again sitting on the front porch, I added a few scenes recommended by Earl to increase the suspense at the end, upping the level of difficulty for the characters. Think of the movie Fatal Attraction and how you believe the character is dead in the bathtub but she comes back one more time.
Well, really, my novel isn't like that at all, but we didn't want to make it too easy for my characters to achieve their goals.
Now I'm working on the query letter that I will send to agents. If the agents like the idea and my writing, they will ask for some of, or all of, the novel.
Then I send the novel and wait.
Some agents are very quick at getting back to me, others may take months. In the past, I've gotten a lot of requests for my novels from agents. Does that mean the ideas are good? The query letters are good? The novels aren't good?
I don't have the answers but I keep working at it, trying to improve each time.
If an agent likes my letter and then my novel, I'll be offered representation.
That hasn't happened yet, so I don't know how they do it, but I'll look at every phone number that comes to my cell phone and pray it's from New York City, which is where most of the agents are located.
Before I get ahead of myself, I need a blurb that describes my book in a paragraph to include in the letter. The blurb needs to give away the plot. I can't save any of it for suspense, but I don't want to give it all away to my blog readers, so here's the paragraph with the word "secret" inserted in place of the real treasure:

After Fia, an American woman, loses her job, a phone call draws her to France with her husband and teenage twins to run her uncle’s bed and breakfast in Provence, but she soon learns that her uncle is hiding a 60-year-old secret from World War II. I've removed the rest of the blurb for work. Thanks for all of your help guys.

I'll probably rewrite this paragraph a dozen times trying to get it right, so if you have any suggestions, I'd appreciate it. You could help me rewrite it only 11 times.
And we came up with a new title. I was calling the book "The Summer of France" because it started as a book about a couple who goes to France to run a bed and breakfast, but it became so much more. The title didn't really fit any more. The new title: Rescuing Raphael, An Adventure in Provence.
An adventure in Provence kind of sounds like an amusement park or something, so I might need to refine that as well.
Then I describe the novel as a kind of Dan Brown meets A Year in Provence. I wanted to describe it as Dan Brown meets Bridget Jones, but Earl pointed out that Bridget Jones was single, not married with teenage twins.
What do you think about the paragraph and the title? I'd love your feedback so I can keep editing and improving.

Agent Search

Any letter from an agent that starts out: "You are clearly a talented writer," must be good news, right? I mean, there's some affirmation that my hours slogging away over a keyboard in a coffee shop must be paying off.
And if that letter continued with "there is much to be admired in these pages," surely an offer must follow, right?
Instead, the dreaded phrase: "That said..." came next. Which meant, better luck next time. She didn't "fall in love" with it. I'd take some infatuation at this point.
I'm used to rejection. I've written two novels. I've had a number, maybe a third, of the agents I queried ask to see all or part of a novel, but each time it falls a little short.
Sigh.....
I'm not sure that the nice words help. Maybe someone should say, "This is crap. Stop wasting your time." Then I could take up needlepoint or dog training.
Instead I get letters, like the one early on that promised me, "We're sure you'll sell this." Why not that agent then if she was so sure?
I don't want to become bitter. I'll swallow and send out more queries on my second novel until my third novel is done. Then I'll be back to editing and trying to sell it. What I'm really trying to sell though is myself. And although I've gotten a hard enough shell to not fret over every rejection, this one hurt a little. I felt tears sting my eyes. I felt like I'd gotten so close.
Just last week, I got a form rejection letter that I thought was so cute I even laughed at it. This agent didn't request to see my work, not even the first five pages, but I admired how much money he must be saving on paper with the teeny, tiny rejection form.
Maybe the next agent will feel some chemistry, just a spark that we can fan to catch fire.
Meanwhile, I guess I need to take it easy and enjoy the process. To quote another memorable writer, Miley Cyrus: "It ain't about how fast I get there, it ain't about what's waitin' on the other side. It's the climb."
For anyone who's curious, here's a link to the synopsis of my novels:http://www.paulitakincer.com/novels/