Next Step for The Novel

Right now, I am feeling elated and excited. Yet, a nervousness nips at my stomach.
I have finished the revision of my latest novel. I've made changes; I've tweaked it; I've slashed and rewritten. I think it's ready.
Grace proofread it for me and kept nudging me to finish. On Sunday, I spent the day at Caribou Coffee revising before handing over the final pages. Grace plopped on her bed and read the rest. She came to me with a big hug and pronounced it "Good."
Finishing the manuscript and the editing is the easy part compared to what comes next. Now, I must begin sending it out to agents, in hopes that someone will say, "Yes! I love this story." And then, if an agent says yes, that agent will need to convince a publishing company "This is just what I need." It will be edited and formatted. Someone will design a cover and I'll get to write a page of acknowledgements and thank yous. And someday in a year or so, I'll find it on a shelf in a book store or find it on Amazon so I can download it.
Right now, I feel hopeful. I love the concept of the book and I've worked on my writing.
Sending this book off feels like the long ago memory of falling in love, that hopeful rise in my chest, but the fear that my hopes might be dashed. It's like raising a toddler and then dropping him off for his first day of kindergarten. Once he walks away, he's on his own. I can't be there to coach him or cheer for him.
I feel like I'll jinx myself if I'm overconfident. But all the positive thinking books remind me to imagine what I want to happen. I want my book to get published. I'm envisioning it.
I created this book cover to print out and post on my dream board.

I've spent the past few days thinking about how to describe the book to agents. It doesn't matter how good the book is if I can't hook the agent with my query letter.
I haven't sent out any letters yet, Grace and Earl are mulling over my crucial paragraph. But I have sent my website designer a blurb and an excerpt to the novel That you can read here. Take a look.
So far, here's the paragraph for my query letter.

Jobless but optimistic, Fia Randolph spends her days in Columbus, Ohio, wishing away the steadily increasing pile of bills on the kitchen table. She fills her days corralling her 14-year-old boy-girl twins and appeasing her husband Grayson until a crackly, trans-Atlantic call from her great Uncle Martin in France breaks the monotony. He begs her to relieve him and his French wife Lucie from the hassle of running their bed & breakfast in Provence. Left without instructions and limited language skills, Fia works to keep the bed & breakfast afloat until she discovers the 60-year old secret that has haunted her uncle since WWII. Swept into a world of mystery and intrigue, Fia must find a way to clear her uncle’s guilty conscience, while keeping herself and her family safe from those who would steal the secret for themselves – at any cost.

What do you think? Suggestions? Confusion? I'd love your input.
Maybe soon you'll see my book on First Paragraph Tuesdays because someone is reading and reviewing it.
Fingers crossed!

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

Long, Cold Writing Winter

Have you noticed my silence on the subject of writing? I'm kind of frozen in indecision.
I have sent query letters for my latest novel, Ransoming Raphael, to 13 agents. I've had one request for more material and several rejections. Some I haven't heard back from.
Hundreds of literary agents sell novels to publishers, so why have I stopped after a baker's dozen? I worry that I need to fix something in my novel before sending it out again. Or, I worry that the query letter doesn't sell my novel well enough. I don't want to send letters to all the good agents, get rejected, then make changes to my novel or query letter and not have more good agents to send it to. So I'm doing nothing.
This break between classes has stretched out before me without early morning writing sessions at the computer. I haven't taken my laptop and tromped down to the coffee shop where the smell alone is inspiring. Instead, I've avoided the computer, the fiction, the agent search. I wrote a Christmas letter and published it myself. I don't think that counts.
A few years ago, when I searched for an agent for Trail Mix, my novel about two women who hike the Appalachian Trail, I received an email from a man who worked for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. He said the Conservancy was dabbling in publishing some fiction. I had a lot of interest from agents about Trail Mix at that time and decided to continue my search rather than asking him to take a look at my novel. Now, I wonder if that would have made a difference in my career. To have a book published, even by a small publisher, would be an extra achievement to put on my query letter.
Here's the cover I envisioned for my book Trail Mix:

The jump from writing to publishing is huge. That chasm gets wider every time I step toward it. I know that my writing can improve, so I vow to work on it this year, with workshops and writing conferences. Even if I write well, getting published remains out of reach, until I find an agent willing to take a chance on a novice.
Some do. I just need to find the right one.
So there I am, frozen between working on writing and working on selling. Maybe a happy medium, a compromise of 60 percent writing, 40 percent selling, or some other fraction that doesn't make me tired to think about.
The one thing I can't do any more is pretend my writing life doesn't exist and pop in another movie. I haven't watched Coco Before Chanel yet.

Dreams

I wish I could describe that feeling. The nervousness and anticipation when I send out a letter to an agent. I have carefully honed the letter, hoping to sell the literary agent on my latest book. I try to be immune to the rejections and figure the right agent will see the potential.
I've probably sent only half a dozen query letters for my latest project, Ransoming Raphael. I peruse my list of top agents and choose one carefully like a rich chocolate.
An agent responds, "Send me x number of pages of your manuscript."
And my heart soars.
This one.
This could be the one.
This could be the book. This could be the agent. This could turn my world upside down.
I sit with my completed manuscript and scour it for misspellings, awkward wordings.
Then, like a baby bird perched on the edge of a nest, I send it out, hoping it will soar before it tumbles to the ground.
I push the send button; the pages cross the electronic divide arriving in an agent's inbox. Maybe the agent will open it right away. Maybe the agent will park it in a long cue behind manuscripts about vampires or pirates or the biography of the man who discovered calculators.
I hope she loves mine.
I hope she calls or emails and says, "More please."