More answers, and a darling new niece!

Time for more answers to your questions!

Kathryn said...
Wondering how your husband reacted when you signed with an agent! What was your family's reaction? :) My husband was SO excited. He knew how badly I wanted this and how hard I had worked to get to that point. He'd seen me at the breaking point, when I was so beaten down with rejection that I didn't know if I could handle even one more. He also saw me when I was so excited about the most recent requests or feedback or revision. When it finally happened, I was almost in shock with disbelief that I'd finally achieved my goal. He on the other hand was jumping up and down, yelling in excitement, lifting me off of my feet and swinging me in circles. My family was also very excited, but not so much that they lifted me off of my feet. ;)


Emy Shin said...
These are great advice! A question, hmm... Did you have a process for querying? Did you query all agents at once, or send five queries, wait a week, then send five more, etc.?
Definitely don't query all the agents on your list at once. But I do believe in doing it in chunks. I'd say five - ten at a time. I usually sent out a chunk every monday morning, and see what kind of responses I got. One thing I did do though, was whenever I got a particularly heartbreaking rejection, I'd send out a new query right away (or maybe a couple) to give myself new hope. It was one way I coped with disappointment--focus on the possibility of the future instead of the failings of the past.

Nicole Zoltack said...
Queries always need to be tweaked so I would love to win!My question: How do you know when your query is ready? Oh boy, this is a tricky one. Especially since I was often tweaking my query between every round of queries I sent out! But what I would usually do is have a few new people read it whenever I thought it was ready (on top of my CPs), and based on how they reacted I would decide. Another thing I did sometimes (when I was feeling really brave), was to call up a friend and read them my query as if it was the back of a book at a store to ask them if they thought it sounded good. I'm sorry I'm not much help on this one. Basically, get it to where you think it accomplishes your goal (concisely and intriguingly surmises your book), and then have the courage to send it out.

And now for your viewing pleasure, I'd like to introduce my beautiful new niece Zoey!!

Isn't she darling? I'm so in love.

And thank you for all of your wishes on SonB's birthday party. It went awesome! He loved all of it (including his cake), so hurray for success!

Did you all have a good weekend?

Ways to react when a doctor starts talking about...

So, I'm at my appointment with the cardiologist yesterday, and he is reading all the different test results in front of me, doing all sorts of exams on me, making strange noises as he looks through the huge stack of papers in my chart. All in all, I'm getting mighty nervous. Thirty minutes of this goes on before he starts telling me what he thinks about my heart "stuff."

All in all, I got good news. There isn't something horribly wrong with my heart. The heart itself is very healthy, but for some reason, I am having premature beats and most of them are coming from my ventricle. Which apparently is cause for concern. However, since everything else looks good, it's not too concerning. But it is concerning. Confused? So was I.

And then he started talking about the fact that ventricular premature beats increases your risk of "suddenly keeling over dead." Yep. In a very matter fact tone of voice, he told me that my risk of "sudden death" wasn't zero, but it wasn't too elevated, but it wasn't as low as a normal person's--it's somewhat raised. So basically, I have a somewhat elevated risk of suddenly keeling over dead, but it's not too concerning, but it's still concering, however I can keep exercising, I need more testing and will start taking beta blockers after the testing, but overall, I'm okay. Right? Right.

So, if you doctor began to talk about your risk of "suddenly keeling over dead," I'm just curious. How would you respond?

Disclaimer: Just so you know, I really liked the doctor, and he was very knowledgeable and mostly understandable, my husband and I just got a big kick out of his matter of fact discussion on sudden death. And not just any death. But the keeling over kind.