The Awesomeness That Is QueryTracker

I'm a moron. I'll admit. I'm not too proud! About a year and a half ago I got the half-brained idea that I could write a novel. Sure, why not? How hard could it be?

Um, hard. So hard. So friggin' hard that I'm pretty sure it took a year off my life. (*shrugs* Eh, what am I going to do living til 95 anyway?)

But if I thought the actually writing was tough, the concept of finding an agent for said toughness was like the diffence between walking down the block and running a supermarathon. I was wholly unprepared for the mental, emotional and sometimes physical carnage known as Querying.

"How do I start?" she asked herself, filled with naive Mary Sunshiny-ness. She Googles FIND AN AGENT...

And that's when Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus with a full double choir and 50 piece orchestra exploded in my mind. QueryTracker!

I honestly don't know what I would have done without QueryTracker. Not only could I research agents, discover their varying submission policies and find links to websites and blogs, but there's the endless query and submission statistics to poor over, quenching my incessant need for order in an otherwise orderless process.

Agent X's stats say she averages 4 days for e-query responses, and I emailed her 6 days ago. Did she get it? Is it stuck in a SPAM filter? Oh God, I know it's stuck in the junk. DAMMIT! Why did I use my AOL account? Wait, but maybe I didn't get a response because she's actually interested? See, she takes longer to respond with requests that with rejections. Yes, YES! THAT MUST BE IT! Oh thank you, QueryTracker. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

(CUT TO: form rejection received from Agent X 15 minutes later)

Dammit.

Writing is inherently lonely. Our non-writing friends and family don't know, don't understand the daily turmoil of having your baby on the agent chopping block, the ups and downs of partial requests and form rejections, the sun emerging from behind the clouds sensation of the covetted full request. And I'm not sure I would have gotten through it with (mostly) all my marbles if it hadn't been for sites like QueryTracker.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm out of Query Hell (soon to be replaced by Submission Hell which, I understand, is a whole nother soul-sucking monster. You can read about my trials here.) And I owe a great debt of gratitude to the wonderful folks at QueryTracker, to Patrick who gives so much of his own time to maintain this Mecca of Databases, and to Mary and Elana who diligently work the QT blog. Thanks, guys.