richard-rowland-perkins.com

Welcome to Richard’s blog. If this is your first visit a little introduction is in order. Professionally, I’m an engineer with a strong interest in renewable energy and sustainable development. But that’s just my day job. Or it would be if I wasn’t currently between jobs… I’m also an avid backpacker, a musician, and a novelist. Or I will be once I get my first novel published…

This site is dedicated to my never-ending struggle to find a meaningful balance between my professional and personal interests. So if you’re wondering how I fit all of the things I want to do into a 24 hour day, read on. The site is divided into three pages.

Here in the water garden you can scroll down to find the most recent posts in my Journal: entries on the creation of this blog, news on my writing submissions and career developments, and other articles that lack a formal home.

Next door at the office you’ll find my Professional page: view my resume or read about interesting things in the world of renewable energy technology.

If you’re interested in fiction, check out the Writer’s Lair: There you can find excerpts from my NaNoWriMo 2008 winning manuscript, The Renegade’s Door. You can also read the drafts of Doormakers Fall and Voices of the Deep, two earlier works set in the same world.

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I’ve received two more rejections since my last update, one of them in response to a requested partial. The agent liked the writing but found the plot and action too much like a video game instead of a novel. I found that very interesting, and more than a little unexpected.

I’m coming to the end of my first round of target agents at this point. They have ranged from superstars with fifty or more science fiction and fantasy titles under their belts to new agents just starting to build their client lists.

I’ve had some interest in the manuscript, with three requests for partial so far. Unfortunately, none of that interest has extended to requests for full or offers of representation. I still have four agents with outstanding queries. One of them is even an exclusive request for a partial. I expect responses to trickle in on those queries over the next few weeks. But after 25 attempts, it’s time to regroup.

What have I learned from this group? I think my initial conclusions should be revised in light of new data. I thought that my query letter was doing its job, but that the manuscript wasn’t closing the deal. Now I think the query letter is decent but could be better, and the manuscript still isn’t up to scratch. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Agents who received a stand-alone query letter: 9

Of those agents, 3 requested partial manuscripts, 1 rejected the query due to lack of interest, 3 returned form rejections with no feedback, and 2 didn’t reply at all. A query letter hit rate of 1 in 3 isn’t great, but it could be worse.

Agents/Editors who received some number of sample pages: 12

Of those folks, 0 requested full manuscripts, 3 rejected the query with comments, 5 returned form rejections with no feedback, and 4 didn’t reply at all. A partial manuscript hit rate of 0 in 12 is… depressing. Sure it’s not an easy time for a new author to break into the market right now, but when is it?

Evidently, my writing doesn’t stand out enough from the modern agent’s daily deluge of slush. I’ve gotten some promising feedback on Renegade, like this shows talent, or this is better than most of my unsolicited material, or even, I enjoyed the writing. Unfortunately, that encouragement has always been followed by a rejection for other reasons. Those are the reasons that I’ll have to work on, if I ever want to get published (with this book or some other). Hopefully the folks over a Critters or Absolute Write will be able to help me with that.

In other news, one of the job applications I mentioned in my previous post has panned out well. I’ve had two phone screens, and one first round interview for a position with a Bay area PV company. I’ve been invited for a second round of interviews next week. Here’s hoping it goes even better than the first one did.

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I’m back from the holidays, and ready to face a new year. I sent out a couple more queries this week to some new agents.

I also started separating out “No Reply” from the other rejection types in my statistics. In this age of electronic submissions no reply usually means no interest, but I wanted to see just how prevalent the trend was. It’s pretty widespread as you can see. For reference, 7 of the 10 actual rejections were form letters, while the other 3 cited some level of custom response.

In other news, I have 3 new job applications and 4 other open leads that I’m following up. I think that qualifies as cautiously optimistic for the start of 2010.

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This will be a short post today. There hasn’t been a lot of news with the holidays approaching, and my progress has been dismal.

I’ve sent out a few more queries and received two more rejections since my last update. Then there was the agent who simply didn’t respond to my query one way or the other. If he said he’d get back to me in two weeks and there’s been radio silence for five weeks, he’s probably not interested. (It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve chalked up a “no-response” as a rejection.)

In much the same way that many people only RSVP to an invitation if they plan to attend, there are a fair number of agents who don’t seem to like writing rejections. I can sympathize. Personally, I’d rather know I’m not in the running than wait and wait on the off chance the agent just hasn’t excavated my query from their slush-pile yet.

Then again, I don’t have to read through a few hundred unsolicited submissions a week, most of which are completely unpublishable. So I can sympathize.

Happy holidays everyone!

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My epic agent quest continues, but without much success. I’ve received two more rejections and one request for a partial since my last update.

These latest responses are a mixed bag. The two rejections were form letters with no feedback. The third reply included a request for an exclusive (which means I have to wait until my one outstanding partial review comes back with a yea or nay before sending off the pages to the new agent).

The agent who requested the partial did so after reading only my query letter, which is consistent with my conclusion that the letter is doing its job. Unfortunately the two agents who sent form rejections got the same query letter, without any sample pages. That bucks the nice trend I had going.

For those of you keeping track at home: 3 out of 3 requests for partial came from query letter only submissions. 6 out of 9 rejections came from queries with a letter and 5 or more sample pages. 1 out of 9 rejections came from queries with a letter and a synopsis. The remaining 2 out of 9 rejections came from standalone query letters.

The subject of genre came up in the comments on the last post. One of the agents who gave me a personal rejection suggested I should try writing something in Military Fantasy, since it might be an easier market to crack than Epic Fantasy right now.

OK. When an agent who says my writing is “much better than the usual unsolicited material I see” suggests a market, I’ll certainly take it under advisement. There’s only one problem. I’m not sure what MilFan is, exactly. It doesn’t show up in the genre glossary of any of my Writer’s Market books. I’ve seen Military Science Fiction and Heroic Fantasy (which is billed as the Fantasy equivalent of MilSciFi). Google searches come up with articles like this SFFWorld Forum discussion, or this LibraryThing Title List.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read any of those books. So here’s a question for my readers: What is Military Fantasy to you, and how would you distinguish it from Heroic, Epic, Contemporary, or Science Fantasy?

In other news, I’m still jobless. More time to write, then (every silver lining has a dark cloud, or something like that). I’ve been musing about writing a different form of story, something web bound, episodic, and interactive. I’ll let that ferment a bit and talk about it in another post sometime.

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