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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Where did the week go? You write a manuscript critique or two, send out a few agent queries and a handful of resumes, and before you can say rejection, it’s Friday again. That means it’s time for another agent search stats update.

As you can see from the table, my response time is still pretty speedy, because most of my responses are from agents who take electronic submissions. I’m also starting to look for trends in my responses, to see what I can glean from them. Here are some of the tentative conclusions I’ve drawn so far:

1) My query letter is attracting the right kind of attention.

2) My prose is pretty good, but not stellar.

3) I may have better luck with another book in a different genre in the current market.

It’s tough to draw much from query responses, since so many of them are form letters. However, the two partial requests I received came from agents who had only seen a query letter without a synopsis or sample pages of any kind. And they came quickly. The first arrived 4 days after submission and the second came back 2 hours after submission. That suggests that the query letter is working.

Unfortunately, the manuscript isn’t closing the deal. The remaining responses that weren’t form rejections said that my writing shows promise. Evidently not enough though. That kind of feedback encourages me to keep writing, but tells me I still have to work on my craft . (Probably a good lesson for every author, published or not…)

The third conclusion is an inference from the scraps of feedback in my rejections and the scuttlebutt floating around on various agent blogs. Evidently, it’s very challenging to sell epic fantasy right now. Unless you’ve got an established fan base, or you’ve written something that really stands out, publishers aren’t looking for big fantasy. Agents are understandably reluctant to take chances on debut fantasy novels that are only “pretty good,” like (evidently) Renegade.

So where does that leave me? About the same place I was before I started this agent search. My strategy hasn’t really changed: I’ve still got another 20-30 highly regarded agents to work through on my target list. I’ve still got The Guardian’s Hand to overhaul once I have my remaining reader feedback in hand.

However, instead of forging ahead with the third installment of the Renegade’s Legacy after Guardian, it might be time to write something in a different genre. Maybe urban fantasy, military fantasy or science fiction. Or perhaps something else entirely. Who knows?

If you have suggestions, you know how to find the comment box!

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I got my first request for a partial manuscript from an agent today. That was promising after getting two rejections earlier this week. I’m still sending out queries, chipping away at my list of prospective fantasy agents a little bit at a time.

The running totals are posted in the table to the right. The reply times have been faster than expected so far. I suspect that’s because most of the replies I’ve received are from agents who accept submissions via email. I expect that the reply times will jump back up once I start receiving snail mail responses.

Feedback for The Guardian’s Hand is starting to roll in. If preliminary comments are any indication, I’ve got a lot more revision in store for me on that manuscript. Sigh. Ah well…  all part of the process.

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As if finding an agent for Renegade isn’t difficult enough, I’m also searching for a day job… still. The last year has been a rough one for job seekers. Unemployment rates in California have been above 10% since January and don’t look to be dropping below that threshold anytime soon. The renewable energy market hasn’t fared much better than any other.

In the face of such dire market prospects, what’s an out of work engineer to do? Keep free-lancing, re-tune the resume, change up my search strategies, and try again, that’s what. I’ve decided to change my resume from a chronological format to a hybrid functional format, sometimes called a combination format. The new resume will begin with a focus on my career skills and achievements, and end with a condensed summary of my work history.

So expect a fresh look to show up on my Resume page sometime soon. Maybe the face-lift will help me land some interviews with the Bay area’s renewable energy technology developers. Once they get past surviving the downturn and start getting serious about hiring again, that is.

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I’ve decided to start tracking some numbers on my search for a home for Renegade. They’ll be pretty depressing, but maybe they’ll help some other aspiring authors know what to expect when they start shopping around manuscripts. Here are the numbers I’ve decided to track: queries sent out, partial manuscripts requested, full manuscripts requested, offers, rejections, and reply times. Since I’m just starting this search, there won’t be a lot of data yet. There will be a lot more by the time I’m done, though. If there are any other numbers you’d like to see, drop me a comment.

In other news, happy birthday big sister!

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