Sending My Work into the World

One of the things I have been doing this semester is working one-on-one with one of my professors with the goal of finishing Choice. Well, we met last Tuesday night to go over the final pages of the novel. Once again, Alice told me it was wonderful and had few suggestions or questions - most of what she's flagged have been things I knew already were dodgy (which is good because it means I'm reading my own work accurately). But there wasn't much, and then Alice asks if I've got an agent in mind for the novel. I do - I have a couple, though, doing some research over the past couple of weeks, it turns out one of them is not accepting new clients and the other seems to be doing really well with memoir but not doing so much with fiction. So...Alice offers me the name and email of an agent at her agency who's looking for new clients and says she wants me to query this week.

I kind of dismissed it. We talked about some other things. Then I asked, "What do you want me to do for next week?" And Alice says, "Query my agent." Again, I dismissed it, talked about something else, and asked again, "What do you want me to do for next week?" This time, I heard it. Alice said that the things I think I need to go back and fix, the things I think are so huge, are really minor and it's time to send Choice out into the world. Really? Are you serious? Yes. She's very serious.

Oh my. It's taken me a couple of days to come to terms with this and accept that I'm going to be querying an agent about taking me on as a client. It seems quite odd and unexpectedly soon, but there it is. And I will be querying this week. I'll let you know how it goes.

On another note - we finally got our new windows, and I am so happy. It's so quiet in my house now. I'm ecstatic. The noise level has been driving me nuts since October, lots of dogs barking all day long. Very difficult for me to be able to get into my writer-brain space. So I've got acoustic glass in my office now and it's heavenly quiet. The funny thing was that the windows actually arrived at the glass place on February 12th and then we had almost continuous rain until this past week. But they're in and I'm very happy.

And on another note completely, had to take the puppy to the vet today. All circumstantial evidence pointed to her having consumed a sock. The fact that two socks had been on a table and I could only find one of them last night, the fact that she wasn't eating, the fact that she seemed a bit lethargic, and the fact that she threw up this afternoon. The vet induced vomiting, and it turned out she had not one, but TWO socks in her stomach. Sock Puppy is doing much better now and I have told the children that if they leave their socks lying around, they will be fined. Plus, if they leave socks lying around and she eats another one, they will be helping to pay for the vet bill.

Well, onward to bed.