am I stupid?

I must be. Because all these agents are talking about how many more queries they are receiving this year and I'm intending to add one more to the flood. Fabulous. I'm finally in on a trend.

As I am in the middle of draft 3 and on track to have a novel done by late spring/early summer, I am now working on drafting my query letter and synopsis. It has nothing to do with the economy. It just happens to be when I completed my novel.

But still my initial inclination is to panic and worry that no matter how great a query letter and novel I write, it will never be good enough and all agents will pass it over, so overworked and harried from the extra deluge of queries that I am lost in the rivers of poor grammar and stupid mistakes made by others.

Ok. I'm over it now. Rationality returned.

The truth is, most of these people are not my competition. Probably 80% are so badly written, researched, unprofessional, etc. that they are no threat to me. As for the other 20%, there are a lot of agents out there. Someone will bite.

Or not, but I'll go on writing my next novel and the next. Because I believe in the law of averages. Look at it this way, you can't sink all your hopes and dreams into one book. If I wanted to be an actress would I sink all my fate into one audition and decide if I don't get it, I am done as an actress? Of course not. I'd audition for anything suitable I can find. It's the same with dating. You don't give up after one or three or half dozen or more bad relationships. You might take a hiatus, but most people, most times, get back in the game eventually.

If not this book, then another one. And if I do my research and query intelligently, it will probably happen sooner rather than later. Fry a hen. (Try again, in case you haven't figured that out.)

Of course, that is all very well and good to talk about right now that I haven't even begun querying yet. We'll see how I feel in five years when I have five unpublished/unwanted novels.

At least I have my health.