It looks like Kelly Harms is a full blown agent these days. My query was passed to her from Andrea Cirillo at Jane Rotrosen Agency, and Kelly is the person who gushed over my submission. Loved the manuscript, a story that needed telling, but, by the way, could you make a few revisions.
Hey, anything to get published, and I revised as she suggested. I guess we weren't on the same page, because I got another no thanks today, three months after submitting the revised manuscript. What I thought took care of her concerns did not address her concerns at all.
The problem with written words is that they mean different things to different people, and what she wanted changed I apparently didn't get. I guess I changed something else and missed her point completely. Admittedly, I did not much care for the changes I did make. My novel is not at all a touch-feely, romantic bit of swish, and rewriting to adjust the main character's relationship with her children just didn't sound right. In fact, I'd say that Kelly did not get what I was driving at. I have had agents complain that the main character's husband needed to be brought out more (she leaves him in the first chapter and that's the end of their relationship). I've been told that the lover is too weak of a character, and I made some changes to build him up. Other than that, most of the rejections are generic, form letters that offer positives about writing and strong characters but still not for us.
Reading current offerings from the library, I think I may have discovered the problem. I write in proper English, complete sentences and semi-colons and the whole bit. I loathe incomplete sentences, dangling like broken limbs. Trying to make sense of the paragraph, I have to go back and re-read, to figure out what that string of nouns and adjectives was saying. Could it be that agents look for choppy, sloppy writing because it's so revolutionary? Break the rules of grammar, become semi-incoherent, and you too can be a published author.
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