Ah, The Mail's In

The agents are back, aren't they? In their offices, reading queries, they're there, aren't they?

I expected to get some mail this week, but so far, it's been quiet in my mailbox. The e-mail, well, that's a given that there's no responses. Jessica Regel did as she promised, reading my query when she came back on Wednesday. Reading and rejecting in short order, but such is the way of the world.

Fairbank Literary sent along a rejection on the partial, but there's not much to go on. Ms. Fairbank doesn't care for my writing style. Either it's code for "The writing absolutely sucks" or it's the way I put sentences together that doesn't grab her heart. Unfortunately, I don't have anything concrete that would help me improve the manuscript. Then again, maybe the manuscript is fine, it's just not done up the way she likes. It's all the subjectivity you see, as in the way you might pick up a book and scan the first paragraph and hate the thing, but it's a best-seller. To each his own, eh?

So it's back to the current WIP, and a bit of scholarly research in between. I picked up a debut novel to examine, Thomas Mullen's The Last Town On Earth. He opens with a prologue, in direct violation of writers' board rules. And he's dumping backstory by the truckload by page twenty-two. Every character is introduced with a description of their looks. He's been published by Random House. A literary agent signed him on. Everything is subjective, isn't it?